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Texas News
Midland ISD principal Shannon Torres named Region 18 principal of the year
Legacy High School Principal Shannon Torres has been named principal of the year for 2022-23 by the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals for Region 18.

Secondary principals from across Region 18 selected Torres for the honor. Torres will now be eligible to compete for the state title of Texas Principal of the Year.

“I am excited and honored to be selected as the Region 18 Principal of the Year,” Torres said. “The staff at Legacy High is amazing and we really care about students, not only academically but emotionally too. We focus on what is best for our students and are always looking to improve our instruction, practice, and structures.” 
#UvaldeStrong: Texas teachers, students show love for Uvalde students on 1st day back in school since shooting
While most school districts resumed class in middle to late August, Uvalde CISD delayed the first day.

More than three months after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, Uvalde CISD students and staff returned for the new school year.

Robb Elementary was closed after a gunman entered a 4th grade classroom and killed 19 students and two teachers on May 24. It happened during the last week of the 2021-2022 school year. 
Canutillo ISD launches first public Montessori program in El Paso
The Canutillo Independent School District will be the home of the first public Montessori program in the El Paso region at Gonzalo & Sofia Garcia Elementary School starting next month.

Canutillo will offer free, full-day and dual-language Montessori pre-kinder classes for students who will be three years old during the 2022-23 school year.
Conservative backlash pushes Texas social studies curriculum review to 2025
The board was initially supposed to update the social studies curriculum by the end of this year.

The State Board of Education narrowly voted Friday to delay updating the state’s social studies curriculum until 2025 after facing pressure from conservatives over proposed changes.

Earlier this week, board members said they would push back the social studies review after hours of public comment.The board voted 8-7 Friday to delay the social studies overhaul.
With a court ruling looming, young Texas immigrants prepare for the possible end of DACA
Texas has the second-largest population of immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in the country. An appeals court is expected to rule soon on whether the program is legal.

When Katia Escobar finally got the money to pay her application fee for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal program that provides some undocumented immigrants work permits and temporarily protects them from deportation, it was a moment of relief for the 18-year-old, who has lived as an undocumented immigrant in California and Texas since she was a child.
Affiliate Feature
Association of Hispanic School Administrators (AHSA) – TALAS’ Houston affiliate

The Association of Hispanic School Administrators is a Region IV organization dedicated to impacting all students with a focus on Latino leaders and learners.
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National News
Latino Students Will Soon Be 30% of All Public School Enrollment: Now What?
Three ways educators can meet the needs of a rapidly growing student population that brings great strengths, but a long history of being overlooked

Demographic change regularly gets discussed as one of those big, inevitable, structural currents reshaping American life. It’s been clear for some years that the United States is becoming more diverse — driven particularly by growth in America’s Latino population. 
Teens view drugs and alcohol as less risky, but use is down
Today’s teens perceive alcohol and substance abuse as less risky than teens did in the past, even as there have been significant declines in alcohol and drug use among students in grades 9-12 since 2009, according to the School Health Profiles report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

In 2019, a third of youth ages 12-17 (34.6%) perceived great risk of harm from smoking marijuana weekly, a drop from 40.6% in 2015. More than three-quarters of teens in 2019 (78.7%) perceived great risk from weekly cocaine use, down slightly from 80.2% in 2016, and 63.5% perceived great risk of harm from daily binge drinking in 2019, down from 65.5% in 2016.
‘Academic Career Plans’ Have Students Exploring Careers as Early as Kindergarten
States are requiring ‘academic career plans’ to get students thinking about future jobs sooner — and save them from college debt

In June, Connor Opdahl graduated high school in a remote, rural area of Wisconsin with the familiar gray clouds facing seniors nationwide: a looming possible recession, political and racial tensions and a rebound of COVID-19.

But Opdahl has a plan.  
When Did Equity Become a ‘Trigger’ Word?
Equity may be the law, but we don’t agree on what it means

“Do you know what the trigger word down here is? ‘Equity,’” Joseph Cousins, a minister in Cherokee County, Ga., told me about a year ago. “To me, equity means fairness, compassion, goodness, honesty, decency.”

I had been reporting a story about school boards’ passing resolutions restricting how schools can teach about race, gender, and other topics. And, as Cousins predicted, hot on the heels of the “critical race theory” legislative wrecking ball, equity had suddenly become a code word for scary-sounding things: race-related trainings, quotas, “Marxist” theory.
6 Reasons Why We Should See Students as Changemakers
Imagine a society that loved its future so much that they enabled students to create it.

Humans have never had a higher percentage of its young people conscious that the future of the world is precarious—some people may think it’s even on the brink of calamity. When polarization and disconnections reach extreme levels only one of two things will happen: continuation over the edge to oblivion or an enhancement-based reversal that results in a radically better solution. The decades from 2020 to 2050 will be the battleground for the next period of civilization for our 8 billion people, and all living things.
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