Some Texas Counties Issue Partial Curfew for Thanksgiving weekend
Officials in the San Antonio area are following in the footsteps of El Paso County, which issued a similar order earlier this week. The curfews come as coronavirus infections surge to new levels in Texas.
Hours before Thanksgiving, San Antonio and Bexar County officials issued partial curfews that will take effect through the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Starting Thanksgiving Day, residents cannot gather outside of their homes from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Central unless they are commuting to or from a business. The curfew ends Monday, according to the amended emergency orders by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
Restaurants must close their indoor and outdoor dining during curfew hours, but curbside, takeout and drive-thru options can continue as usual.
Those who violate the order can face a fine up to $1,000.
The curfew is a last minute attempt to curb social gatherings as Texas continues to see record numbers of people infected with the coronavirus.
“Please listen to our public health experts. It's not worth the risk this holiday season,” Nirenberg said in a tweet. “If you have to leave home, wear a mask & keep your distance from others.”
El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego issued a similar order late Tuesday.
Texas health officials reported more than 14,000 new coronavirus infections Wednesday in what appeared to be an all-time high for daily cases. The record comes right before the Thanksgiving holiday as public health authorities urge people to celebrate apart this year, warning that family gatherings may increase the spread of infections at a time when many Texas hospitals report overwhelming volumes of COVID-19 patients.
The seven-day average of new cases in Texas continues to surpass 10,000, having tripled since the beginning of October. Testing is also at record levels. Roughly 10% of coronavirus tests yielded positive results on Nov. 24, according to Texas Department of State Health Services data.
Mental Health During the Pandemic
Texas ranks 50th out of 51 in overall access to mental health care, reports show. Currently, only one in seven Texas children with major depression receives consistent treatment — almost half the national average.
It’s been a tough year for everyone, which can take a toll on our mental health. Texas continues to set records for COVID-19 cases, and health experts fear the holidays could exacerbate an already dangerous situation. The state has reported over 20,500 virus-related deaths, and over 8,000 were hospitalized in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.
Since March, more than 3.8 million Texans have applied for unemployment relief and teachers, parents and students have had to adjust to an abnormal school year. Add a contentious presidential election, protests against police brutality and a struggling energy sector to that mix of stressors.
Greg Hansch, the executive director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Texas, answered questions in our community Facebook group on how the pandemic has affected mental health and mental health care in the state. Below are some takeaways from our conversation. You can read the full conversation here.
What is the current availability of mental health care for Texans compared to the rest of the nation?
Texas ranks 50th out of 51 in overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.
Currently, only 1 in 7 Texas children with major depression receive consistent treatment — almost half the national average. The vast majority of children and youth with mental health disorders do not receive treatment, and those who are receiving care do not receive it when the disorder first presents itself. Data shows the delay from symptom onset to treatment averages eight to ten years.
First Episode Psychosis (FEP) impacts the health and wellbeing of approximately 3,000 Texas children and young adults each year. Texas has only 20% of the Coordinated Specialty Care program capacity needed to facilitate positive outcomes for this population. Other states have invested general revenue to ensure that more young people are able to access this gold standard in care.
In Texas, approximately 1,400 prisoners and jail inmates are awaiting competency restoration through the state psychiatric hospital system. The average number of days to obtain a maximum security and non-maximum security placement are roughly 280 and 80 days, respectively. Prolonged waits for competency restoration can worsen mental health outcomes, contribute to an over-crowded prison and jail systems, and jeopardize the safety of prisoners, inmates and prison or jail staff.
Texas has a long way to go. We have champions in the Texas Legislature. Considering the mental health impact of COVID-19, and the pre-existing mental health epidemic plus the huge gaps in our system, mental health needs to be a huge priority this legislative session.
Has Texas’ decision to not expand Medicaid impacted funding for and access to mental health care in our state? And roughly how many people has that impacted?
Access to coverage and care is essential for people with mental illness to manage their condition and get on a recovery path successfully. Medicaid is the lifeline for much of that care as the nation's largest payer of mental health and substance use condition services — providing health coverage to more than one in four of adults with a serious mental illness.
When states expand Medicaid, more people with mental health conditions can get the coverage they need to access vital care.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that over 400,000 Texans with mental health or substance use challenges could enroll in health insurance if state leaders accepted Medicaid expansion funding.
How is quarantining affecting kids and parents and their mental health? Is it worse than a businessperson being forced to close a business? Totally different?
There is research on both the mental health impact of quarantine / stay-at-home (notably, how isolation can drive depressive symptoms) and how unemployment and economic instability can have far-ranging mental effects. I can't say if one is worse than the other.
How to get help
Texas COVID-19 Mental Health Support Line: 833-986-1919
National Alliance on Mental Illness in Texas: 512-693-2000
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline: 800-662-4357
Suicide Prevention Line: 800-784-2433
Whistleblower Fired From Texas AG Office
Ryan Vassar, who had served as the deputy attorney general for legal counsel, was one of eight senior aides who told authorities they believed Paxton was breaking the law — a report that has sparked an FBI investigation.
The Texas attorney general’s office has fired the last remaining whistleblower who alleged Ken Paxton broke the law in doing favors for a political donor — just days after aides had sued the agency alleging they suffered retaliation for making the report.
Deputy Attorney General for Legal Counsel Ryan Vassar — who had already been placed on paid leave — was fired Nov. 17, according to internal personnel documents obtained by The Texas Tribune, making him the fifth whistleblower to be fired from the agency in less than a month. The three others who reported Paxton to law enforcement have resigned.
On Nov. 12, Vassar and three of his former colleagues filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Texas attorney general’s office, claiming they had suffered retaliation after they told law enforcement they believed Paxton broke the law by using the agency to serve the interests of a political donor and friend, Nate Paul.
Joseph Knight, Vassar’s attorney in the lawsuit, said the justification Vassar was given for his termination amounted to “made-up, nonsense reasons” — and that he believes the firing was an act of retaliation. Vassar was hired by the agency in 2015.
Neither the attorney general’s office nor Ian Prior, a political spokesman for Paxton, returned requests for comment on why Vassar was terminated, though Prior has said previous terminations were not acts of retaliation but rather related to policy violations.
The FBI is investigating Paxton over the allegations of the eight whistleblowers, who were all senior aides, the Associated Press reported earlier this month.
Paxton has dismissed the whistleblowers as “rogue employees” and said their allegations are “false.”
According to the lawsuit he and three other top aides filed, Vassar was tapped by Paxton to help carry out favors for Paul. One such instance came when Paxton urged members of his senior staff to release to Paul government documents that should not have been disclosed, the aides claim in their lawsuit.
“Paxton directed Vassar to find a way to release the information. Vassar struggled with this directive because allowing disclosure of the information requested by Paul would overturn decades of settled expectations among sister law enforcement agencies, compromise the [office of the attorney general]’s own law enforcement information and likely spark innumerable lawsuits challenging the newly announced application of the law,” the lawsuit claims.
Then, Paxton “personally took the file” — including documents that had been sealed by a federal court — and “did not return it for approximately seven to ten days,” the lawsuit claims.
In a statement earlier this month, Paxton said the aides’ “allegations are overblown, based upon assumptions and to a large degree misrepresent the facts.”
“Unfortunately, these attorneys chose to air their grievances through the media and through the courts,” Paxton said. “We will be fully prepared to address these allegations through the judicial system, if necessary.”
The open records incident is just one example, the former aides say, of how Paxton used the agency to serve Paul’s interests.
The full scope of the relationship between Paxton and Paul remains unclear, but the two sometimes saw each other socially, and Paul gave Paxton’s campaign $25,000 in 2018. Paul also revealed in an unrelated deposition that he hired a woman at Paxton’s recommendation, though he said doing so was not a favor to the attorney general. The woman he hired had been involved in a romantic relationship with Paxton, according to two people who learned of the affair from Paxton in 2018.
The agency took the highly unusual step of intervening in a lawsuit involving Paul and a local charity, and, aides say, Paxton pushed his staff to write a legal opinion that would help Paul stave off foreclosure sales at several of his properties.
Most strikingly, though, Paxton appointed an outside attorney to vet complaints by Paul, who claimed he had been mistreated by numerous state and federal authorities when his home and office were raided by the FBI in 2019. Top aides have said that they found Paul’s complaint meritless, but Paxton seemed unsatisfied with their investigation and hired a Houston defense attorney with five years of legal experience to probe the claims.
Vassar, as a senior aide, played a role in communicating with the attorney, Brandon Cammack, including drafting a contract for him, at Paxton’s direction, the lawsuit says.
Thanksgiving Carries an Extra Weight This Year
This year’s pandemic has brought untold suffering to families across Texas. Making things worse: At a time when they might take solace in the company of friends or family, public health authorities are urging them to stay apart.
When Chris Mabe’s mother, “Gramma Blue,” moved to Brazos County, her family got a bigger home for all the friends and grandkids they expected her to draw from across the country. The house had a music room, a large kitchen, extra beds and a 12-seat, hand-carved dining table.
But this Thanksgiving, the house will be nearly empty. Mabe’s 81-year-old mother, Jewel Bergan-Brumbaugh, died this March, one of the state’s earliest victims of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It's all gone,” Mabe said. “Nobody comes. We don't see anyone. Mom is gone.”
Adding to the isolation, no students and faculty from Texas A&M University, where Mabe’s husband Jim works, will be invited to share a meal this year. And all of the couple’s family, including their two adult children, live out of state. The only attendees for Thanksgiving dinner will be Jim, Chris and her mother’s yowling, 16-year-old cat, Scooter.
“I dread the things that will come up for me and the amount of effort it's going to take to rise above the grief and the fear and the anger about this happening to our country and the world,” Chris Mabe said. “It's not fair. It's not just. It's terrifying. And yet I know we're going to figure out how to be OK.”
This year’s pandemic has brought untold suffering to families across Texas. The state has reported over 20,500 deaths from the pandemic alone. More than 8,000 were hospitalized in the days leading up to the holiday. Since March, more than 3.8 million Texans have applied for unemployment relief, with 70,000 applying through the first two weeks of November.
And now the holidays are arriving, a season that will be especially difficult for many of those who have lost loved ones, jobs and a sense of normalcy. Making things worse: At a time when they might take solace in the company of friends or family, public health authorities are urging them to stay apart.
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Economic pain
Justin residents Ashley and Terry-Lee Washko were saving to buy a house before the pandemic hit. Then when Terry-Lee, 35, was laid off from his job at an oil field company in June, Ashley, 32, had to drive four hours to pick him up from the side of the road. After months of searching for a job and receiving unemployment checks that didn’t amount to enough to pay the bills, Terry-Lee got a job at a nearby warehouse last week. Still, they lost the company car that came with his job and their dreams of buying a house anytime soon.
Ashley said the job she’d always worked to stay busy became the only source of income to help feed their two teenage kids and Terry-Lee’s father. As their savings has started to run out, they won’t be able to afford food they typically have for Thanksgiving.
"It's been so long since I've had to worry about groceries and now, I'm like, 'Hey, why don’t you go to Dollar Tree, I think they have that there,'" she said. "It's just a struggle when the kids are about to be out for Thanksgiving break and they're gonna be home all week and I'm like oh my gosh we don't have enough food for them."
Normally, Ashley’s family gathers and brings out a large tablecloth for people to write what they’re thankful for this year. She wrote last year that she felt blessed to have the life she did. Now, her family will stay home. She said if she had to write something on the tablecloth, it would be that the year is almost over.
Social service organizations and food banks across the state are working double to serve an influx of Texans needing assistance. The holiday season is always the busiest time of year for food banks, as they work to ensure every Texan gets to sit down to the Thanksgiving dinner table with enough to eat, said Celia Cole, CEO of the food bank network Feeding Texas, which serves 4.5 million Texans annually.
But this year, the need is much higher than in previous years, Cole said. She estimates food banks statewide are serving twice as many families as they were before the pandemic.
In El Paso, a major hot spot for cases, the organization is currently receiving many more requests for home delivery from people who cannot safely go out to get food, Cole said. The Rio Grande Valley and Houston have also seen a significant increase in need over the last month, she said.
“There are, unfortunately, no instances of decreased need,” Cole said. “It’s a lot more people needing help, a lot more food going out the door, and it’s a lot harder to get food to people in need.”
Early in the pandemic, food banks struggled to keep their shelves stocked as volunteers were told to stay home and grocery stores had less surplus to donate.
More Texans than usual showed up Saturday to receive a Thanksgiving turkey from CitySquare, a Dallas nonprofit that provides affordable housing and operates a local food pantry, said John Siburt, the organization’s president and chief operating officer. The annual event was turned into a drive-thru this year, with volunteers handing turkeys to people in cars.
“We’re definitely seeing increased need at our food pantry, with a new segment of people needing food pantries for the first time and a steady stream of people needing to access food to get through the month,” Siburt said.
More Texans are also turning to social service organizations for help maintaining their housing.
“The most alarming needs we’re seeing right now are around rental assistance and utility bill assistance,” Siburt said. “We’re being overrun with people who need help paying their rent and paying their utility bills and trying to avoid eviction.”
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That strain is being felt even by people not directly affected by the pandemic. In Mt. Vernon, Tony Hall, 57, lost his job last year. Hall and his wife, Teresa Barinecutt, 59, have tried reaching out to organizations for housing, but haven’t been able to find any help.
Hall was working as a log roller last year when one of the 150-pound logs rolled into his chest. He told himself he could shake it off, but had to go to the hospital a month later and discovered that he had loose blood in his lungs that caused blood clots and pneumonia. Without health insurance and unable to work, he and Barinecutt were evicted from their home and are now living in their car.
Mental health
Experts say that reports of depression and anxiety increase around the holidays during a typical year. They fear increased loss and lack of normal support systems will make this year even worse.
“There's a lot of societal pressure on us to be happy and joyful during this time of year,” said Julie Kaplow, executive director of the Trauma and Grief Center at the Hackett Center for Mental Health. “We know that there are a lot of reasons why that may not be feasible or possible for many families, this year.”
Joy Alonzo, clinical assistant professor at Texas A&M Health Science Center, said the constant stress of worrying about you or loved ones catching COVID-19 isn’t making things any easier. Almost 80% of adults said the pandemic was a significant source of stress for them, according to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2020 report.
And people like Chris Mabe, who have already lost someone, are navigating their grief in a time where typical support systems like gathering together aren’t possible.
“They're also grieving for a loss of tradition, loss of what they would normally do during this time period,” Alonzo said. “They're actually grieving for normalcy.”
“What I need more than anything is a place to get out of my car and lay down and get some rest,” Tony said.
Mabe said she’s feeling dread about the coming holiday, “but I don’t want to feel that.”
She said sticking to the routine and finding ways to stay connected during the holidays are going to be the family’s “safety light.” She said she’s still planning to cook a big turkey, make video calls, exchange photos on Facebook and stick to her ritual of watching football and yelling at the TV.
“I mean, it's not what I want to project, and it's not what I'm going to talk about on the Zoom call, but I'm really aware that that's what I'm feeling because it's a reckoning," she said. "It's a milestone, anniversary dates and little milestones, they bear so much weight, and it's going to be hard.”
Mabe’s family could never gather for a funeral after the death of her mother because of the pandemic. She said it makes her angry that while her family canceled its celebration, her neighbors are still having parties.
Normally, family members would gather in the same room and process their loss together. They would talk about how angry or sad they were, laugh, cry, play music and crack jokes with a bottle of wine or sparkling cider in tow.
“We never got to do that together. and that is a huge loss and we’re not alone in that,” Mabe said.
She said she feels lucky to have the financial resources to support her family and access mental health support. Still, despite having experienced tragic losses in the past, she said grieving doesn’t get any easier.
“Our family has lived very hard lives for lots and lots of reasons. … We've always found a way to get through it,” Mabe said. “And we'll get through this, too. But it is going to be exhausting.”
How to get help
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255
Texas Families say Remote Learning isn’t Working
A summer of delay and inconsistency from state political and education leaders left Texas schools little time to prepare for an academic year with millions of students learning from home. Now many of those kids are failing through no fault of their own.
Almost midway through the school year, it has become increasingly clear that virtual learning is failing a sizable number of Texas public school students whose parents decided to keep them home as COVID-19 grips the state.
The disturbing number of students posting failing grades while trying to learn in front of computer screens has also brought into sharper focus the failure of state education and political leaders to prepare for an academic year they knew would be like no other.
Over the last month, The Texas Tribune has interviewed more than 30 educators, students, parents and experts across the state about their experiences with remote learning. Parents and students describe a system in which kids are failing, not necessarily because they don’t understand the material, but because the process of teaching them is so broken that it’s difficult to succeed.
Teachers say they are scrambling to retool education, creating new videos and online lessons from scratch and struggling with new demands and limited time. They blame state leaders for squandering valuable months over the summer by delaying key decisions, frequently reversing course and sending conflicting messages to educators on the ground.
Instead of immediately giving local school officials the guidelines and tools needed to prepare, state leaders waffled on policies that school communities needed to make their decisions. They challenged local health officials over who had the authority to keep classrooms closed in areas with high coronavirus infection rates, feeding uncertainty about when and where students would return to classrooms.
By the time the fog cleared, school officials had mere weeks to roll out plans for the fall semester, including training teachers, students and parents on new technology; designing ways to keep track of students falling through the cracks; and upholding some semblance of academic rigor.
The Texas Education Agency indicated it has done the best it could in limited time, working throughout the pandemic to continue providing resources for districts thinking about remote, hybrid and in-person instruction.
Students are now paying the price, and the highest is being exacted from students Texas already struggled to educate. According to a Texas Tribune analysis, school districts with mostly Black, Hispanic and low-income students have higher shares of students learning from home. And state data showed those students were less likely to be engaged in online learning in the spring, when all schools were online.
“There’s just a level of fatigue with this that, given the way that the distance curriculum is being structured, is just wearing on kids and families in a way that’s really untenable, especially in those communities that were already disadvantaged before this,” said Benjamin Cottingham, who has studied the quality of remote learning in California and put out recommendations on how districts can improve.
A squandered summer
Confusion and uncertainty have marked Texas’ response to the pandemic across all fronts.
Constantly changing, confusing top-down guidance from Gov. Greg Abbott this spring eventually led to surges in the number of Texans hospitalized and dead from COVID-19. As the Trump administration aggressively pushed schools to reopen their doors — seeing it as the key to invigorate a slumping economy — Abbott and Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath decided all Texas schools would be required to open their doors to all students who wanted to return in person, but must also be prepared to teach remotely those who did not want to return.
But the guidelines on how to do both those jobs effectively and safely were delayed for weeks this summer as Abbott reconsidered his hands-off approach to the pandemic. By late June, the TEA had promised it would keep state funds flowing to districts for the students who attended remotely, and it began offering districts a little more flexibility as it became clear the pandemic was getting worse. In July and August, state leaders publicly bickered with local health authorities who wanted to keep classrooms closed during COVID-19 spikes, eventually taking away some of their authority to make those decisions.
As state leaders put out conflicting mandates, school superintendents attempted to prepare for the fall ahead. They repeatedly surveyed families, trying to figure out how to cater to two groups of students, some coming to school in person and others staying home.
Some districts considered having two corps of teachers — one for students in classrooms, the other for virtual learners — thinking the bifurcated approach might improve education for all the kids. But there was no money to essentially double the staffs of each school, and there weren’t enough classrooms to socially distance all those teachers.
After holding listening sessions with superintendents, the TEA offered districts free access to a virtual learning system, which 400 school districts educating millions of students have adopted. The agency also contributed hundreds of millions in federal stimulus money to subsidize bulk orders of computers, Wi-Fi hotspots and iPads. But in some cases, supply chain issues delayed shipping for months. Texas has also provided online course materials schools can use for free — but some courses are still being rolled out midway through the year.
“The better time to have rolled all this out would have been last June, last May,” Morath acknowledged this week at a State Board of Education briefing. “But we are moving as fast as we can, all things considered.”
Delayed starts to the school year allowed districts to spend more time planning, but some struggled to use that time wisely. “We could have used another month or two of planning and training and figuring things out,” said Mark Henry, superintendent of Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District outside of Houston. “But parents had the opportunity to declare whether they were going to be face-to-face or remote until two weeks before school started. We didn’t know what our numbers were going to be until 10 days before school would start.”
Returning from a chaotic summer, teachers had to create new classes for virtual learning with almost no time to plan, while instructing kids in person and online at the same time. Texas funds districts for remote students if they can show those students engaged with their lessons that day. A simple task like taking attendance now lasts more than twice the usual time, as teachers hunt for evidence that a student reached out or completed an assignment.
Most districts have required teachers to come to the classroom daily, even denying many stay-at-home requests from those with medical conditions. “If we’re fearful of COVID and stressed out by these mandates and inflexibility, our effectiveness is going to be diminished as well,” said Lori Wheeler, who retired from Austin ISD in early November, worried about the health risks of working in person. “We had three weeks to learn a completely different job.”
Thoroughly preparing for an academic year such as this one would have taken at least a year in the best of circumstances, educators and experts said. But the delays at the state level left teachers with mere weeks to plan for the fall. “I think teachers were kind of flying blind in the sense that they were kind of making it up as they went, trying to do their best in terms of how much planning time the teacher has and how effectively they thought they could conduct lessons,” said Christopher Williams, a teacher in Houston ISD, the state’s largest school district and one of the last to bring students back in person. “These online platforms are new to us.”
Frustration hits home
The stress and lack of preparation teachers experience trickles down to students and parents. Parents and guardians told the Tribune that teachers have often not made clear to them which class assignments are required and which are just suggestions. Sometimes parents tell their children not to bother completing assigned work at all, worried the stress will overwhelm them and have long-term effects.
Candace Hunter’s daughter Hezekiah, who is 11, used to love school as a straight-A student. Now, she is inundated with mundane assignments from multiple classes, leaving her despondently working into the evening to clear the backlogs. The sixth grader at Austin ISD’s Lamar Fine Arts Academy asks her mom if she can stay out of school.
Hunter, a veteran teacher who now privately trains teachers, said the school has not adjusted its teaching policies to be more flexible. In a normal year, teachers ask students questions throughout a lesson and give them homework to get proof they understand each skill or lesson. Replicating that method on a virtual platform has been disastrous, resulting in dozens of emails and messages that students and parents must sort through each day, she said.
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“Why not create a system that will draw people back to you? Like, ‘We thought about who needs this program the most … and each campus has created a program especially for their population that is going to be engaging and robust.’ That’s not happening,” Hunter said.
Eventually, she told her daughter’s teachers, “If this continues, we’re going to start cherry-picking our assignments.”
With more low-income students and students of color learning remotely, existing disparities in education are exacerbated. A Tribune analysis showed that in majority low-income districts, an average of 64% of students are learning from home. That rate climbs to 77% in majority Hispanic school districts and 81% in majority Black districts, according to the data collected in late September by the TEA and Department of State Health Services. By contrast, in majority white school districts, 25% of students are learning from home.
Remote learning is working for some students, but often requires an immense amount of time from guardians and parents. Natasha Beck-King, a history graduate student with coursework of her own, transferred her son to a San Antonio ISD school from a local charter school when it was clear the charter did not have a long-term plan for remote learning.
Beck-King stays up late with her children to verify they have completed their work and feels like parents should spend more time doing the same. “If your kid is failing and they’re not in tutoring, and you’ve communicated with the teacher and the teacher is communicating back with you … that is not on the school,” she said.
Some schools had the resources to prepare earlier. Marysa Enis, a former school psychologist at Austin ISD, said remote learning is going well at her son’s school, the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, which used its own money to pay teachers to plan over the summer.
But some families lack the resources for online learning to ever be successful this year, through no fault of their schools. Georgina Pérez, a Democratic member of the Texas State Board of Education, lives in the southeast corner of El Paso County, a border region where broadband access is limited. Her youngest children, fifth grade students at San Elizario ISD, received computers and hotspots from the district, but couldn’t get a signal and eventually gave them back. Now, Pérez drives to the school every Tuesday to pick up paper packets, assignments on material the children learned more than a year ago.
Pérez knows her children may need to repeat the fifth grade next year and believes they will eventually catch up, but she worries about the students in families without as many resources. She blames the situation on state delays, not just to get control of the pandemic, but also to get its most vulnerable communities connected to the internet. “How many years have we studied the needs for broadband infrastructure in Texas?” she said. “Twenty years ago, we already knew what we needed, but we just didn’t do it.”
Carrots and sticks
The TEA has used both carrots and sticks to encourage school districts to follow certain guidance.
Despite significant outcry, Texas plans to administer STAAR standardized tests to students this spring and use those scores to rate schools and districts, which could lead to sanctions for some. Looming accountability ratings have spurred administrators to increase the difficulty of courses and push teachers and students to get back to normal in a year that is anything but.
“If we don’t push our kids, if we water down the curriculum and make it easier, I guess, then they won’t be where they need to be when it comes to accountability testing in the spring,” said Linda Parker, assistant superintendent at Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD in North Texas. “We’re trying to operate in a world that is so different than what we’ve had before.”
And the threat of lost state funding due to drops in enrollment has been a specter for superintendents already spending up to millions to COVID-proof their buildings.
In late July, as state leaders battled local health officials over who was in charge of school reopenings, Texas said it would provide funding for schools that kept their classrooms closed only if they did so for state-approved reasons. Districts took that as a threat that their funding would be yanked if they listened to local health officials who said in-person school wasn’t safe.
Recently, Texas announced it would fund school districts for declining enrollment through the first semester, instead of just the first 12 weeks. The announcement was met with tempered relief from superintendents who are waiting to hear if they will receive that financial reprieve for the entire year. The suspense has left teachers and staff wondering if they will still have their jobs months from now, adding yet another layer of tension.
In response to complaints from parents and educators, the TEA and superintendents tinkered with their requirements for schools. In October, the TEA said schools were required to have qualified staff instructing or supporting students face-to-face in classrooms if they wanted to get funding, which it said clarified existing guidance.
That clarification ruled out a system Austin ISD and others had been using, in which students remained in the same classroom and learned virtually while supervised by a teacher. Austin ISD had to start from scratch and announced that its middle and high schoolers would physically transition between classes and receive face-to-face instruction starting Nov. 2.
Many educators used the well-worn idiom “building the plane as you fly it” to describe the summer and fall. Parker took the saying a step further in describing how schools are responding to shifting state guidance. “It’s actually like, ‘Guess what, pilot? Here’s your plane, but we’re going to change the motor. Now we’re going to change the structure. ... Then, as the year starts, we’re going to change your plane. We know you don’t know that much about it, but you’ll be fine.’”
“Throw ’em an anvil”
At times, the response to the pandemic has been like a massive game of telephone, with the TEA giving guidance to school superintendents that scrambles by the time it reaches teachers and parents.
This summer, the TEA explained to districts the online programs available to help them manage classroom tasks and monitor student progress. Lily Laux, a deputy commissioner at the TEA, told the Tribune she wanted districts to understand that remote learning would be easier with the higher-end programs, since teachers would be able to easily track whether students were engaging with the lessons. But she said she was not mandating a change.
In an email to staff at the end of June, obtained by the Tribune, Pflugerville ISD Superintendent Doug Killian announced that the district would be pivoting to Canvas, a program used frequently in higher education that teachers describe as challenging to learn. He explained that “guidance from TEA requires a more robust system for instruction, more in-depth online instruction, and necessary tracking of students online for attendance and funding purposes.”
The district did not launch training for the program until Sept. 4, with the goal of phasing it in for students and parents from mid-October to January. District leaders plan to extend that time for teachers who need it, said spokesperson Tamra Spence.
“That’s like throwing someone in the deep end of the pool, and when they don’t drown, throwing ’em an anvil,” said Don Fisher, a former Texas A&M-Kingsville lecturer on student media, who has taught and designed online classes for more than a decade.
Confused and frustrated by the late rollout of the new program, some teachers said it was the result of top-down decision-making that lacked foresight and left them out of the process. “There was no organized, centralized, deliberative initiative from school districts to professionally develop their teachers and increase their proficiency on these … platforms,” said Cuitlahuac Guerra-Mojarro, who teaches engineering in the district. “Had there been foresight and leadership and understanding about what the future is, we would have been more prepared.”
And ultimately students pay the price. Alexis Phan, a sophomore at Pflugerville High School, stares at a screen for at least eight hours a day and feels like her teachers are moving at too fast a pace. Some of her classmates have lost friends to suicide or shootings and are struggling to focus. One week in October, Phan had six tests in electives and core subjects. She is passing all her classes, but her grades are lower than they used to be, and she spent weeks staying up until 1 a.m. doing homework.
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Phan spends most days at home alone, with her father at work every other week and her sister and mother at work. She feels sad and lonely often, “just doing work alone with so much work just piling up constantly.” But she visits her grandparents regularly and worries going back to school in person could bring the virus back to them.
“Honestly, I wish that some teachers could be a bit more understanding with us. They should be a little more understanding that just because we’re in a pandemic or have a three-day weekend that they shouldn’t give us more work than what they would normally do,” she said. “It’s just harder to learn online.”
Awaiting a fix
Medical and education experts say remote learning should continue to be an option for families that don’t feel safe sending students to classrooms.
But instead of trying to improve virtual learning, dozens of districts are already bringing all students back in person. Texas recently changed its guidance and allowed districts to require failing students to return in person or find another district. But with COVID-19 cases rising in many regions, some administrators are being forced to temporarily shut down schools for weeks at a time and rely on their remote-learning programs to keep students up to speed.
From mid-September into October, Gunter ISD, in rural North Texas, had to quarantine 190 students after they had been in close contact with someone who tested positive, according to Superintendent Jill Siler. About 91% of the district’s students are learning in person, and the other 9% use online programs that Gunter ISD purchased, with classroom teachers providing support for younger students.
For now, Gunter ISD will keep remote learning since some students are successful and because an increase in COVID-19 cases would require the district to educate kids remotely. “If we’re still in December and in as much struggle as we are now, that decision [to cut remote learning] in December may look different,” Siler said.
Siler and other school administrators are working to learn from mistakes and improve their virtual learning programs. Hays CISD administrators gave teachers more time to plan lessons and created a help desk for parents or teachers, said Superintendent Eric Wright. They have also considered reducing the number of required assignments after getting feedback that it was “overwhelming.”
The TEA continues to provide updated guidance and offer training for the free virtual learning systems and technology tools. At a legislative hearing last week, Morath told lawmakers that Texas needed to “reengineer the school experience so students reach high academic outcomes” in 2021, including changing how instruction works, addressing disparities among students and investing in teachers.
Cynthia Ruiz, who quit her job as an attendance specialist in Austin ISD in October, said schools should change their expectations of what instruction looks like during a pandemic. They could shorten the school day or school year, free up time for teachers to connect with their students and build in more time for mental health check-ins.
“To try and mimic the school day in the way we’ve always done it was their first mistake,” she said. “One reason why we have low grades is because we’re saying everything is important, and when you’re saying everything is important, nothing is important.”
Mandi Cai and Chris Essig contributed to this report.
Officials Raise Alarm Ahead of Thanksgiving
Health experts worry that increased travel and mingling over Thanksgiving and into the December holidays could exacerbate an already dangerous situation as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising across Texas.
The original plan for Thanksgiving was that nothing would be different.
Eight members of Jesse Gonzales’ family would come from all over North Texas for a traditional turkey dinner in his Dallas home, just like they do every year. His grandchildren would run around the house and Jesse would watch football with his son while other family members caught up and retold old stories.
Then, the family got a wake-up call.
Gonzales was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October. And six other family members also caught the virus around the same time. It was enough to remind the family about the seriousness of the still-raging coronavirus pandemic.
So this year, Thanksgiving is canceled. It’s a big deal for Gonzales, who loves the fall holiday celebration even more than Christmas — which is also canceled.
“It’s always been a tradition that we all come here and celebrate, but now with this deal, this put a different outlook on the situation,” Gonzales said.
That’s along the lines of what health experts and some local officials are advocating for as the holidays draw near, and some families across Texas make preparations to travel and gather indoors over Thanksgiving meals.
“Cancel gatherings, large and small, unless you’re with your household,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said Tuesday. “We’re in a war against this virus. This is not the time to lament that we didn’t get a gathering this time around.”
Eight months into the pandemic, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rapidly rising again in Texas and across the country. Experts say the latest surge in cases is linked to pandemic fatigue. In just eight days, the U.S. recorded 1 million new coronavirus cases, bringing the nation’s total to over 11 million. Texas exceeded a million cases Friday, according to state data.
Health experts worry that increased travel and mingling over Thanksgiving and into the December holidays could exacerbate an already dangerous situation.
“The worst thing I could think of is to take people from all over the country, put them in planes and mix them up,” said Dr. James McDeavitt, dean of clinical affairs at the Baylor College of Medicine. “That’s almost like you designed something to spread the virus aggressively.”
Already, airlines are reporting that travel is up for the holidays.
United Airlines is expecting the Thanksgiving holiday to be the busiest time since the pandemic began in March, according to a news release. The airline added over 1,400 domestic flights to accommodate the demand during the week of Thanksgiving.
Southwest Airlines plans to add up to 300 flights a day, and American Airlines plans to average over 4,000 flights a day during the upcoming holiday, about a 15% increase compared with the rest of the month.
New traditions
Anaiya Davis said when her family gathers this Thanksgiving, there will be temperature checks at the door. Everyone attending is being asked to quarantine before the celebration. When Davis heads from her home in Austin to the Fort Worth area, she’s expecting to see about 15 people in her family. Usually there are about 50 there. Davis said two family members died this year who were immunocompromised, which has put the rest of the family on high alert.
“When we lost my grandpa, it kind of made us more conscious and very afraid of the virus in general,” Davis said. “Then when we lost my cousin, we jumped back into being more afraid because we were like, we’ve already lost two super important people in our family. We don’t want to run the risk of losing anybody else.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says small household gatherings are an “important contributor” to the rise in COVID-19 cases. The CDC advised that holidays be celebrated among the members in a household and noted that college students who live away are not considered household members.
“In-person gatherings that bring together family members or friends from different households, including college students returning home, pose varying levels of risk,” the agency said.
Kate Feuille said her family is planning a small, outdoor Thanksgiving, but the situation where she lives, in El Paso, is worrisome. Cases in the area have surged and overwhelmed hospitals.
Still, she’s hoping the weather is nice so the family can have a physically distanced celebration outdoors. Feuille said her family is still working out how to get her son home from college safely. This year, instead of worrying about throwing a more grand Thanksgiving, she’s planning something more scaled down.
“The idea of making this big meal to come together as a family doesn’t seem that special right now,” Feuille said.
Alternative plans
Isolating completely for the holidays isn’t the only option, health experts say.
“We need to celebrate after everything everyone has been through for the past year,” McDeavitt said. “If we could just get enough people paying attention to the holidays and being careful, then my hope is we can keep the holidays from becoming a major super-spreader event.”
McDeavitt said this holiday season, people should consider meeting virtually, celebrating only with those in their households, having carefully planned events with masks and distancing, or gathering only with those in their “bubble.” In the holiday bubble, as he described it, everyone involved would need to agree to follow strict health precautions, self-quarantine if possible, get tested for the virus and avoid contact with people outside of the bubble.
“Once you’re in your bubble, everybody comes in, everybody stays, nobody leaves and you don’t have neighbors over for drinks,” McDeavitt said.
Being away from family and friends during the holidays can have mental health consequences.
“If you want to be totally safe, you would just hole up in your house and never see another human being,” said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston. “Well, that’s probably not even possible, but also not real good for your mental health.”
Even in normal times, the holiday season is “probably one of the most difficult times of the year for people” said Austin-based psychotherapist Grace Dowd.
“I think people are starting to really feel the psychological implications of COVID and some of that loneliness and isolation that’s being brought out,” Dowd said.
Dowd said while it can be the season of joy, people can also feel lonely and be reminded of family or friends who aren’t around. If someone is looking for community, they might not be able to visit family, but they could meet virtually or visit friends in their area while following precautions, Dowd said.
“I think we’re going to have to get a lot more creative this year around what the holidays look like, and I think coming to terms with [how] they may not look like how they looked in the past and mentally preparing for that,” Dowd said.
Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff contributed to this report.
Board Approves new sex ed Policy
Texas Education Board members voted against proposals to teach middle and high school students about consent, sexual orientation or gender identity. The board will take a final vote Friday.
Starting in 2022, seventh and eighth grade students in Texas will learn about forms of birth control beyond abstinence, but middle schoolers still won't have to learn about the importance of consent or the definitions of gender identity and sexual orientation.
Over the last several months, panels of educators and medical professionals formulated recommendations to overhaul the health and sex education policies. The Texas State Board of Education, which determines what 5.5 million Texas public school students learn, has heard from hundreds of educators, advocates and experts across the state throughout the process.
The 15-member, Republican-dominated board took a preliminary vote Wednesday to overhaul the minimum standards for what Texas students learn about health and sex, a process that has taken more than a year. It will take a final vote Friday. This marks the board's first thorough revision to its sex education policy since 1997 and will affect millions of students in the state.
Board members included language teaching middle school students to "analyze the effectiveness and the risks and failure rates ... of barrier protection and other contraceptive methods in the prevention of STDs, STIs and pregnancy," in addition to the importance of abstinence. Currently, learning about birth control methods beyond abstinence is only a requirement in high school, where health education is an optional course.
Texas elementary and middle schools must offer health education for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, but high school students can meet state graduation requirements without taking those classes. Texas also doesn't mandate that schools teach sex education. Schools that do so must stress abstinence as the preferred means of birth control for unmarried young people, and parents can opt their children out of any lesson they choose.
Much of Wednesday's debate revolved around whether to include lessons on consent, gender identity and sexual orientation.
Ruben Cortez, a Brownsville Democrat, unsuccessfully attempted to add language teaching middle school students about "bullying and harassment because of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression."
"That language is nowhere to be found anywhere else, and again there’s this lack of awareness and lack of attention to this specific issue," board member Marisa Perez-Diaz, a Converse Democrat, said in support of her colleague. "I think that the language needs to be more explicit, especially at the middle school area and at a time where our adolescents are experiencing a lot of changes."
Republican members voted against the language. Instead, they supported teaching students to prevent "sexual bullying," which confused some members who seemed unable to define the term.
"If we can't define it, then how do we expect teachers to teach it and students to learn it? If we don't know what sexual bullying is, then what is a teacher required to teach?" said Georgina Pérez, an El Paso Democrat.
"When it happens, you know it when you see it," said Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican.
"It's a form of sexual harassment, essentially, not in the workplace," concluded board chair Keven Ellis, a Lufkin Republican.
Cortez tried to add a similar sentence in the high school standards, suggesting teachers "explain why everyone deserves to be treated with respect, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity." His proposal again failed to pass.
"We've heard the testimony. These students are out there. They've talked to us in September and they're asking us to hear their voices, and it seems like only a few of us are listening to what they're asking of us, but these are real experiences that our kids have," he said. "It seems like it's falling on party lines, which is sad to me because I think we're here as representatives of this body to represent the voices of every child, and I think we're leaving out a segment of kids when we take these types of actions."
The vote, which was largely along party lines, aligned with actions from Texas Republican leaders to target LGBTQ rights and protections over the last several years. In 2017, they unsuccessfully pushed a policy preventing transgender people from using public bathrooms that match their gender identity. Last year, they encouraged an investigation into whether a mother supporting her child's gender transition was committing "child abuse."
Earlier this week, dozens of people showed up at a virtual public hearing to encourage the board to adopt comprehensive sex education that explained options for contraception, the importance of consent, and the definitions of gender identity and sexual orientation. Some chastised the board for refusing to specifically reference LGBTQ students in its standards.
The message that refusal gave was "people like me don't matter, young people like me don't matter and people in the LGBTQ community should just stay in the closet," said Jules Mandel, outreach and advocacy coordinator for left-leaning Texas Freedom Network, a board watchdog.
Others showed up at that Monday hearing in favor of abstinence-only education, which promotes teaching students to avoid sex until marriage. Several attendees discouraged the board from including the concept of consent in the standards, arguing it would pressure teenagers to have sex.
"Consent puts yes to sex as an option on the table for teenagers," said Dan Bailey, leader of a youth organization called Just Say YES, which encourages young people to refrain from all forms of sexual activity.
On Wednesday evening, Perez-Diaz unsuccessfully proposed teaching high school students to "analyze the similarities and differences between legal consent to sexual activity and affirmative consent to sexual activity." She said it was important for students to understand the concept before leaving for higher education and the workforce.
Federal data shows Texas consistently has one of the highest teen birth rates in the country, which studies show correlates with an emphasis on abstinence-only education. About 39% of Texas high school students report having had sex, but less than half of them used condoms and a small percentage used birth control pills.
Experts including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association oppose abstinence-only education and champion comprehensive sex education. This type of sex education prioritizes accurate and exhaustive information about contraception, human sexuality and sexually transmitted infections.
Joe Biden has Promised to ban new oil and gas Leasing
Joe Biden has promised to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters. The Trump administration held its last Gulf of Mexico auction Wednesday.
In the last opportunity for oil companies to bid on federal Gulf of Mexico waters under a Trump administration, the federal government on Wednesday leased more than a half-million acres to companies for offshore oil drilling and production.
The leasing event, livestreamed from New Orleans, comes as President-elect Joe Biden readies his transition — Biden promised during his campaign to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters as part of his clean energy plan to reduce the use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.
Members of the oil industry largely saw Wednesday’s auction as an opportunity they were unlikely to have for the next four years.
“They wanted to jump on it before the window potentially closes and there are more regulatory hurdles,” said Sami Yahya, a senior energy analyst for S&P Global Platts Analytics. The change in presidential administrations “is one of the top things operators have in mind.”
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said about 518,000 acres were leased during the auction for nearly $121 million in high bids. That exceeded the agency’s target of $100 million, said Mike Celata, Gulf of Mexico regional director for the bureau.
“These are clearly uncertain times, with COVID-19 and the low oil price,” Celata said. “I’m pleased, given everything that has happened, at the size of the sale. The Gulf has a long future [for oil production].”
Expectations for the sale were dim because of decreased global oil demand and low oil prices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Oil companies have struggled this year as the pandemic, combined with less faith from Wall Street investors, have left them strapped for cash.
“Back in the 2014 era, we used to have billion-dollar auctions,” Yahya said. “We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.”
There were 105 bids placed during the Wednesday auction — a recovery from March when only 84 were placed, but down from 165 in August of 2019. The highest bids were placed by subsidiaries of European oil companies Royal Dutch Shell, Equinor and BP, all of which placed more than $17 million in bids, with Shell spending the most on Wednesday at $28 million. California-based Chevron put down $17 million in bids. A handful of Texas energy companies, including a subsidiary of Murphy Oil, which recently said it would relocate its headquarters to Houston from Arkansas, made smaller offers. Murphy placed $5.3 million in bids.
Agency officials declined to comment during a press conference on whether holding the lease sale was motivated by the incoming Biden administration’s stance on leasing federal lands and waters for oil production.
But, holding two auctions a year in the Gulf for the unleased 79 million acres of federal waters has been standard practice under Trump’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, typically holding one in March and another in August. This auction had been pushed back from August, officials said, due to COVID-19 (although Yahya said the delay was likely an effort to wait for oil prices to stabilize following the presidential election).
“Without commenting on proposed policy by incoming administration officials, our lease blocks are offered many times,” said Kate MacGregor, deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior. “These blocks have been offered time and time again.”
Environmental groups criticized the lease sale as a last-ditch effort by the Trump administration to favor the oil and gas industry instead of moving to transition the U.S. to forms of energy that are less carbon-intensive. They also warned of the risk of oil spills offshore, which can endanger the Gulf’s ecosystems.
“This lease sale is pouring fuel on the flames of climate change,” said Emma Pabst, a global warming solutions advocate with Environment Texas. “It’s steadily burning through what little time we have left to act.”
After Getting Stranded in Peru, the Bills are Arriving.
The U.S. State Department has sent letters to Americans rescued abroad during the pandemic asking for repayment for the repatriation flights and threatening to withhold tax refunds or social security payments if the debt goes unpaid for months.
Iqra Beg is one of dozens of Texas tourists who were stranded in Peru in March, after the South American country abruptly shut its borders because of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic.
Under a military-enforced curfew, the Texans spent days frantically trying to contact the unresponsive U.S. embassy and consulate, spending hundreds of dollars extending their hotels and Airbnbs and growing increasingly panicked when they couldn’t find open flights back to the U.S. to their jobs and families.
They thought the nightmare was over when government-chartered planes arrived to fly them to Miami.
Months later, the bills arrived.
The U.S. State Department has sent letters to Texans like Beg in recent weeks asking for repayment for the repatriation flights and threatening to withhold tax refunds or social security payments if the debt goes unpaid for months. Many of the tourists signed promissory notes before boarding the flights back promising to pay, without knowing exactly how much they would owe until they received the bill.
Those Texans are among the more than 100,000 citizens and permanent residents the State Department has helped bring back during the coronavirus pandemic, with less than half taking government chartered-flights and agreeing to pay the cost, a department official said. Most of the remainder bought tickets for commercial flights and, in rare cases, a U.S. military or government aircraft was used, according to the official.
Lawmakers in Congress have tried unsuccessfully to waive payments for the repatriated Americans — with U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, saying “for many, getting home meant thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses incurred through no fault of their own.”
But a bill co-sponsored by Masto and six other lawmakers — none from Texas — has failed to pass.
The Texas Tribune interviewed or reviewed bills received by a half-dozen Texans marooned in Peru, most of whom was charged around $1,300 for an evacuation flight, and said the cost was higher than they expected. Interest will be added if they don’t pay within a month of the due date, and they could be placed in the crosshairs of a private debt collection agency, have their credit damaged or their wages garnished if the debt goes unpaid long enough, the letters say. Their payments are due in October and November.
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“The reimbursement amount established is the reasonable commercial air fare immediately prior to the events giving rise to the evacuation, or the cost of the charter divided by the number of passengers, whichever is lower,” the letters say.
Reference
See one of the letters.Beg, a Dallas educator, said she hadn’t expected the bill to come seven months later and to be so high, after she already spent hundreds of dollars to extend her hotel in Cusco, pay for an overnight stay in Miami and then a domestic flight from there to her home in Dallas. She had tried to cancel her March visit to Machu Picchu as coronavirus concerns grew but was told by her travel company that the $1,000 all-inclusive trip would not be refunded. Her original return flight, also booked through the travel company, was not refunded, she said.
The State Department is required by law to seek reimbursement for “evacuation assistance” up to what would be considered reasonable commercial airfare in a normal time, the official said. It has sent some 24,000 billing notices worth about $41.4 million and received about $21.5 million in payments so far, according to data provided by the State Department official. It had received approximately 25,700 promissory notes as of last week.
Though some Americans had raised concerns about the pricing of return flights, the official said the State Department “did not set or control the prices,” “does not have authority to do so” and that private carriers who did determine the bills “stepped up to offer commercial rescue charters under extraordinary circumstances from difficult locations.”
“These are not ‘business as usual’ commercial flights during normal times, and they cost significantly more to operate,” the official said. Financial risk assumed by the airline and the fact that one leg of the plane’s journey would be without passengers are factors that could drive up the cost, the official said.
Airline executives have said the last-minute nature of the flights — and routes through places where they may not usually fly — leaves them with little time to negotiate prices and contract with vendors who load baggage, clean aircrafts, and the like.
Latam, the airline that flew Beg and several other Texans interviewed by the Texas Tribune, did not answer questions before publication.
Texans who received the bills said it’s the latest episode in a disorganized government effort to retrieve citizens stranded abroad. The State Department warned Americans to avoid all international travel on March 19, several days after the Peruvian borders were sealed.
President Donald Trump initially seemed to blame the tourists for being stuck in Peru, and some said they felt abandoned as other nations came to retrieve their citizens. Beg and others holed up in hotels or hostels, traded information and worried about those who were missing work or running low on medicine as the days ticked by. Armed officers patrolled the streets, and the Americans were instructed to only leave to go to make essential visits, like to get food or medical care.
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Nine days after the border closed, Beg saw an email from the U.S. embassy at 6 a.m. It said a flight from Cusco to Miami was scheduled for that morning and that she should be outside the airport in two and a half hours.
She walked 2 miles to get there, with a half-dozen other Americans — including an elderly man who had been cutting his pills in half each day to make them last, Beg said.
“You're just in such a desperate state to get out…. You’re like: ‘If I miss this flight, will I be able to get another one?’” she said.
Jana Miller, a 34-year-old from Richardson, found temporary housing at a hostel in Peru when the borders closed and after failing to find any available flights out of the country, she resigned herself to staying and waiting out the lockdown.
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But on March 25, a woman Miller befriended at the hostel — another Texas resident — was notified there was a government-chartered flight out. She raced to the airport — walking four miles before dawn to get there — and told Miller to follow and see if she could get on the flight. She did.
Miller said just a bag of chips was served on the roughly 8-hour flight, which made a stop in Lima. She ate a foot and a half worth of Subway sandwiches after landing and spent the night in the Miami airport waiting for a morning flight to Dallas.
She was prepared to pay but expected the bill would be for a “reasonable amount,” she said.
“Flights were averaging, like $350. And so my thought was: ‘This is a one way ticket. Surely it's not going to be so extravagant that it's going to be unmanageable,’” she recalled.
When a bill for $1,300 arrived seven months later, she sent a photo of it to her coworkers and jokingly told her roommate she’d be eating a lot of Ramen noodles in the days ahead. Her coworkers surprised her by pooling together enough money to pay it off.
Jonathan Du, a student at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, said the repatriation process “could have been handled better” and that the confusion over the bills was a “case study in government bureaucracy” and the effect of the coronavirus.
He reached out to the State Department to get answers when he returned, worried that the bill would get lost in the mail and go into default and leave him with interest payments or unable to renew his passport. He never got an email back from the department, he said. He eventually spoke to an official on the phone in October — after initially only reaching a voicemail — and gave them his credit card information.
Texans were rescued by the U.S. government after getting stranded in Peru. Now the bills are arriving. https://t.co/9vW1oEr5Pp
— Shannon (@ShannonNajma) November 17, 2020
Below:
— An evacuation flight taking off from Peru
— People waiting for a gov-chartered flight
— Clapping aboard one of the repatriation flights pic.twitter.com/vkKXIqNdnC
The State Department official said the agency is processing an “unprecedented” volume of bills and that its website notes there are a huge number of emails due to the large-scale nature of the repatriation efforts.
But Du said he can't imagine what it's like for people unable to pay thousands of dollars right away, or who "might have missed their bill or aren't at the same address anymore or just don't even know it's coming.”
That might have happened to Lauren McKinney, a junior at the University of Texas at Austin. She thinks her bill was sent to her old apartment because her sister — who was in Peru volunteering before becoming stranded with McKinney — already got one for around $1,300. She has requested that a bill be sent to her virtually and is hoping to work out a payment plan with the government as she doesn’t have the ability to pay that amount of money. Her sister’s bill is due in mid-November, McKinney said.
“I was hoping since there's a pandemic still going on and people are still asking for stimulus checks... Not that this would be waived, but it just seems a little odd that it's so clear that so many Americans are struggling financially currently, and this is the time they chose to send the bill,” she said.
Sin Tax Might Save the Texas Budget
A hole in the state's finances almost always starts a conversation about how to raise money. This time, marijuana and casinos are in the spotlight.
Texas budget writers will start out billions of dollars short in 2021.
New sin taxes might spell relief. Name your vice: Pot? Casinos? Online betting? Lobby signings and bill filings already point to activity there.
Federal help might be available, too, either in the form of a new coronavirus relief program or from Medicaid expansion — an attractive federal matching program conservative state leaders have avoided for years because of the strings attached to it.
Accounting tricks are always popular. To keep a budget balanced, the state can employ some of the same sleights of hand familiar to anyone who has reached the bottom of their bank account before the end of the month — like moving payments from one paycheck period to the next.
The periodic — and most often symbolic — attack on tax exemptions and exclusions will get a fresh airing. The lonely and unpopular call for a state income tax will, too.
The exemptions and exclusions from current taxes amount to billions of dollars. The state comptroller keeps an inventory for the curious, and should have a new version ready soon for the incoming Legislature. It looks less appealing, politically speaking, as lawmakers work their way through the supporters of each tax break. And every Texan is in that company: The $46 billion in exemptions and exclusions from the sales tax for this year alone includes $3.2 billion for groceries and $3 billion for motor fuel.
So keep your mind on sin. It’s the easiest category to tax. In a state that loves to hate taxes, sin taxes are considered voluntary — just a cost of doing things that are considered unnecessary or frivolous, like smoking, drinking or gambling.
This explains why some of the biggest gaming companies in the country have hirelings ready to lobby the Texas Legislature in 2021, in spite of — or because of — the absence of legal casinos, slot machines, sports books or poker tables in the state. The Las Vegas Sands Corp., owned by Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, has signed up a gang of lobbyists that includes former top aides to the governor and the outgoing speaker of the Texas House. Boyd Gaming, a casino operator, has a former top aide to the lieutenant governor on retainer. The lobbyist filings with the Texas Ethics Commission go on and on: Look up the filings under “Gambling,” and the agency’s website spits up a 12-page list of names.
The in-person and online gaming companies are loading up.
They’re hardly alone. A dozen bills that would legalize or decriminalize marijuana for personal or medical use came in during the first week that legislation could be filed. Voters might get a chance to vote on something like this when all is said and done: “Proposing a constitutional amendment to authorize and regulate the possession, cultivation, and sale of cannabis.”
The hurdles are substantial, but they’re less foreboding than the nearly absolute resistance to a state income tax. That’s been a nonstarter in the Texas Capitol for decades.
By that measure, almost anything else seems like cause for optimism. Texas legislators have allowed agricultural hemp, which has all of the non-recreational qualities of marijuana, and CBD oil, derived from marijuana for medicinal uses without the intoxicants. Other states — even some conservative ones — have legalized or decriminalized marijuana. One law firm arguing for legalization claims a pot tax would bring in $1.1 billion every two years.
And Texas has allowed charitable bingo, horse and dog racing with parimutuel wagering, and a state lottery — each new version of gaming framed as a way to alleviate budget problems.
Comptroller Glenn Hegar already warned legislators they will be $4.6 billion short of the revenue he originally forecast for the current budget, which runs through the end of October. He’ll have another forecast for the coming regular session — an estimate of state revenue available to spend over the next two years.
It’s expected to be short of what lawmakers hoped for. And it will trigger a conversation of unpleasant political alternatives among the people who write a budget that does the things Texans want done without taxing those same Texans hard enough to make them squeal.
They can cut programs and services. They can do some of the standard accounting tricks. They can create new taxes and fees or raise the ones they’ve got. They can do some combination of those things, taking care not to anger too many constituents along the way.
In the state budgeting business, that’s the road to sin.
Texas high-Speed Rail Company Still Lacks Permits
In a letter to the Japanese prime minister, Gov. Greg Abbott said that the company had all the permits needed, but later he had to backtrack. Legislators are expected to file bills to regulate high-speed rail projects during their next session.
DALLAS — Less than two months before the Texas Legislature begins its next session, the yearslong battle over a controversial high-speed rail project is expected to spark more legislative skirmishes.
And after years of public skepticism, Gov. Greg Abbott recently signaled his support for the project in a letter to Japan’s prime minister, although his spokesperson later said that Abbott’s office will “re-evaluate this matter.”
Last month, Abbott sent a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga saying: “This venture has my full support as Governor of Texas, and I am hopeful that final negotiations of this project with Japan can be concluded so that construction can begin. Public support and momentum are on our side, and this project can be completed swiftly.”
The Oct. 2 letter also included a significant error. Abbott told Suga that the company developing the high-speed rail line had “all the necessary permits to begin construction.”
The Texas Tribune found that Texas Central, the Dallas- and Houston-based company in charge of the project, is far from receiving all permits needed to build the 240-mile line, which would stretch from Dallas to Houston and cost around $20 billion, according to the company. When contacted by the Tribune with this information, Abbott’s office said it would review the matter.
“From the beginning of this project, the Governor made clear that he could support this project if, and only if, the private property rights of Texans are fully respected,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman told the Tribune on Oct. 7.
“The Governor’s team has learned that the information it was provided was incomplete. As a result, the Governor’s Office will re-evaluate this matter after gathering additional information from all affected parties,” Wittman added.
The governor’s office has not responded to multiple follow-up questions about the results of its review and has not explained why Abbott didn’t know the project lacked permits or who Abbott was relying upon for information about the project.
Abbott’s office also has declined to say whether he has sent subsequent correspondence to Suga. Texas Central plans to use Japanese technology similar to that used for the famous Shinkansen bullet train and the company could receive a loan from a Japanese public financial institution.
During a September 2019 trip to Japan, Abbott rode the bullet train and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation that would promote collaboration between the two regions. The bank had signed an agreement with Texas Central in August 2018 that would provide a loan of up to $300 million to the company.
Abbott had previously preached caution about the project. In 2016, at a Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce gathering, Abbott said that these kinds of projects cannot be a “money-losing proposition.” During the 2017 legislative session, he signed a bill prohibiting the state from funding high-speed rail projects.
But his October letter to the Japanese prime minister alarmed some lawmakers whose districts are in the path of the proposed rail line.
“Naturally, I was disappointed to see the letter because it expressed support for the project based on what I knew to be inaccurate information,” state Rep. Ben Leman, R-Anderson, said in an interview last month. Abbott “clarified that and I'm extremely appreciative of that.”
Other lawmakers plan to file legislation to slam the brakes on the project.
State Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, has filed a bill that would forbid state agencies, like the Texas Department of Transportation, from giving permits to high-speed rail projects if the federal approvals and permits have not been secured yet.
“What we're saying is that until Texas high speed rail gets all of its approvals from the federal government, TxDOT can't waste any time, energy, attention, manpower, money,” Toth said.
Kyle Workman, president of Texans Against High-Speed Rail, said that he expects to see similar bills filed as well.
“I can't disclose all of our game plans,” Workman said. “But the reality of it is that we are prepared… to propose legislation to protect the citizens of the state of Texas, both in terms of their private property rights and the taxpayer subsidy that is inevitable and protect their tax dollars.”
Texas Central declined to respond to questions from the Tribune, but CEO Carlos Aguilar issued a statement saying the company is "now focused on finalizing financing and getting ready for execution."
Company still lacks key permits
The Texas Central high-speed rail project has been in the works for more than eight years, and the company has promised to fund the project with the support of private investors and without public funds. But critics have said that the cost will be higher than $20 billion and that it can’t be built without public support.
The project has received support from leaders of urban areas, like the mayors of Dallas and Houston, but has encountered hard resistance in the rural counties on its path. Landowners, rancher associations and local elected officials have criticized the project and said they oppose the use of eminent domain to take private land for the project.
Texas Central has said that it plans to start construction by the first half of 2021 and that it has already secured sites for stations in Dallas, Houston and the Brazos Valley.
But the Tribune found that Texas Central still hasn’t applied for a key permit from the federal Surface Transportation Board, which regulates transportation projects, for the construction and operation of the proposed rail line, according to an STB spokesperson.
And two Texas agencies, the Texas General Land Office and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said they haven’t received all the necessary permit applications from the company, including the route proposal and a permit to discharge stormwater during the construction process.
A third agency, the Texas Department of Transportation, must approve permits for the rail line to cross state roads during construction, but a spokesperson said the agency would consider any proposals from the company only after the STB approves the project.
The company did receive two key approvals in September from the Federal Railway Administration, which provided the regulatory framework and the environmental review for the high-speed train. The railway administration explained that these rulings covered several of the permits needed by the project in areas like railroad safety, protection of parkland and protection of cultural resources.
Meanwhile, Texas Central is still trying to secure the land along the proposed route. Texas Central says it has secured more than 600 parcels covering about 40% of the lots — not the land — it needs for the project.
The company has said it could use eminent domain to take the land it needs for the rail line, but a Leon County landowner has sued the company, claiming Texas Central is not an “operating railroad” and that would be a “critical limitation on the eminent domain authority.”
After losing in the Leon County district court, the company won in the 13th Court of Appeals in May. The Texas Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear the case in the next few months.
Leman, who has been one of the main elected officials leading opposition to the project, said that when eminent domain is used in other ways in Texas, such as for pipelines, electrical transmission lines or roads, a state agency regulates whether eminent domain authority is needed. But that’s not the case with high-speed rail, he said.
When other companies tried to bring high-speed rail to Texas in the 1980s, Texas created a regulatory agency, the Texas High-Speed Rail Authority. But that agency was ultimately dissolved after those projects failed.
“There is no state agency authorized by statute to have general regulatory authority over the high speed rail in Texas,” Leman said. “So landowners have no one to turn to, no one, no agency.
“This is not about being against eminent domain,” Leman added. “This is about having an appropriate process where landowners are treated fairly.”
More bills focused on project are expected
For the last four legislative sessions,Texas lawmakers have been trying to pass laws to regulate high-speed rail projects.
In the 2019 session, at least seven bills were filed including measures to limit surveying land for high-speed rail until funding for the project is secured, allow landowners to repurchase land taken under eminent domain if the project fails, and give county governments authority to stop construction of a high-speed rail project in their jurisdiction until they approve any necessary county road alterations needed.
None of them got to Abbott’s desk. But legislators expect a new batch of rail-related bills to be filed when lawmakers return to session in January, including some of the same measures that died two years ago.
Toth, the only lawmaker who has filed a bill focused on high-speed rail so far for 2021, said that as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he is going to be watching to ensure that no state money is spent on the project.
State Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, who is the chair of the Transportation Committee in the House, said that there are “a lot of legitimate concerns surrounding this project.”
“Protections for Texas landowners is a high priority for a lot of legislators, including me, and I am sure there is more we can continue to do to protect property owner rights,” Canales said. “As the project moves forward, it is essential that Texans are given the truth and that the entity involved is transparent at every step of the way.”
Teacher Divides her Time Between "Roomies" and "Zoomies"
Third grade teacher Abigail Boyett is responsible for simultaneously educating 10 students in person and 11 at home. It's a challenge many Texas teachers face this fall as schools adapt to the pandemic.
“Ms. Boyett! Ms. Boyett!”
When the squirming third graders sitting six feet apart in her classroom tried to get Abigail Boyett's attention, she pointed to the pair of leopard ears sitting on her head.
Months into the school year at San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District, the Lewis Elementary School third graders knew the fuzzy headband meant their teacher was focused on the other half of the class, the students sitting at home tuning into the lesson through Zoom. Both “roomies” and “zoomies” were supposed to be working independently on multiplication assignments, while Boyett pulled aside two who had struggled to grasp the concept.
“My friends in my classroom, I’m putting on my cat ears. When I have on my cat ears, we ask three before me,” she reminded them last Thursday, looking out at the room of masked 8-year-olds sitting behind plexiglass partitions. “You ask three of your friends before me.”
The rhyme is one of many tools Boyett has devised during the pandemic to teach two groups simultaneously, her attention divided between 11 students on screen and 10 in the room. She is responsible for solving technological issues for her “zoomies,” reminding her “roomies” to stay six feet apart and ensuring each child understands the lessons.
The continual push and pull for attention is familiar for thousands of urban and suburban teachers at a time when 3 million Texas public school students are learning remotely and another 2 million are showing up in person. “I try to treat them as equal as possible, but my roomies sometimes get a little more slack because they are in my classroom. I can see what they’re doing,” Boyett said. “It’s really hard.”
Teachers across the country are struggling to adapt to hybrid classroom approaches cobbled together in response to the enduring pandemic. Many say they’re having trouble reaching the students who need their help the most.
“That model is so brutal for teachers. It’s not fair to students. It’s not fair to parents,” said Benjamin Cottingham, who has studied the quality of remote learning in California schools. “I’m afraid that you’ll lose those people in education just permanently if they don’t change anything.”
Most Lewis Elementary teachers did not want hybrid classrooms. Principal Kendra Merrell estimated that 70% preferred being assigned to solely remote or in-person students, instead of a mix.
But the school didn’t have enough teachers to separate each class. “There was no way that logistically we could make that happen. There were too many kids coming back in person for us to be able to accommodate the in-person learners with the amount of staff we have,” she said. Currently, a little more than half the students in the majority-Hispanic school are learning in person.
Still, Boyett prefers teaching this way during the pandemic. She thinks it gives her a better shot at building long-term relationships with each student, rather than having some come and go if they switch between remote and in-person learning during the year. “We wanted our own classroom because we wanted our kids to get used to us. We wanted our kids to get used to each other,” she said. “Also, if they started with someone else and then came to me once they were in-person, I would have to do everything all over again.”
Amy Moreno worried that her daughter Isabella would be “heartbroken” if she started with Boyett and had to change midyear. She is grateful the school decided to keep a hybrid system. Isabella learns from home, in a room alongside her mother and two brothers. At first, the third grader felt jealous and left out watching her in-person classmates on screen, but she has since gotten used to it.
“She’s doing really well. She’s adjusted to the online experience,” Moreno said. “My husband and I are open to reconsidering it when they go back in January.”
The strength of Boyett’s relationships with her students was apparent Thursday. Students eagerly raised their hands to answer questions and sometimes interrupted to tell moderately relevant personal stories. Boyett once muted a student singing to herself during a lesson, but generally acknowledged those who wanted to talk to her, even when it was distracting.
“Is your face shield more better than the mask?” one student asked, as Boyett tried to transition into a writing activity.
“It’s because you can hear me clearly. I can speak better and you can hear my words clearly,” she responded patiently.
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Both groups of students spend most of their days looking at computer screens, the easiest way for Boyett to teach everyone at once. She guided them through finding their assignments on the learning management system the school uses, explaining which buttons to click and which virtual folders to enter. In the morning, students pledged allegiance to the Texas and American flags while watching a pre-recorded video of the day’s announcements. When they left for the bathroom or their daily art or music courses, Boyett reminded them to wipe down their desks and sanitize their hands.
When she asked for quiet focus with the classic elementary school “1, 2, 3, eyes on me,” all students visible in the Zoom grid clapped “1, 2, eyes on you” and fell silent. The majority of students had their cameras on, a choice Boyett left to them. At times, siblings or parents could be seen walking through the home or even dancing and pointing at the camera. One student, distracted close to lunchtime, rolled around on his couch at home. And during another lull, a student in the classroom stood up and danced near his desk.
Though Boyett appears to possess endless wells of patience and energy, she was scraping the bottom the day before, as students on screen and in the room repeatedly called out her name. “I was like, ‘OK, Ms. Boyett is one person,’” she recalled. “‘I need y’all to start raising your hands. Students online, don’t forget, I have students in the classroom. Students in the classroom, don’t forget I have students online.’”
On Thursday, Dallas Bassford, who is 8 and usually attends in person, was absent because her family was driving to a wedding in Florida. But she was still able to attend class from the car on her iPad, while headphones barely kept out the highway’s rumble. During the afternoon’s science lesson about the dangers of polluting, Dallas’ answers were repeatedly swallowed by a faulty Internet connection.
Her mother Katy Bassford said Dallas is able to focus more at school, a benefit that outweighed the health risks of sending her in person. “That is one question I asked the teacher before. I asked, ‘Is it going to be like a prison where they just sit there and can't do anything and they’re on the computer?’ Ms. Boyett said, ‘I’m going to try to make it as fun and interactive as I can,’” she said.
Like most teachers, Boyett had little time to plan for this fall after Texas repeatedly delayed and changed guidance for school reopening throughout the summer. She is still teaching parents how to use online programs or how to tell which assignments are required. And she is trying to plan more interactive lessons to keep students interested and engaged, instead of relying on worksheets or online assignments.
Third graders are the youngest students that will have to take Texas’ reading and math standardized tests, or STAAR, in the spring — and those tests are still going forward this academic year.
Boyett doesn’t talk to her students much about the standardized tests coming up, not wanting to stress them out too much. But she has seen their reading fluency decline, with students who are supposed to be reading 100 words per minute reading about 60. “When I conference with parents and tell them, OK they’re lacking a little in fluency, they will own up to it,” she said. “They’ll tell me, ‘You know what? During COVID, we didn’t read. We didn’t do anything. I’m sorry, but we will get back to it.’”
The split in the classroom also takes away valuable learning experiences from students. During the last period of the day, Boyett worked with two students who had not understood how to use a number line to create a multiplication sentence. One sat in front of her at a desk and the other sat at home, a crying baby audible somewhere behind him.
Boyett pulled up a colorfully decorated number line and asked the student in front of her what numbers he would multiply. But he had muted his audio, and while his teacher was able to hear his answer, the other student heard nothing.
“Why do we want kids to have a conversation? Because we’re hoping a kid listens to the other kid and the way they explained it makes more sense,” Merrell said, reflecting on that challenge of a hybrid classroom. “We’re cheating them out of that experience and that conversation and that ability to learn at a deeper level.”
Immigrants Hope the Courts or the election Will Save Their Protected Status
Temporary Protective Status for immigrants from several countries is now before the courts. Tens of thousands of TPS recipients live in Texas.
By Julián Aguilar - October 26, 2020
Despite knowing that everything he’s worked for over the past three decades could be wiped out within months, Gerson Bonilla hasn't started thinking about coming up with a Plan B.
Bonilla, 49, fled his native El Salvador in 1989 during that country's violent civil war and received permission to legally stay under a humanitarian program called Temporary Protective Status, which allows citizens of countries experiencing conflict, natural disasters or other emergencies to take temporary refuge in the U.S.
The program was established in 1990 under President George H.W. Bush and currently offers protection for more than 300,000 immigrants living in the U.S. In 2017, about 45,000 people from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti lived in Texas under the program, according to a report by the Center for American Progress. Those families had a combined 53,800 U.S. citizen children, according to the report.
Bonilla's journey took him to Houston, where he found work and got married. He now has four U.S. citizen children, a mortgage and owns an HVAC installation and repair business.
But in a victory for the Trump administration and its immigration hardliners, an appellate court last month ruled the White House could end the program for recipients from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Sudan.
The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will also apply to TPS recipients from Honduras and Nepal who are part of a separate lawsuit, Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, told the Associated Press last month.
Arulanantham said his team is preparing to seek a review of the case, Ramos v Nielsen, by a larger group of 11 judges. Of the 9th Circuit's 29 members, 16 were appointed by Democrats and 13 by Republicans. A timeline on a final decision is unclear.
Some conservative groups argue that TPS holders only been allowed to remain in country for decades because of biased judges. They have cheered the court’s decision to end the program.
Bonilla fled El Salvador in 1989 and received permission to legally stay under Temporary Protective Status.
Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune
“The fact that the legal and justifiable termination of TPS has been delayed for this long is further evidence that pernicious judicial activism must be reined in,” Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a statement after last month's ruling. “This ruling represents a win for the idea that the American people should be able to provide needed and appropriate temporary humanitarian relief, with the full expectation that their generosity will not be taken advantage of when the emergency is over."
If the appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't reverse the earlier ruling, Bonilla could be sent back to a country he has only visited once in more than 30 years.
“We have to keep working, we have to survive the pandemic," he said. "We’re going to keep moving forward, one way or another, life continues. We’ll see if there is a change in the administration” on Election Day.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign said that if elected, the Democratic presidential candidate would protect TPS recipients.
Meanwhile, many immigrants with protected status are turning to civic activism to put pressure on elected officials. The National TPS Alliance announced a 54-city bus tour in response to last month’s decision that includes visits to 32 states where TPS holders will engage with voters and teach them about the program and the benefits its recipients bring to the country.
Gloria Soto, a 32-year-old TPS recipient who arrived in the United States from Honduras when she was 8 years old, said she can’t just sit and dwell anymore.
“At the beginning [after the court ruling] it was sad and disappointing and the anxiety came,” she said. “But at this moment I am really of a strong mind that I am going to fight for my status.”
Like Bonilla, Soto also has a mortgage and U.S. citizen children, including a 14-year-old special needs daughter who was born prematurely. She’s worked at a finance company in the Dallas area for four years and has few connections to her native Honduras, where she said medical care for her daughter would be hard to find.
She said people like her deserve a shot at living in the country without worrying if their TPS benefits will be extended once again.
“There are always going to be people who have taken advantage of the TPS, but what about the ones who have been really good residents of this country? Why not give that option to become a [permanent] resident to those who have a business, those who have property, those who have kids and that have been filing their taxes?”
TPS recipients and their allies are pushing for legislation to allow some TPS recipients the opportunity to apply for legally residency. TPS protection doesn't automatically lead to permanent residency, but recipients can apply for other forms of relief like a nonimmigrant visa or an adjustment of immigration status, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
And while she waits for better news, Soto said she has faith things will ultimately work out for people like her and Bonilla.
“We are fine and we’re going to get through,” she said. “How many times have they tried to cancel TPS before?”
Failure Rates Among Students Fuel Calls for Face to Face Teaching
Most schools hoped this fall would see students make up academic ground lost last spring when the pandemic hit. Instead, districts are looking for ways to reverse plummeting grades and attendance among students learning at home.
Alarming failure rates among Texas students fuel
calls to get them back into classrooms
By Aliyya Swaby - October 23, 2020
As fall progresses, Texas public school superintendents are realizing that virtual instruction simply is not working for thousands of students across the state.
Report cards from the first weeks of the school year show more students than last year failing at least one class. Students are turning in assignments late, if at all; skipping days to weeks of virtual school; and falling behind on reading, educators and parents report. Many parents say they’re exhausted from playing the role of at-home teacher, and some students without support at home are struggling to keep track of their daily workload with limited outside help.
The problems are concentrated among students trying to learn from home, more than 3 million of the state’s 5.5 million public school students, according to administrators’ accounts. The trends are adding urgency to calls for getting more students back into classrooms as quickly as possible.
By now, many school districts hoped their students would be making up academic ground lost last spring, when the pandemic caused them to shut down classrooms. Texas is mandating that districts get back to normal this fall and prepare students for upcoming state standardized tests. Schools dialed up the intensity of their classes — and then an alarming number of students began failing.
As the first grading period came to a close, some administrators began temporarily backpedaling from their initial insistence on academic rigor. They gave teachers the message: Do what you can to make sure kids pass.
Judson Independent School District, in San Antonio, added a note to its grading handbook allowing principals to “grant any exceptions” and “extend grace” to students, letting them make up late work or drop assignments. “We understand that connectivity issues, lack of devices, technological issues with the Student Portal, Canvas, and electronic books may impede a student from submitting their assignments in a timely manner,” the handbook now reads.
Cathryn Mitchell, principal of Austin ISD’s Gorzycki Middle School, sent an email in early October, obtained by The Texas Tribune, alerting all staff to a “campus-wide dilemma.” Almost 25% of students were failing at least one class, including 200 failing more than one subject. She attributed the failures to steep technology learning curves, lack of access to devices and Wi-Fi, shifting reopening guidelines and anxiety over the health risks of on-campus learning.
The email implored teachers to exhaust “all measures to assist the student before failing them,” including working with them one on one, emailing or calling parents, and setting up Zoom parent conferences. For teachers unable to do everything to help a failing student before the grading deadline, Mitchell wrote, “we would ask that you gift the student with a 70.” Texas’ “no pass, no play” rule prohibits students pulling less than a 70 in one or more classes in a marking period from playing sports or participating in extracurricular activities for three weeks.
“We know that some students are taking advantage of the situation or have procrastinated to get themselves into this position. There is no question about that,” Mitchell wrote. “But we also know that we have asked a great deal of them these first five weeks. ...This will not be the norm every six-weeks."
Austin ISD officials told the Tribune that school leaders are “committed to high standards of academic rigor” and working to “better serve” students with low averages or incomplete grades based on their individual needs. They did not respond to questions about whether Mitchell’s approach was supported by the district or whether 25% is an average failure number across the district this marking period. According to KVUE-TV, about 11,700 Austin ISD students are failing at least one class this year, a 70% increase from last year.
As the extent of students’ struggles become clear, parents and superintendents are increasingly determined to get students back to school, the pendulum of their worries swinging away from health risks and toward the risks of students not learning at all. “Districts are starting to feel some real internal pressure as educators,” said Joy Baskin, legal services director at the Texas Association of School Boards. “If they feel that there’s enough momentum around getting everyone back, I think that’s their preference.”
State data on COVID-19 in schools is limited and full of gaps, but it points toward low student infection rates, encouraging some experts. Experts say layering policies such as sanitization, social distancing and masks is needed to reduce the risk of transmission. Despite outcries from some teachers and parents, dozens of school districts have nixed their virtual learning options altogether and brought nearly all students back to classrooms.
According to the San Antonio Express-News, at least one of those districts is attempting to require all remote learners with failing grades to return in person — violating recently updated state guidance. “Discontinuing remote instruction in a way that only targets struggling students is not permitted,” the updated guidance reads.
Texas school districts don’t have much time to get students back on track. This academic year, the Texas Education Agency will resume strict sanctions on schools and districts with consistently low student standardized test scores after pausing those penalties last spring. And there are dollars at stake, with state funding tied to student attendance. Districts have reported losing track of thousands of students, including some of their most vulnerable, who haven’t logged into virtual classes or responded to phone calls and door knocks. According to state leaders, schools that are open for in-person instruction have seen higher levels of enrollment than those with only virtual education.
San Antonio’s Northside ISD has not changed its expectations for virtual students, despite seeing higher failure rates, said Superintendent Brian Woods. Since many students learning from home are low income, Black and Hispanic, lowering academic standards for those students could end up deepening existing inequities, he said.
Instead, the district has put together a call team to reach out to low-performing virtual learners and urge them to come back to campus. Just under 45% of students are learning from classrooms in the second grading period, up from less than 25% earlier in the fall, when the district slowly phased students in. “We’re not going to fix it by only taking the good grades or dropping half the grades,” Woods said. “We’ve got to dig in and look more at the root cause. We know what it is: There’s kids who need to be in the building, period.”
In Brazosport ISD, where 78% of students are learning in classrooms, a quarter of virtual learners are failing two or more classes, compared with 8% of at-school students. The district is “not dropping our expectations for at-home students,” said Superintendent Danny Massey. But with coronavirus cases dropping in Brazoria County and district officials being transparent about COVID-19 cases on campuses, more parents are gradually choosing to send their students back. Some Austin ISD parents are considering sending their children back later this fall, once the district returns to in-person instruction that more closely resembles a regular classroom. When the district reopened, it had students sitting in classrooms but learning virtually. The state halted that approach. Rosemary Wynn, an Austin ISD parent, thinks her eighth and ninth grade sons may get more out of learning in person once it includes more face-to-face instruction.
She and her husband had a stern talk with their O. Henry Middle School eighth grader earlier this fall after realizing he had not opened about 100 emails from his teachers, except one from his football coach. He was previously a straight-A student, but at one point his grade in one class had fallen to 29, she said. “Children don’t know how to read email. That is not part of their repertoire,” she said, with exasperation. “I haven’t had a single teacher reach out to say, ‘your kids’ grades this, your kids’ grades that.’ I think the whole way this is set up is a recipe for disaster.”
Kelly Sanders and her son Bizuayehu Crouther, a 14-year-old at Austin High School in Austin ISD, regularly debate whether he should return later this fall. Bizuayehu has dyslexia and dysgraphia, which impacts his ability to write clearly by hand, and he’s found virtual learning much easier. “I do not want to go back,” he said.
Sanders is concerned that the second grading period will be even more academically rigorous and that her son will not be able to keep up virtually. “I’m happy that [he is] making really good grades right now, but I’m concerned that it still isn’t as rigorous as the classes would be if it were in person. If at some point he has to take a standardized test on the material, I don’t know what that looks like,” she said.
But for other parents, the decision is easy. Single parent Renee Schalk chose to keep her 17-year-old son and 2-year-old triplets home from Georgetown schools and doesn’t regret it. “My children are children of color,” said Schalk, who is Black. “I don’t want them subjected to COVID-19. … We’re not doing enough in this state, we’re not doing anything in this country to make it safe.”
Angelina Allegrini, a 14-year-old ninth grader in San Antonio’s North East ISD, said her grades suffered in the beginning of the year as she got accustomed to the variety of programs teachers used for online learning and the exhaustion of staring at a screen for three to four hours a day. After a few weeks, and a little leniency from teachers, she pulled them back up.
But the social, extroverted teenager still felt she was missing something. “I wanted to try to get to know people in my class. I saw some of them on the screen, but that’s not the same,” she said.
On Monday, after several weeks of learning from home, Angelina walked into her high school for the first time this year. Her mother, Cherise Rohr Allegrini, a prominent epidemiologist in San Antonio, said she was “not thrilled” about her daughter’s decision but predicted it wouldn’t last long, with a surge in COVID-19 cases likely on the horizon. “I think they’re probably going to change and close schools in a couple of weeks or so,” she said. “We’re going to start seeing outbreaks on campuses.”
Texas Schools Tell Teachers They Must Return to Classrooms
Several school districts are trying to accommodate teachers with health conditions who want to work from home, but many are being called back in as more students return to classrooms.
Texas schools tell teachers with medical risks they must return to classrooms
during the pandemic
By Aliyya Swaby and Emma Platoff - October 20, 2020
After several miscarriages over the last few years, Joy Tucker is finally pregnant with her third child at the age of 37.
A school counselor at the Houston-based Windmill Lakes campus at the International Leadership of Texas charter school, Tucker talked to her doctor about the risks she and her child would face if she were to contract COVID-19 from students or other employees. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that pregnant people may be at an increased risk of severe COVID-19 illness, or even preterm birth. At her doctor’s recommendation, Tucker turned in a note asking her school if she could work remotely.
School leaders denied that request, saying she would have to return to work in person in September. If not, Tucker would have to use the rest of her paid leave to remain home, leaving her no time to recover after the baby’s birth. Her options quickly dwindling and her baby due in January, Tucker lawyered up and filed a grievance with the school district.
“I want nothing more than to go back to work and be with my kids,” said Tucker, who chose to use paid leave instead of returning in September. “If I have to choose between mine and my baby’s life, or going to work in a situation where we could get sick or we could die, there’s no choice to make — I have to stay home.”
Caitlin Madison, a spokesperson for the charter school, declined to comment on Tucker’s case but said, “since this school year started, the ILTexas policy has been that if we have students on campus, then we need to have our employees on campus as well.” About 28% of students in the district have chosen to return to campus.
“The only work-from-home exception for campus staff has been if they are sick with COVID or were potentially exposed to COVID and require a 14-day quarantine,” she added.
International Leadership of Texas is one of a number of Texas schools denying some teachers’ requests to work from home, as they balance staffing against often-fluctuating student enrollment. Federal disability law allows employees to ask their bosses for reasonable accommodations, such as temporary schedule changes, shift changes or working remotely, if an illness puts them at higher risk for COVID-19.
School districts must grant those requests unless they would pose an “undue hardship,” including costing too much or impeding their ability to run the school. With Texas largely requiring school districts to bring back all students who want to return, administrators like those at International Leadership of Texas argue they cannot run their school campuses properly if too many teachers stay at home. More than 2 million of 5.5 million Texas students were attending school in person as of late September, according to a state estimate, an increase from 1 million earlier this fall.
Experts say that school districts should layer safety requirements such as masks, social distancing and sanitizing to keep COVID-19 from spreading. In other countries, transmission in schools has been extremely low. But few of those countries had the same level of uncontrolled community spread as Texas, which has failed to contain the virus in many regions and is seeing regional surges in cases. State data on transmission in public schools shows almost 6,500 teachers reported positive COVID-19 cases, but the data is limited and full of gaps.
Given the unclear picture of COVID-19’s spread in Texas schools, teachers say school administrators are unfairly expecting them to put their lives in danger, in some cases requiring all staff to return to campuses even when most students have chosen virtual learning. Texas teachers have little leverage, given the state’s strict labor laws: Any teachers who strike could be stripped of their jobs, teaching certificates and pension benefits.
“You don’t need to be in an office to do your job,” said Tony Conners, who is representing Tucker and has exclusively represented teachers for more than 30 years. “Since spring break, when COVID-19 hit, everyone was working from home and [school districts] were taking the money from the government and they were telling the communities and parents that they were being well served.”
Conners said he’s heard from more teachers than ever before wanting counsel on how to get accommodations to stay home. The toughest cases, he said, are in charter schools and suburban districts. By law the process is individualized, requiring school leaders to talk with employees about how to meet their needs.
But districts do not have to hire new staff or create new positions to accommodate someone under the law, said Joy Baskin, director of legal services for the Texas Association of School Boards. “If more than half of students are coming back, you have to create social distancing in the physical environment, which may mean you need smaller class sizes and therefore you need all hands on deck,” she said. “A lot of districts responded to that by saying, ‘We don’t have remote-only positions.’”
Even districts currently providing teachers with accommodations cannot guarantee them for the entire year, since many are allowing parents to decide each marking period whether to enroll their students in virtual or in-person education.
“If we can provide some of those accommodations without creating a hardship on a campus where they wouldn’t be able to serve their students safely, then I wanted to be able to proudly say that we had valued both students and staff,” said Austin Independent School District Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde. About 700 of 5,000 total Austin ISD teachers have received permission to work virtually at least through December. But as more students return in person, “we will be challenged to keep all of those accommodations for a long time …... There is of course fine print that says, if it becomes necessary to rescind the approval for school student needs, then we would have to do so,” she said.
Some teachers have already had that rug pulled out from under them. In August, Gina Morreale, an Eanes ISD middle school history teacher, was approved to work remotely after turning in a note from her doctor explaining her chronic bronchitis and susceptibility to pneumonia. She even got an email from administrators asking her not to come on campus to do her work sponsoring the cheerleading team. Lean on the cheer moms, she was told.
A month later, Eanes administrators decided to bring back all students who wanted to come in person, instead of phasing them in slowly. Unfortunately for Morreale, that meant also bringing all staff back to campus.
“This can’t apply to me,” she remembers thinking. “Maybe this applies to someone who is in a walking boot — someone that wasn’t high risk.” She started to think through her options — Could she quit and move in with her parents? Did she need to look for a new job?
She asked her doctor for another letter with more detail, and said she is still working with district leaders, hoping they can agree on an accommodation.
Eanes ISD was forced to call its staff back to ensure there were enough personnel, said spokesperson Claudia McWhorter. The human resources department is working with concerned educators on a case-by-case basis. “Even when we were at 25% capacity, our campuses were short-staffed; some campuses have been forced to have an all-hands approach and even have principals serving as teachers in classrooms,” McWhorter said in an email. “Simply put: with more students returning, we need staff in the buildings.”
For now, Morreale has been able to work remotely, but she’s not sure how long the district will allow it.
“I hope I can until it is safe for me,” she said.
Administrators that deny teachers' requests to stay at home are offering other options. Baskin said the school board association is training human resources directors to get creative in thinking about accommodations that could help teachers with health risks safely work from school buildings. That might mean offering a more remote office away from students and teachers or extra safety equipment.
Six years after finishing multiple rounds of chemotherapy for breast cancer, Pasadena ISD high school English teacher Elizabeth Alanis asked if she could work from home. Her white blood cell count, which determines the health of her immune system, still yo-yos every several months.
To her horror, after a conversation with school leaders, she received a letter denying her request to stay home long term. The district instead offered to minimize her direct contact with students, provide her with plexiglass dividers and protective equipment, set up student desk shields or move her classroom to an external portable building so she didn’t have to pass many people in the halls.
“Your job duties and responsibilities require your physical presence on campus as of September 8, 2020,” they wrote in a letter Alanis provided to The Texas Tribune. “Consequently, the District does not believe allowing you to telework after the short-term program has ended and after students have returned to campus, is a reasonable accommodation based on your job duties and responsibilities as a classroom teacher.”
According to the district, she is one of 59 teachers who have formally requested to work from home through the federal disability accommodations process, of about 3,700 teachers total. None of them were allowed to work from home past Sept. 8, when students returned to campus. “Pasadena ISD must provide students attending in-person instruction with a safe, supervised school/campus environment, and that effort is supported by all of our staff being physically present,” said Arturo Del Barrio, spokesperson for Pasadena ISD. The percentage of students on campus is gradually increasing, from about 40% in September to almost half by mid-October.
Alanis used her personal leave days to remain at home until mid-October, but decided to return Tuesday, unable to afford unpaid leave for months. “I've spoken to my oncologist on this matter and he knows it's a tough place to be in. My white blood cell count is still low, so that just means I'll have to take extra precautions,” she said. “I am going to invest in a medical grade mask and I am going to also invest in an air purifier with a UV light.”
Sitting out of classes for even part of a semester is heartbreaking for Alanis, who has been a teacher for 16 years, most of them in Pasadena ISD. “There’s not much they can take from me at this point. They’ve already kind of taken who I am,” she said, her voice over the phone showing she was close to tears. “I’ve had such huge ties to my students, to my community. And oh my God, I love those kids.”
Texans with Criminal Records Face Limited Housing Options
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs is proposing that people with certain criminal convictions be temporarily or permanently blocked from living in tax-supported developments that provide support services.
Texans with criminal records face increasingly limited housing options.
Homeless advocates say a new rule could leave them with even fewer choices.
By Juan Pablo Garnham - October 16, 2020
Homeless Texans with certain criminal records could be blocked from one of the few paths they have to social services and a stable home if Gov. Greg Abbott approves a proposed new rule for residents in some subsidized housing units.
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs is proposing that people with certain criminal convictions be temporarily or permanently blocked from living in tax-supported “supportive housing” developments.
Such housing is funded through Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, which give developers tax benefits in exchange for building homes that are leased at below-market rates. Once they're built, developers and local providers coordinate to connect tenants that were previously homeless with support services like mental health or substance abuse programs. Either the developer or external agencies provide these services in order to help the tenant get back on their feet. Supportive housing is only one kind of the housing created by the housing program, but advocates said it is key to fighting homelessness.
“People experiencing homelessness already have more barriers than those housed to access housing,” said Eric Samuels, president of the Texas Homeless Network, a statewide nonprofit that coordinates homelessness efforts. “This adds barriers and makes our job more difficult.”
According to a TDHCA spokesperson, the proposed rule was added after Austin residents complained about a now-canceled supportive housing project in the West Campus neighborhood near the University of Texas at Austin. An employee from the agency explained in a September board meeting that groups complained about the possibility of having a supportive housing project without a “safety check.” The rule requires all new subsidized buildings to have a screening process, but only supportive housing projects would be required to have precise bans for certain kinds of crimes.
Advocates say there is no data that shows that supportive housing projects increase crime in neighborhoods.
The rule mandates that developers deny applicants for at least two years if they have been convicted of nonviolent felonies, which can include a third offense of driving while intoxicated or credit card abuse. For people convicted of Class A misdemeanors, like possession of over 2 ounces of marijuana or criminal trespass of a habitation, the ban would last at least one year. Some gun-related violent crimes could also get a person banned for at least three years.
People convicted of more serious crimes, like murder, sexual assault, kidnapping and arson, would be banned permanently from these developments.
TDHCA said the proposed rule would guarantee a “minimum requirement” for screening tenants and that many developments already have similar rules in place, including “almost all affordable housing developments” and “a vast majority of supportive housing developments.” But advocates say developers have freedom to create their screening rules, leaving flexibility to negotiate individual cases with homeless organizations.
According to a 2019 homelessness count, in Texas there were more than 3,500 people who were chronically homeless, which means that they’ve remained unhoused for more than a year and many times have added challenges, like a disability, mental illnesses or a history of substance use disorders. Organizations don’t count how many of them have been convicted of crimes, but Samuels said it is not uncommon for homeless people to have criminal records.
“Most of these are nuisance crimes,” said Samuels. “People experiencing homelessness are victims of crime far more than they are perpetrators.” In the last five years, about 1,000 units of subsidized supportive housing have been approved in Texas using Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, according to TDCHA data. Some of these homes are built for people experiencing chronic homelessness who, without supportive services, won't be able to get back on their feet.
Right now, if a potential tenant has a criminal record, case workers can try to negotiate with the developer and find conditions in which that person would be approved. The proposed new rule would allow landlords to review mitigating factors, like letters of recommendation from case managers and health professionals, and still lease to someone with certain criminal convictions. But when asked how the process would work, TDHCA spokesperson Kristina Tirloni said that would be left to the property owners.
Homeless service providers said that the requirement will limit their ability to find homes with support services for some of the state’s most vulnerable people. “The proposed mandate prohibits the ability to match folks with their best option,” said Bree Williams, director of community housing at Austin ECHO, a coalition of nonprofits that provide homeless services. “These developments are service enriched, and they are amazing with folks with specific needs. This takes some folks out of the run for that.”
Homeless service providers and advocates said that their clients are already having a hard time finding housing because of the screening that landlords do. But with a state-mandated ban like this, their chances of negotiating placement with landlords and developers will diminish.
“One of our community’s greatest barriers to ending homelessness is the disqualification of people with criminal histories from obtaining a lease,” said Thao Costis, CEO of SEARCH Homeless Service, a service provider in Houston, in a letter to TDHCA.
TDHCA will be responding to the comments that it has received and proposing possible changes in a board meeting on Nov. 5. After that, Abbott will have to make a decision on whether to support the proposal by Dec. 1. His office did not respond to a request for comment.
The housing tax-credit program is a federal initiative that is managed by the states. In Texas, developers and nonprofits can compete for the tax benefits in exchange for building, renewing or preserving homes for low-income people and other groups in need of affordable housing.
According to Costis, housing and supporting someone with services costs $17,000 a year. But when that person is on the streets, the cost in policing and health resources can average $91,000 a year in Harris County.
“They remain stuck living under freeway overpasses and in businesses’ entryways,” she said. “Their languishing on the streets costs the community extraordinary policing and medical expenses.”
Advocates are also concerned about limiting who can find a tax-supported housing unit during a pandemic.
“We're serving folks that many of which are living with multiple medical vulnerabilities,” Williams said. “Now more than ever, we need to find a way to bring those folks home and have them in a safe space where they can protect themselves from the virus.”
Wi-Fi Buses
As more students return to school in person, some school districts are having to trim back programs that deployed buses as hot spots in neighborhoods for students with little or no internet access.
Wi-Fi buses were a quick solution for student internet access, but as schools reopen they need their buses back
"Wi-Fi buses were a quick solution for student internet access, but as schools reopen they need their buses back" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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The sight became familiar across Texas after the coronavirus pandemic abruptly closed schools last spring — empty school buses rigged with Wi-Fi routers sat in parking lots and neighborhoods, allowing students to tap into free internet to do their schoolwork.
But with more students returning to in-person classes, some school districts now need to get those buses back on the road while still figuring out how to provide internet access to families needing it.
The Austin Independent School District has been deploying 261 Wi-Fi-equipped buses across 40 neighborhoods with little or no home internet access, said Eduardo Villa, a district spokesperson. Drivers not needed to haul loads of students to school and away sports events stationed their buses as internet access points on weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m, said Kris Hafezizadeh, the district’s executive director of transportation.
Austin's schools reopened for in-person classes Monday. While bus drivers will still have Wi-Fi duty, the hours will be squeezed between morning and afternoon routes — roughly 4-hour shifts in the middle of the school day.
Families relying on the buses for internet will now have to request free hotspot devices from the district, which has about 8,000 of them left to give out, Villa said.
Wi-Fi bus programs were an affordable, quick-turn solution to long-standing problems getting students in rural and underserved neighborhoods access to the internet.
Students learned which spots in their homes were within Wi-Fi reach. Parents called bus drivers and asked them to please move the bus a few feet closer, or shift a bit to the left so their child’s’ school-provided laptop could catch the signal. Some parents packed sandwich lunches and spent hours in the car with their kids parked next to what was a hulking yellow internet router.
But it was meant to be temporary, internet access experts said.
“I look at it as very much exactly like a band-aid type of solution. You stop the initial bleeding until you can figure out what the long term plan is,” said Brian Shih, principal network consultant at the EducationSuperHighway, an organization focused on bringing internet access to public school classrooms.
Southside ISD, in the more sparsely populated southern reaches of San Antonio, initially reopened its schools at one-quarter capacity. For now, the district can still spare buses and staff for the Wi-Fi program, but that won’t be the case soon, said Jesse Berlanga, the district’s transportation director.
Of the district's 41 buses, 15 have been serving as hot spots. As schools allow more students to return to class in person, the district will have to cut hours and may cut the program to the five most popular bus hotspots, Berlanga said.
At its peak, the program served about 180 households a day, but the number hovered in the 70s over the last week, he said.
Students in households with limited or nonexistent internet access were among the first group, along with students with disabilities and English language learners, given the option to return to schools in person.
The district ordered mobile hot spots for households that chose to stick with online learning, but 130 internet-less households are still on the waiting list for a device. For now, the district will hand-deliver printed learning packets to students’ homes.
But even with the mobile hot spots in hand, some students will be left out. The hot spots work well in urban and suburban districts with plenty of cellphone towers. But they’re virtually useless in rural areas with no towers to capture a signal.
“I think that's probably the most important thing to understand, especially with school connectivity, is that every community is going to be different and require different solutions,” said Jennifer Harris, state program director for Connected Nation Texas.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/08/schools-internet-buses/.
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Netflix's "Cuties" Facing Criminal Charges from East Texas County
The district attorney in Tyler County, where the grand jury indicted Netflix, is the son of U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, who has labeled the movie child pornography.
Texas politicians fueled criticism of “Cuties." Now, Netflix is facing criminal charges in a small East Texas county.
"Texas politicians fueled criticism of “Cuties." Now, Netflix is facing criminal charges in a small East Texas county." was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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A grand jury in a small East Texas county has indicted media giant Netflix for promoting "Cuties," a French film about an 11-year-old Senegalese immigrant who joins a dance group.
The Tyler County grand jury indicted the company, not its executives, on charges of promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child, a state jail felony. In Texas, a corporation convicted of a felony can face a fine of up to $20,000, according to the penal code. If the court further finds that the company benefited financially from a crime, the penalties can increase to twice the amount earned.
GOP lawmakers across the country have criticized the movie, claiming it sexualizes young girls and exploits child actors. Prominent critics include Texas Republicans Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, alongside a group of more than 30 House GOP lawmakers. Babin publicly decried the French film as child pornography, and Cruz sent a letter to the U.S. attorney general asking him to prosecute Netflix.
Netflix did not respond to requests for comment.
The indictment, handed down late last month, came out of Tyler County — though the film has no apparent ties to Texas. The court filing claims Netflix knowingly promoted work that "depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created, which appeals to the prurient interest in sex."
While the film does not contain any underage nudity, it includes a minute-long scene with close-ups of the girls in the dance group gyrating their thighs, butts and stomachs, The Washington Post reported. The movie was shot with a counselor on set and got approval from the French government’s child-protection authorities. The film’s writer and director, Maïmouna Doucouré, has said "Cuties" is a critique of the hypersexualization of young girls.
Tyler County District Attorney Lucas Babin, Brian Babin’s son, said in a press release Tuesday that his 21,000-person county opted to indict Netflix for the promotion of the film in his county. Texas Rangers served a summons to Netflix last week, he said. Brian Babin did not respond to questions for this story.
“After hearing about the movie Cuties and watching it, I knew there was probable cause to believe it was criminal,” Lucas Babin said in the release. “If such material is distributed on a grand scale, isn’t the need to prosecute more, not less?”
Thomas Leatherbury, director of the First Amendment clinic at Southern Methodist University, called the indictment an “unusual test case” and said it was “clearly filed to make a point.”
He said it’s “troubling” when there is a “criminal charge related to First Amendment activity, particularly expressive activity, like a movie.”
Before its Netflix debut, the independent French film won an award at the Sundance Film Festival and had mostly positive reviews. Once Netflix acquired it, the controversy started — first, over promotional materials featuring the young girls posing provocatively in dance costumes, then over the film itself. Netflix eventually changed the poster and apologized for the plot summary that described Amy, the main character, as becoming “fascinated with a twerking dance crew.”
“We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties,” Netflix tweeted. “It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance.”
The coming-of-age film follows protagonist Amy, the preteen daughter of Senegalese immigrants, as she navigates her Muslim upbringing, joining a rebellious clique and figuring out what womanhood and self-image mean in a hyperdigital world. Filmmaker Doucouré said in an interview with Zora that the people who started the controversy over her movie have not actually seen it.
“I’m hoping that these people will watch the movie now that it’s out,” Doucouré told Zora, an online magazine. “I’m eager to see their reaction when they realize that we’re both on the same side of this fight against young children’s hypersexualization.”
No jail time comes with criminal convictions of a company, said Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. He also said it’s unclear, if a court determined Netflix made money off a crime, whether that would mean the fine could double the amount of money that was gained only in Tyler County, where the court case is handled, or worldwide.
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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/06/texas-tyler-county-netflix-cuties/.
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Real Estate Investor Linked to Allegations Against Texas Attorney
Earlier in his career, media reports called the now 33-year-old real estate investor a “wunderkind,” a “rising star” and a “prodigy.” Now he’s fighting more than a dozen bankruptcies and has been linked to criminal allegations against an embattled Texas politician.
Nate Paul - CEO of World Class Capital Group. Photo by World Class website.
Who is Nate Paul, the real estate investor linked to abuse-of-office allegations against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton?
"Who is Nate Paul, the real estate investor linked to abuse-of-office allegations against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton?" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.
Walk through downtown Austin or its rapidly developing nearby neighborhoods and it’s impossible to miss the massive black banners draped over office buildings, warehouses and bars. “Another World Class Project,” reads one posted to the metal siding of a squat industrial building downtown. Other banners riff on their own ubiquity with a pithy line popularized by DJ Khaled: “Another One.”
The promotional campaign belongs to an Austin-based real estate investment firm owned by Nate Paul. World Class Capital Group has acquired an enviable portfolio of some of Austin’s choicest parcels with ambitious plans to lease or develop them. Paul has described himself in media reports as wanting to become “the youngest self-made real estate billionaire.”
These days, Paul’s name is associated not just with a real estate empire but with a series of recent high-profile bankruptcies and a much-publicized raid on his home and business office last year by FBI and U.S. Department of Treasury agents. The investigation remained active as recently as April, though no criminal charges have been filed, according to the Austin Business Journal.
And now he has been linked to bribery and abuse-of-office allegations made against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
According to the Houston Chronicle, former top aides to Paxton have alleged that the attorney general inappropriately appointed a special prosecutor to target “adversaries” of Paul, who donated $25,000 to Paxton’s reelection campaign in 2018. Those “adversaries” appear to include agents who raided Paul’s home and business office, though Paxton has confirmed only that he authorized an investigation into “allegations of crimes relating to the FBI, other government agencies and individuals” and that the investigation involved Paul.
A Paxton-appointed special prosecutor, Brandon Cammack, obtained subpoenas to look into allegations Paul made accusing federal authorities of wrongdoing when they raided his home and offices, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
And a text message, which was first obtained by the Houston Chronicle, sent last week by senior staff at the attorney general’s office to Paxton does not specify the nature of the real estate investor’s involvement in the “violations of law” they accuse Paxton of committing, but the aides mention Paxton’s “relationship and activities with Nate Paul.”
Paxton has said the allegations made against him by high-ranking attorneys at his agency are false, brought by “rogue” employees, and that he does not intend to resign. He also said he appointed a special prosecutor to lead the investigation to keep the investigation “independent” of his relationship with Paul.
Paul did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Earlier in his career, media reports called the now 33-year-old investor a “wunderkind,” a “rising star” and a “prodigy,” with an estimated net worth of nearly $1 billion. Raised in Victoria by Indian immigrant parents, Paul changed his name from Natin to Nate, moved to Austin, enrolled at the University of Texas and then dropped out after acquiring a taste for flipping real estate, according to media reports.
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He founded World Class in 2007 and has said he got his start purchasing property at low prices and in a low-interest-rate environment after the 2008 financial crisis. He bought storage facilities, land in Austin, a marina on Lake Travis and a building being used by a call center in south Austin, according to a profile in Forbes. “I was buying at the pit of the crisis,” he told the magazine. “In many of those deals, there was no other bidder.”
By 2015, he had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily from institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies, according to the Austin Business Journal.
“Is this guy for real?” the publication asked in a 2015 profile of Paul. The next year, he claimed a spot on Forbes’ “30 under 30” list of promising young financiers.
“I started with zero,” Paul told the Business Journal. “There was no legacy. I’m self-made.”
In brief media appearances, Paul has shown off a taste for luxury. In 2013, a New York Post report documented his attendance at Leonardo DiCaprio’s 39th birthday party. In 2017, he drove a Forbes reporter around Austin in a Bentley to point out his real estate holdings. He has posed for photos in the Austin Business Journal in his office in the penthouse of Austin’s iconic Frost Bank Tower. And he owns a nearly 9,200-square-foot mansion in a wealthy West Austin neighborhood appraised at $2.4 million, according to local tax records.
A 2017 Forbes profile pronounced him a “Texas Tycoon” and estimated his net worth to be about $800 million. Paul’s company at the time had $1.2 billion in assets and 10 million square feet of commercial space, ranging from offices to retail outlets to self-storage facilities, according to Forbes.
As his real estate ventures expanded across state lines, with World Class and its related companies opening offices in New York and Los Angeles, Paul attracted controversy at home. Former employees of one of his rooftop bars in Austin sued after the bar allegedly cheated them out of tips, according to Forbes. The case was settled privately in 2014.
And among local musicians, Paul became known as something of a venue-killer, as World Class developed a reputation for buying properties leased by bars and clubs and promptly evicting them as tenants.
Vincent Salvaggio, the owner of downtown rooftop venue Ethics Music Lounge, told the Austin Chronicle in 2018 that World Class Capital locked the bar’s doors for delinquent payment immediately after purchasing the property, unbeknownst to Salvaggio.
“They had me locked out before I even got the legal paperwork that they owned it and they haven’t let me back in to get my shit — not my sound system, not even my checkbook,” Salvaggio told the Chronicle at the time. “They’re trying to raise the rent on everything, so it’s good for [them] to get people out who are playing lower rent.”
Recent local news reports and bankruptcy filings indicate Paul’s business may have fallen on difficult times. At least 18 entities connected to World Class Holdings have filed for bankruptcy in the past year, according to the Austin Business Journal. Paul’s firm has used the bankruptcy process to “fend off creditors and provide a degree of breathing room as it tries to find a way out of default on multiple loans tied to real estate across the city,” the publication reported.
In September, American Express sued Paul and World Class Capital seeking to collect more than $300,000 in credit card debt, court records show.
Meanwhile, Paxton’s office has come to Paul’s defense in at least one other legal matter, records show. Paul’s World Class firm works through a complex web of more than a dozen affiliated business partnerships, which jointly own properties with investors.
A dispute arose two years ago between companies affiliated with World Class and the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Foundation, which invested in multiple Austin properties with the companies. The foundation is an Austin-based nonprofit that provides grants to charitable organizations and academic scholarships for students with financial needs.
The Mitte Foundation sued Paul in 2018, claiming he wasn’t sharing financial information on their jointly owned investments that Paul’s businesses managed. The case went to arbitration, and on July 1, 2019, a company affiliated with World Class agreed to buy out Mitte’s interest in the real estate partnerships for $10.5 million with payment due that August.
It never came, said Ray Chester, the lawyer representing the Mitte Foundation in the case.
In October 2019, the judge in the case ordered a receiver to take over the business partnerships, which would compel Paul to reveal the financial records that Chester said still hadn’t been shared with the Mitte Foundation. Chester said that within days, Paul “blatantly defied” the arbitrator’s ruling and said he had sold the partnerships at less than half of their market value.
But the sale was to another company affiliated with Paul, Chester said.
“He basically sold it to himself at below market value,” Chester said, although court records show the sale was never consummated.
As Paul’s firm cycled through teams of attorneys and held back on making the $10.5 million payment, Paxton’s office intervened in the case on behalf of World Class and its business affiliates this June, court records show. Paxton argued that his office needed to “protect the interests of the public” because the suit involved a charitable trust.
In July, Paxton asked a judge to halt the case. During that time, Chester said Paxton’s office called him five to 10 times per day to try to get him to settle for “pennies on the dollar,” calls that Chester characterized as “vaguely threatening.”
On Sept. 20, less than two weeks before news broke about the allegations against Paxton, the attorney general’s office reversed itself and announced its intention to step away from the case, which is still ongoing.
After filing for bankruptcy in August, the World Class affiliate handling investments in the property did not pay the $10.5 million or turn over the records, Chester said. But a clause in the settlement agreement does allow the Mitte Foundation to take a valuable, larger ownership share in the downtown property, Chester said.
As media reports surfaced detailing Paul’s connection to the allegations against Paxton, Texas Republican politicians who had received campaign contributions from Paul announced they would donate the funds to charities. Campaigns for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Comptroller Glenn Hegar, Land Commissioner George P. Bush and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy distanced themselves from Paul’s campaign contributions, which ranged from $2,500 to $10,000.
Roy, formerly a top Paxton aide at the Texas attorney general’s office, also called on Paxton to resign.
Although Paul has not said much publicly since garnering attention in the past year for the FBI raid and his bankruptcy lawsuits, he frequently shares inspirational quotes on his LinkedIn profile. He shared a Sun Tzu quote this summer: “Pretend to be weak, so your enemy may grow arrogant,” appending the hashtag #WorldClass.
On Monday, he posted another update: “Work Hard in Silence, Let Success Make the Noise.”
In the Austin Business Journal’s 2015 profile of Paul, outside observers praised him with a tinge of skepticism. David Armbrust, a real estate attorney at Armbrust & Brown, called Paul’s meteoric rise “very impressive.”
“I suppose like many in the real estate business, he may fit into one of two categories — either a rising star or a shooting star,” Armbrust said at the time. “Only time will tell.”
Shannon Najmabadi and Emma Platoff contributed reporting.
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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/07/nate-paul-ken-paxton/.
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A Predicament Familiar to Texas Attorney Generals
Four of the seven Texas attorneys general since 1972 have gone on to higher office, one stalled and one went to prison. Ken Paxton, the current AG, is in a situation now that could determine which way his career will go.
Analysis: Ken Paxton faces a predicament familiar to Texas attorney generals
"Analysis: Ken Paxton faces a predicament familiar to Texas attorney generals" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Texas has had seven attorneys general in the last five decades. Two became governors, one became chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, another became a U.S. senator and the other three got into the kind of legal trouble that can stop a political career dead in its tracks.
Jim Mattox was acquitted. Dan Morales went to federal prison. And now, Ken Paxton — who is already under indictment on securities charges — faces allegations from seven of his top aides of “abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.”
Paxton is at an inflection point familiar to some of his predecessors, one that resolves into an absolution on the way to higher political office or into the last station in what has been his steady rise in state politics. The best thing going for him right now might be the timing: He’s not on the 2020 ballot. Neither is his spouse, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, who might otherwise suffer from having the same last name as the guy getting all of those negative headlines.
Those headlines are doozies. The Austin American-Statesman and the Houston Chronicle reported that the seven agency lawyers acted after the AG appointed a special prosecutor who targeted “adversaries” of Nate Paul, an Austin real estate investor and Paxton donor.
Last week, those Paxton assistants made their accusations in a letter delivered to the agency’s human resources department — a way of protecting their jobs while pointing the finger at their boss. One of them, First Assistant Attorney General Jeff Mateer, abruptly quit. The other six remain in an awkward work environment on the same floor of the Price Daniel State Office Building as the boss they’ve confronted.
Chip Roy, a former top Paxton assistant who’s now in Congress, said Monday that Paxton should resign.
The AG has no such plans. “Despite the effort by rogue employees and their false allegations I will continue to seek justice in Texas and will not be resigning,” he said in a statement released Monday.
And this is not his first hoedown. Paxton rode into office in 2014 amid allegations of securities fraud that quickly became indictments that are still pending today, more than six years later. He’s accused of advising investors to buy stock in a technology firm without telling them he was being paid to do so.
This is not the tale of an elected official who is in a hot mess for the first time. It’s the story of a politician who has become accustomed to a hot mess. In the first case, he has blamed political enemies and has said he did nothing wrong. Faced with new allegations, he says his employees “impeded the investigation” and that he appointed a special prosecutor to make “an independent determination” since he knows Paul.
The politics reach from here to 2022 and beyond. Paxton is one of several Republicans serving in statewide office, and only one person in that group — Greg Abbott — is serving in the top statewide office. He’s in his second term, and has a group of allies, like Paxton, who are both supportive and personally interested in what he might do next, and when.
They’re playing a game as old as government. So old, it comes with jokes, one of which is that AG — the shorthand for attorney general — stands for “almost governor.”
Paxton has never said publicly he will seek higher office. It’s just that the six Texas AGs who preceded him — a line extending back to 1972 — have all sought higher office. It’s been a mixed bag.
John Hill, a Democrat elected attorney general in 1972, lost the 1978 race for governor to Bill Clements, the first Republican to win that office since Reconstruction. Hill recovered from that loss, later becoming chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. His successor in the AG’s office, Mark White, beat Clements in 1982 and became governor. Clements came back and won in 1986. White’s comeback bid in 1990 stalled out in the Democratic primary that included his successor in the AG’s office, Jim Mattox. (State Treasurer Ann Richards beat them both and went on to become governor.)
Mattox had been acquitted but politically scarred after a commercial bribery indictment early in his first term in 1983. He was accused of threatening a major law firm’s bond practice after the firm’s client tried to depose his sister in a lawsuit that involved a major Mattox contributor. He won reelection, but AG was his last elected office. Mattox made a couple of unsuccessful runs after that — first for U.S. Senate and then for a return to the AG’s office — but never clawed his way back in.
Not quite governor.
His successor, Dan Morales, ran for governor, too, in 2002 — four years after leaving the AG’s office. He lost a one-sided Democratic primary to Tony Sanchez Jr. and in a surprising turn of fortune, pleaded guilty in 2003 to charges of filing a false tax return and mail fraud, and admitted to altering and forging government records to benefit himself and others. He’d been charged with trying to divert money from a state settlement with tobacco companies to another lawyer. Morales did prison time, lost his law license and squandered a once-promising political career.
The next two AGs did what Hill, Mattox and Morales had been trying to do. In 2002, Republican John Cornyn, a Texas Supreme Court justice who had succeeded Morales, won an open U.S. Senate seat and now, 18 years later, is trying to win a fourth term. His successor, Greg Abbott, was the state’s longest-serving AG — 12 years — before running successfully for governor in 2014 and again in 2018.
For Abbott, that “almost governor” joke was a good omen, as it was for White and Cornyn, and in its way, for Hill. It was a bad omen for Mattox and Morales. It has worked a little more than half the time for almost 50 years.
For Paxton, the AG now, the answer is still ahead.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/06/ken-paxton-texas-attorneys-general/.
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