Amid a crush of late-breaking business in Austin, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s proposal to grant education savings accounts (ESAs) to every family in Texas ran out of steam before the May 30 deadline. Months of wrangling had yielded enough twists to both encourage and dismay the policy’s backers: an early passage out of the state Senate; a 16-hour hearing in the more moderate, skeptical House; and even a compromise measure, quashed after a veto threat from Abbott. 

But in the end, the hope of instituting universal school choice didn’t advance nearly far enough, even under unified Republican control over both the legislature and executive. An effort that could have transformed Texas, virtually overnight, into the biggest school choice marketplace in the country — and potentially bolstered its governor’s conservative bona fides — instead faltered before the goal line. And while the chances of a statewide voucher offering haven’t been extinguished entirely, the greatest prize for voucher proponents appears to be slipping away.

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while Abbott is “not inclined to back off” of his conservative policy instincts, he still hasn’t won over the allies he needs after spending considerable political capital.

“At the most mundane level, the governor has found himself in a position where he’s very publicly committed” to vouchers, Henson said. “But he may have overestimated his ability to turn votes in the House.”

The fight isn’t quite over, as Abbott has already announced that he will call legislators back for a special session dedicated to the question of ESAs. Whether that move will be announced in the coming months, the fall or even later is still unknown, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, one of the state’s loudest voucher advocates, has candidly said that he isn’t sure what tradeoffs the bill’s passage might necessitate.

It could make for a puzzling endgame to what had been a conservative breakthrough in statehouses around the country. Fueled by activist calls for greater parental rights and fierce battles over the teaching of subjects like race, gender and sexuality, the movement for private school choice has proceeded from strength to strength this year, with Iowa, Utah, Arkansas and Florida all instituting voucher-like initiatives for every student. But Texas, the nation’s biggest red state, couldn’t close the deal.

Some of the state’s leading players in education say that the halting progress shouldn’t be seen as a surprise. Going back nearly two decades, Republicans have tried to establish school voucher systems — only to be thwarted by members of their own party. No matter the ideological currents, GOP members from rural areas have consistently proven hostile to programs they believe would unsettle the finances of local school districts, which are often the biggest employers and social anchors in their communities. Their support, in Texas and other states, could determine the path forward for perhaps the most controversial K–12 idea today.

“There is a group of Republican lawmakers who are otherwise very conservative in the ways that they vote, but who see this as a measure that would take money away from their communities’ public schools,” said Christy Rome, executive director of the anti-voucher Texas Schools Coalition. “Largely, they don’t have private school options in those communities, so they feel that this is a way in which the state invests in education without benefiting their schools.”

The rural factor

For all the new momentum behind school choice — often born of parents’ dissatisfaction with COVID-era policies or their suspicion of teachings on race and gender — this year’s push for ESAs in Texas carried unmistakable echoes of earlier, similarly unsuccessful efforts.

In 2017, rural Republicans joined forces with urban Democrats to sink a Senate-passed voucher bill, even after Abbott and Patrick signaled their forceful support for the measure. In 2013, 2009 and 2007, House members passed budgetary amendments expressly forbidding the use of public funds to pay for private schools. Even in 2005, with arch-Texan George W. Bush occupying the Oval Office and the education reform era in its ascendancy, a Republican-led voucher proposal was narrowly defeated by a similar coalition.

This year’s model, dubbed Senate Bill 8, was carefully devised to circumvent common objections to private school choice, with $8,000 ESAs made available only to students who hadn’t attended private school the previous year; temporary subsidies were even offered to smaller districts that saw students leave for private alternatives. 

Nevertheless, the law was huge in scope. An analysis from the state’s Legislative Budget Board suggested that its cost would increase to $1 billion by 2028. 

That price tag bred resistance from the start. Although the state overhauled its education finance mechanism just before the pandemic began, K–12 schools are still funded to a large degree through local property taxes. Given the challenging economic and demographic trends facing many communities in the more remote stretches of Texas — 86 of the state’s 254 counties lost population between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent tabulation by the Texas Association of School Boards — many state representatives jealously guard resources for public institutions like schools, hospitals and fire departments.

“Nobody has been able to come up with a deal that persuades enough rural school districts, and rural members, that this is not going to hurt them,” Henson said. “If there’s a structural factor, it’s the size and geography of Texas — it’s hard to change the situation in these very small, far-flung districts where the economics of keepings schools in business are just very difficult.”

Abbott got a taste of public disapproval for his plan while traveling the state to persuade families. The tour, which took him to churches and parochial schools around Texas, was repeatedly met with protests by local educators and community members. 

Judge Scott Brister, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Texas appointed by Abbott to chair a statewide school finance commission, said that schools “are what hold these small communities together. They’re frequently the main business in town, the thing keeping people there. And if those schools die, the towns will die.” 

But while he wasn’t involved in this session’s ESA debate, Brister is bullish on the ability of tiny communities like Penelope, TX — a Central Texas town with a population of 207, where his mother worked as a school counselor — to adapt to changes in how educational services are delivered. 

Supporters even see the policy as a means of arresting years of flight from small towns. Michael Barba, K–12 policy director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said vouchers held the promise of attracting parents who might otherwise give up on rural life.

“A number of the rural counties have a declining population of school-aged kids because young families aren’t dropping roots in their hometowns,” Barba said. “They’re moving to the big cities because they don’t have the educational opportunities, the workforce opportunities, in their hometowns.”

Doubts about special session

Barba said he was encouraged by Abbott’s focus on vouchers, calling it the governor’s “number-one issue.” The commitment was evidenced last month by Abbott’s pledge to call a special session if SB 8 wasn’t brought to his desk.

But that legislative maneuver comes with peril as well as promise. Already, a special session called in late May to deal with property taxation produced dueling measures from the House and Senate, which have been divided this year on a number of issues besides school choice. Hyper-focused on a narrower set of priorities than are typically debated, such sessions offer fewer opportunities to horse-trade in pursuit of a compromise. They also tend to catch the eye of the local political press, making it harder for quiet deals to be struck.

One question on the minds of local education observers is why the conservatives — including Abbott and Patrick, but also their allies in the state Senate — didn’t aim for a narrower victory, perhaps by launching a voucher system solely for low-income or special needs students. Similar, small-bore programs were established in states like Arizona and Florida before incrementally being expanded statewide.

Rome, of the Texas Schools Coalition, suggested that a recent round of legislative redistricting, wherein four rural House districts were either eliminated or merged with other jurisdictions, partially diluted the strength of the rural anti-voucher bloc. That may have led the governor’s team to think they could dispense with more marginal steps, she argued. 

“The shift in membership of the Texas legislature made state leaders believe they had the votes to pass a voucher proposal without starting small,” Rome said. “There was some thinking that the coalition would disband or not have the votes to prevent full vouchers, but that hasn’t proven to be the case.”

A special session would offer the opportunity to rethink that strategy, and existing legislation could point the way forward. A last-ditch bill offered by the Senate late in the regular session, for instance, linked vouchers with a $50 increase in per-pupil allotments from the state. Another version, originated in the House, would have provided vouchers only for the roughly 800,000 Texas students either attending a failing school or diagnosed with a disability; that idea met with the threat of a veto from the governor’s office.

Whatever the details, Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said that Abbott would have to be willing to accept something less than his ideal package. Without paring back the voucher footprint, or adding additional sweeteners to financially strapped districts, he said, the effort was likely doomed.

“I can’t imagine why you would bring this up in a special session in the same form, because you’re just offering to get beat again,” Jillson said. “Unless you’re going to change the offer, there’s no reason at all to bring it up.”

Vanessa’s first two years of high school passed in a haze.

Some days she attended classes at her high school in East El Paso. Other days she ditched school to smoke or vape cannabis with her friends at a park. Then there were days she would arrive at school, walk straight back home and sleep all day after getting high alone in an empty house.

“There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t get high,” Vanessa said. “It made me forget the reason why I was alone. It was just a way to escape from reality, to dissociate.”

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Looking back, Vanessa realizes she was still in mourning from her sexual assault years prior and the rift it caused in her family.

When school counselor Alice Gardea felt concerned about why Vanessa was missing so many classes, she referred her to Project Vida, an El Paso-based nonprofit that offers therapy on campus.

Vanessa, who’s now 17 and heading toward her senior year of high school, described that conversation as the moment that “set everything in place.” Weekly therapy sessions helped her navigate her grief and take back control of her life, she said.

As teenagers struggle with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, organizations in El Paso are partnering with school districts to make mental health care more accessible. Local mental health providers say that cost, scheduling conflicts and lack of reliable transportation are among the barriers that prevent students from accessing therapy, especially if they live in rural areas.

Emergence Health Network, a local agency that provides mental health services, offers on-campus therapy and case management in 10 different schools in El Paso County. This month, the organization added the middle school and high school in Fabens, a community about 30 miles southeast of El Paso along the border.

Project Vida, which introduced its first on-campus therapist in 2017, spans 21 schools across El Paso and Hudspeth counties. In some schools, it’s not uncommon to see students who are raising themselves in non-traditional households, said Pamela Ponce, co-chief of school-based integrated health at Project Vida.

Early intervention can be life changing for not only children and teenagers – but also for the family and community they grow up in, Ponce said.

“Many of these people who are having crises in their adult years, those crises could have been prevented if they started getting services early during school age,” Ponce said. “It gives them the ability to learn coping skills, learn more about themselves, how to care for their mental health, then teach that to their parents and siblings.”

Mental health providers on school campus build trust

Project Vida began seeing the need for mental health services on campus in 2015, while its staff was in schools for the organization’s teenage pregnancy prevention program. Facilitators noticed that students were coming into Project Vida’s school offices to ask about topics besides sexual health, such as how to manage their anxiety, Ponce said.

Since Project Vida team members were visible on campus, showing up to lunch and school events, students began seeing them as trusted adults that they could talk to about any health issue, she said.

In 2017, Project Vida piloted its first on-campus, mental health care team at Eastlake High School, located on the outskirts of El Paso in Socorro Independent School District. The suicides of at least two students, linked to possible bullying, stunned the district that year.

Project Vida has since expanded to Clint, Canutillo and Fort Hancock, concentrating in middle and high schools and seeing about 300 students a year. Each mental health team, which typically rotates between two campuses, includes a licensed professional counselor or licensed clinical social worker. Availability tends to fill up within the first three months of the school year, although clinicians can take new students in the middle of the school year if their clients finish their treatment plan early, Ponce said.

Ponce said they see students who are grieving the loss of loved ones, experiencing panic attacks or struggling with depression. Students also showed signs of social anxiety when they returned to the classroom after back-to-back tragedies: The 2019 mass shooting at Walmart, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 3,600 people in El Paso.

Without on-campus services, students in small and rural communities may have to travel half an hour to an hour into El Paso for mental health care. That means a parent might have to miss work – and lose part of their income – to drive their child to their appointment, while the child may have to miss school.

A shortage of mental health care providers means people can face long wait times for appointments in El Paso to open up, or can only get monthly appointments rather than weekly or biweekly, Ponce said. Parents can also find it challenging to find a provider that takes their health insurance.

Project Vida’s program is funded by a combination of federal and state grants, as well reimbursements from Medicaid, CHIP and private insurance. The organization works with uninsured people on a sliding scale and won’t turn away anyone who can’t pay for services, Ponce said.

Vanessa described the day her counselor referred her to therapy as the day that changed her life. She thinks she’s better at not letting the painful events she couldn’t control, control her, she said. She’s begun catching up on her academics, quit her habitual vaping and looks forward to homecoming, prom and graduation next year – activities that used to not excite her.

It feels good to have the motivation to live again, she said.

“I recently wrote a poem for English class about my sexual assault and the emotions I was experiencing,” Vanessa said. “As I was writing and reading other poems about assault, it helped me feel it’s OK to not be OK.”

Small communities overcome mental health care stigma

When 18-year-old Ariana Bañez told her parents last year she wanted to see a professional mental health care provider, they didn’t believe her at first, she said.

Bañez, now a senior at Fabens High School, said she probably seemed like the typical overachiever. She was on the student council and competing to become the class valedictorian. She was involved with the school theater program and played French horn in the school band.

But Bañez said she had a hard time adjusting to her school load after returning to campus during the pandemic, after more than a year of virtual classes and canceled extracurricular activities. Bañez remembered trying to hide how overwhelmed she felt, but the pressure manifested in physical ways. She would get headaches and stomachaches. Sometimes she forgot to eat.

Searching for a therapist only brought more stress. The clinics in El Paso that Bañez called were booked and couldn’t take on new clients.

It also seemed taboo at the time to admit she needed help, Bañez said. Fabens has a population of less than 8,000 people – and gossip spreads fast, she described. Some of her peers feel they can’t speak up about anxiety, depression or family problems because “everyone will say, well, get over it.”

“We’re a really close-knit community,” Bañez said. “But when it’s like that, when family issues come up, it gets harder to deal with. It’s hard to really express that without everyone judging you.”

Natalie Mendez, a qualified mental health professional from Emergence Health Network, said educating parents and destigmatizing mental health are a major part of her job. Mendez supervises the network’s team at Canutillo ISD. About 6,200 people live in Canutillo, a census-designated place on the northwest side of El Paso County.

If a parent is receiving services for a child, they don’t necessarily want the staff at the school to know because staff might know their friend and then word gets around, Mendez explained.

Sometimes parents are initially open to mental health services, but opposed once a provider explains treatment options, Mendez said. Other times parents mistake services as a quick fix that will immediately change their child’s behavior, grades and attendance. Ultimately, students should have a direct say in their mental health care and forcing them to get treatment before they’re ready can re-open trauma, Mendez said.

“When a child is not on board, we don’t recommend services because the child has to be in charge,” Mendez said. “Regardless of their age, they need to be the one to set their own goal. … The child and parent are equal partners. Our job is to bridge that partnership so we are working together for the benefit of the whole family.”

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission funds Emergence Health Network’s operation, which includes three schools in Canutillo ISD and five schools in El Paso ISD. Emergence Health Network has seen about 350 students for on-campus services since 2020.

Along with therapy, the organization provides case management and informal youth mentorship. A therapist can help a student trace why they feel anxious in crowded hallways while a case manager can help a student develop grounding techniques, like counting tiles on a ceiling, when they’re in a situation that triggers their anxiety, Mendez explained.

“They’re both tackling the same problem,” Mendez said. “One is understanding the reason, the other piece is, ‘OK, what are we going to do about it?’”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Bipartisan legislation that would overhaul how Texas funds its community colleges is heading to Gov. Greg Abbott‘s desk for approval after the House agreed to accept the Senate’s amendments Wednesday.

Last week, the Senate unanimously approved a House bill to fund the state’s community colleges based on how many of their students graduate with a degree or certificate or transfer to a four-year university. Currently, schools are largely funded based on the number of hours students spend in a classroom.

Bill sponsor Rep. Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, had previously told The Texas Tribune the House was likely to accept the Senate additions. VanDeaver served on a commission of lawmakers and community college presidents last year that recommended the changes, along with a long list of ways the state could better support the more than 642,000 students who attend Texas’ 50 community college districts.

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The Senate added language from seven smaller higher education bills to the legislation, nearly all of which have already passed out of one or both chambers. These include legislation to provide new grant funds for students and workforce development, legislation to ease the student transfer process between two- and four-year schools, and one bill dealing with student privacy.

In a press release, a coalition of business and higher education advocates celebrated the bill’s passage.

“By 2030, 62 percent of all Texas jobs will require postsecondary credentials — but Texas businesses are already struggling to find qualified workers,” Justin Yancy, Texas Business Leadership Council President, said in a statement. “Now, thanks to the passage of House Bill 8, state leaders can continue to address the skilled workforce shortage, support our businesses, and ensure more Texans can earn self-sustaining wages.”

A new budget provision that is contingent on the legislation passing shows that in the next two years, the new funding model would direct about $2.2 billion toward public community colleges, compared with the old system, which would have provided $1.8 billion.

Texas community colleges are primarily funded by local property taxes, student tuition and fees, and state money.

While every community college receives a little over $1.3 million for core operations in each two-year budget, the rest of the money it receives from the state is allocated in two ways. The vast majority of that funding depends on how many hours of instruction students receive, called contact hours. The rest — around 10% — is awarded based on milestones like the number of students who complete their first year of math, earn 15 credit hours or graduate with an associate’s degree.

But over time, the state’s share has not kept pace with other sources of funding and now accounts for less than 25% of community colleges’ budgets. School leaders say the state needs to rethink how community colleges respond to workforce demands and prioritize efforts to enroll more students in programs for industries that pay well but don’t take a long time to complete.

House Bill 8 would shift the funding balance so most of the money that schools get from the state is based on student outcomes. Schools would compete for funding against their own progress in those areas.

Specifically, the legislation says the state would allocate funding to colleges based on metrics like the number of credentials they award in high-demand industries, the number of students who earn 15 credit hours and then transfer to a four-year university, or the number of high school students who earn at least 15 credits through a dual-credit program.

Instead of waiting for lawmakers to allocate a pot of funding each session, schools would be able to look at their data and determine what their funding levels would be.

“The new finance system will fundamentally shift how community colleges support their students, ultimately providing them with more valuable options as workforce programs receive as much of an emphasis as academic programs,” said Renzo Soto, a policy adviser for Texas 2036, a nonprofit focused on improving Texas’ future through public policy. “This all culminates into a greater focus on ensuring community colleges are delivering workforce returns for students, employers and the state through state funding tied to the student outcomes that matter most — earning a credential of value that prepares them for the workforce.”

HB 8 lays out a road map for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to implement the new funding system, but it would require the state agency to determine many specifics such as the new formulas to calculate just how much money each college would receive. As the bill is written now, the state agency would have until Sept. 1 to put the new system in place. Texas Higher Education Commissioner Harrison Keller said that means the board would need to have the details decided by mid-July to get state approval.

Keller called the legislation historic and said it was crucial that all the community college leaders across the state backed the change.

“We could not contemplate making such a dramatic change so quickly without that strong partnership and buy-in from community college leaders across the state,” he said.

Disclosure: Texas 2036 has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The Texas Legislature gave final approval Sunday to a bill that will criminalize performers that put on sexually explicit shows in front of children as well as any businesses that host them.

Originally designed as legislation to restrict minors from attending certain drag shows, lawmakers agreed on bill language that removed direct reference to drag performers just before an end-of-day deadline. The bill now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

Under Senate Bill 12, business owners would face a $10,000 fine for hosting sexually explicit performances in which someone is nude or appeals to the “prurient interest in sex.” Performers caught violating the proposed restriction could be slapped with a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

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After lawmakers from both chambers met in a conference committee to hash out the differences between their versions of the bill, the House and Senate released a new one that expanded the penal code’s definition of sexual conduct. The bill classifies as sexual conduct the use of “accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics,” accompanied with sexual gesticulations.

Advocates said this addition is aimed at drag queens’ props and costumes, which is evidence that lawmakers are still targeting the LGBTQ community.

Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano, amended the legislation in the House by removing explicit reference to drag. Shaheen told The Texas Tribune that members had viewed videos of performances in which children were exposed to “lewd, disgusting, inappropriate stuff.” He said the updated bill addresses what was in those videos. Shaheen did not specify which videos concerned lawmakers.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, authored SB 12 after a small but loud group of activists and extremist groups fueled anti-drag panic by filming drag shows and posting the videos on social media. Those groups characterized all drag as inherently sexual regardless of the content or audience, which resonated with top GOP leaders in the state, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Advocates say the revisions to the legislation still target drag, even if those types of performances aren’t directly mentioned in the bill.

Brigitte Bandit, an Austin-based drag performer, criticized the addition of “accessories or prosthetics” to the bill. Drag artists performing in front of children don’t wear sexually explicit costumes, Bandit said, adding that this bill creates a lot of confusion over what is and isn’t acceptable to do at drag shows.

“Is me wearing a padded bra going to be [considered] enhancing sexual features?” Bandit asked. “It’s still really vague but it’s still geared to try to target drag performance, which is what this bill has been trying to do this entire time, right?”

Shaheen said that including direct reference to drag performers wasn’t necessary to the intent of the bill, which was to restrict children from seeing sexually explicit material.

“You want it to cover inappropriate drag shows, but you [also] want it to cover if a stripper starts doing stuff in front of a child,” Shaheen said.

Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, spoke against the bill Sunday just before the House gave it final approval in a 87-54 vote. She criticized the removal of language that previously narrowed the bill’s enforcement to only businesses. González warned that the bill’s vague language could lead to a “domino effect” of consequences.

“The broadness could negatively implicate even the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders,” said González. “It can go into your homes and say what is allowed in your homes after the lines ‘commercial enterprise’ were stricken out.”

During a House hearing on SB 12, Democrats questioned whether the bill’s language would also ensnare restaurants like Twin Peaks that feature scantily clad servers. Shaheen said the way the bill is written exempts these types of performances.

LGBTQ lawmakers applauded the removal of the direct reference to drag performers. But advocates fear the phrase “prurient interest in sex” could be interpreted broadly since Texas law doesn’t have a clear definition of the term, said Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas who testified against the bill in a House committee.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the term is defined as “erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,” though the language’s interpretation varies by community.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Texas lawmakers sent a sweeping school safety measure to Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday, including in their response to last year’s Uvalde massacre a requirement to post an armed security officer at every school and provide mental health training for certain district employees.

The measure also gives the state more power to compel school districts to create active-shooter plans.

Both chambers gave their final approval to House Bill 3 after ironing out their differences over the past week.

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“It’s time to act,” said Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, before the vote was taken. “We need to prevent the next Uvalde.”

The provision to require an armed person at every school campus was added back into the bill during the negotiation process after the Senate took it out earlier in the session. The armed person can be either a peace officer, a school resource officer, a school marshal or a school district employee, according to the law.

That provision caused the most consternation among the opponents of the bill, who have argued all through the legislative session that fewer guns — not more — is the solution to mass shootings. Still, the bill passed by a relatively large margin in the House, 93-49.

Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, said requiring an armed person at schools will endanger students instead of ensuring their safety.

“The potential for disastrous consequences is staggering,” Goodwin said.

The proposal requires the Texas School Safety Center — a Texas State University think tank that has been reviewing schools’ safety protocols since the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting — to review best practices to best secure campuses every five years. In the Uvalde shooting, the gunman entered Robb Elementary through a backdoor that failed to properly lock. The bill would also create regional safety teams that would conduct intruder detection audits at least once a year.

HB 3 would create a safety and security department within the Texas Education Agency and give it the authority to compel school districts to establish robust active-shooter protocols and follow them. Those that fail to meet the agency’s standards could be put under the state’s supervision.

The bill would also require the TEA to develop standards for notifying parents of “violent activity” on campus and set up school safety review teams to conduct vulnerability assessments of all the school campuses once a year.

Both chambers have said school safety is a priority this session after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at a Uvalde elementary school last year. However, parents of the Uvalde victims were left disappointed after the raise-the-age bill they advocated for failed earlier in the session. The bill would have changed the age to legally purchase semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21.

To further harden schools, the state would give each school district $15,000 per campus and $10 per student, a figure that many school officials say isn’t enough. In addition, lawmakers have allocated $1.1 billion to the TEA to administer school safety grants to the state’s more than 1,000 school districts.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat who represents Uvalde, said Sunday that he voted against the bill because of the funding concerns.

“It is sick and twisted that we have the largest budget surplus in Texas history and we aren’t doing a damn thing to keep our kids safe,” he said. “We aren’t doing anything to prevent another Uvalde.”

Under the bill, school employees who regularly interact with children would need to complete an “evidence-based mental health first-aid training program.” The TEA would reimburse the employee for the time and money spent on the training.

In counties with fewer than 350,000 people, the bill requires the sheriff to hold semi-annual meetings to discuss school safety and law enforcement response to “violent incidents.” This includes making sure there is a clear chain of command and that all radios are working.

In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting last year, nearly 400 law enforcement officers from different agencies descended upon Robb Elementary in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted for more than an hour.

Each district would also be required to give the Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement a walkthrough and a map of each campus in an effort to avoid confusion when responding to an incident.

“This is a huge win for the safety of our children,” said Rep. Carrie Isaac, R-Dripping Springs.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

When Isabel Torres found out she was pregnant at 36 years old, she had enrolled in college twice before but left before earning a degree. Now, the stakes seemed even higher to go back and finish to better provide for her daughter.

She enrolled at Austin Community College and decided to earn an associate degree. That meant raising her daughter while balancing work, a work-study job and classes. A two-year degree took four years to complete. Torres said it took a lot of dedication and help from a slew of resources offered at ACC.

“I was able to access child care support. I was able to access book lending programs … I was able to qualify for a work-study [job],” she said. “I don’t know how I would have done it without those resources.”

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According to national statistics, 1 in 5 college students have children, one of the many identified barriers that can make it difficult for students to complete a certificate or credential. Most student parents are women and more than 2 in 5 are single mothers, like Torres.

Texas is adjusting to a near-total ban on abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson last year struck down Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional protection for abortion and allowing states to set their own laws regulating the procedure. Texas lawmakers on both sides of the aisle recognized that the number of pregnant and parenting students will likely increase in the state.

This legislative session, lawmakers passed multiple bills that would provide more support to students with children as well as codifying their rights in state law to ensure all colleges and universities are set up to meet their needs. Gov. Greg Abbott has already signed one bill into law.

“What we like about these bills is that it sets the table for an understanding that students who are parents face different responsibilities,” said Amy O’Donnell with Texas Alliance for Life. “They have different weights on them, they have different pressures on them. They have to navigate different things than a student who is not a parent and there needs to be accommodations for them. There needs to be resources.”

One bill requires colleges and universities to designate an employee as a liaison specifically for parenting students to connect them with resources they might need on campus, including tutoring, transportation, child care or access to public assistance programs. Another bill requires schools to allow students with children to register early for classes. A third bill codifies existing rights for parents in state law to ensure faculty and school administrators understand what types of accommodations or services they need to provide students expecting or raising children.

“Those are all low-hanging fruit and things we should be doing, “ said Jonathan Feinstein, state director for Texas at The Education Trust. “It sends a much-needed signal that these populations and these students need to be visible and that it’s OK for them to be visible.”

The legislation forced strange bedfellows: abortion opponents pushing the state to show support for students who might keep an unplanned pregnancy and abortion-rights advocates pushing to ensure that without the choice to get an abortion that students at least get the services they need to complete their education.

“We don’t have that choice anymore. It’s a question of whether you choose to go college while you’re having children,” said Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, who sponsored House Bill 1361. “My team was actively looking for pro-parent, pro-family legislation in full acknowledgement that in a post-Dobbs world, we need to wrap people with services in a manner and to an extent that we had not seen pre-Dobbs.”

Abbott has already signed a bill carried by Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, which spells out specific rights that pregnant and parenting students have to pursue a college degree. It allows them to take leaves of absence and excuse any missed classes due to pregnancy or childbirth. It requires colleges and universities to create a nondiscrimination policy for students with children or pregnant students.

Paxton told members when she laid out this and other bills in a March committee hearing that she had a personal connection to the legislation. Her birth mother had Paxton while she was in college and was able to persist only with outside help.

“She was actually able to go on and go back and finish her master’s degree, but many, many folks don’t have family support or they maybe have families that are just far away,” Paxton said.

Multiple women who testified in support of the legislation shared experiences in which schools suggested they take a leave of absence or provided little information on possible accommodations to continue attending classes. Others said they were unable to access recordings or materials for classes they missed to take care of a sick child. The stakes are high: In many cases if students miss a certain amount of classes, they can be dropped from a class. And if students fail too many courses, they could lose access to financial aid.

Monica Palma said her law school suggested she take a leave of absence when she gave birth to her third child.

“I was flabbergasted and disillusioned because my kids would still be here in a year or two and I would be further behind on my goals,” she told lawmakers.

Paxton also sponsored legislation that requires universities to allow students with children to register early for classes so they have access to the courses that best fit their schedules. That bill also received bipartisan support.

“Being able to plan out the next six months is crucial,” Torres, the student at ACC, said. “Being able to register and you only have two or three weeks to line everything up is sometimes not enough time if you have a boss or if you work for a corporation that doesn’t really bend.”

Another bill requires universities to assign an existing staff member as a liaison for parenting and pregnant students who would help them connect to various resources such as health care, transportation, child care and other public benefits. That bill also requires universities to start keeping track of how many student-parents they have on campus, including their demographic data and how well they’re progressing toward graduation.

“We actually will be able to quantify how many of these students we have in our Texas colleges, get a sense of their demographic makeup as well as their needs and how well we’re meeting them,” Feinstein said. “That was kind of an unknown.”

Advocates say the stakes are high for Texas’ workforce to make sure these students earn a certificate or degree after high school. According to The Aspen Institute, student-parents are more likely to attend community college. They are predominantly students of color and are older students who carry nearly twice the student loan debt as most students. They also perform better than students without children.

Torres was assigned a work-study job on campus at ACC to help other students access resources to support their needs in and out of the classroom, including food and housing insecurity or academic issues. As she was about to graduate, a full-time position opened up. So she decided to stay and continue helping other students get to graduation.

“These laws are crucial,” she said. “It really [makes] a difference of the students finishing their program or not.”

Disclosure: The Education Trust has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

When El Paso teen Alex Reyes read “Magnus Chase” while in the seventh grade, they immediately identified with one of the main characters: Alex Fierro. It wasn’t just because of their shared first name, but because of their shared experience as gender fluid teenagers.

“It was the first time I had read a book where I saw something that I kind of felt similar to, related to,” Reyes said. “It’s stuck with me for so long. They have so much more going on, and the sexuality is just a part of it. … It’s not all that I am, but it’s a part of me.”

Rick Riordan’s “Magnus Chase” series, like many of the books Reyes reads, is being targeted by Texas legislators and school boards nationwide. A PEN America report from 2022 found that book bans affected 86 school districts across 26 states, with a combined 2 million students. More than 1,500 books have been banned already; Texas tops the list, with 16 districts having banned more than 700 books.

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The number may soon rise further. The Texas Legislature is currently considering several bills that may ban books in schools that include content on sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual activity. Among the bills being considered are Senate Bill 13, House Bill 900 and House Bill 1804.

In El Paso, youth, authors, librarians and other community members are pushing back.

Last year, the city, in collaboration with the YWCA Paso del Norte Region, installed a banned books section at city library branches. “Books have been challenged and banned throughout history, and we are seeing a reemergence today,” the YWCA announced then. “Silencing and limiting of stories, histories, and points of view of anyone are direct attacks on the people who write and are represented in those books.”

The effort by El Paso Public Library sought to spotlight the stories of historically marginalized people and communities of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, Asian and LGBTQ+ that are often left out of history books and school curriculums.

El Paso city Rep. Alexsandra Annello was elemental in championing the effort to bring access to banned books to area residents.

“A lot of teachers in the area were expressing their concern,” she said. “We really wanted to do it in solidarity with our school board partners … and say that the state can’t come in and tell us what not to have in our library. They’re being banned because they’re culturally informative.”

A city of El Paso resolution, created and passed unanimously by council in February 2022, declares that every public library in the city would have a banned books section, highlight the books year-round and form a partnership to accept the books from the YWCA.

The partnership between the two entities, Annello said, served as a message to the public that it wasn’t just a city initiative but a collaboration with community partners that is continuing and can be expanded.

“I was even expecting some of my fellow council members to fight against us, but we had overwhelming support,” she said, adding that the YWCA’s own inclusion and diversity committee donated the books. “The day after we passed this, people were showing up to the library (asking) to rent books.”

Having representation in literature

As Reyes continued their schooling, they found solace in stories they identified with. When a teacher shared the book “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” by El Paso author Benjamin Alire Sáenz, it helped Reyes see that others in their community had some of the same questions.

“Seeing ‘Aristotle and Dante,’ something that takes place in my own hometown, written by someone from my hometown, someone who was a teacher at UTEP at one point, it made me realize that there are other people out there like me,” Reyes said. “I’m not alone and no one is alone.”

Having literature that reflected their own feelings helped Reyes finally feel like themselves – and discover what it meant to be gender fluid, allowing Reyes to come out to their family.

“I was so scared to say anything or even think about what I might be when I was little,” Reyes said. “I was so scared that everyone in my family was going to hate me because we were Christian.” But the books they had been reading, in which queer characters’ families and friends were not only religious, but supportive, offered Reyes hope.

“I was able to tell my mother (I was) gender-fluid. Having something concrete that I was able to say back to myself in the mirror gave me so much courage to be able to say it to her.”

School libraries

Armando Loera has been an educator for more than 30 years. Seventeen of those years have been as a librarian. Currently, he is the librarian coordinator for one of the school districts in El Paso County.

“As librarians and as educators, we are about having the freedom to teach real history,” said Loera, who spoke to El Paso Matters not as the representative of the district but as an expert on Texas school libraries. “The freedom to read what’s out there. We really are defenders of something we call the freedom to read.”

Due to proximity alone, school libraries offer daily access for school children to access literary materials without driving to a public library. If any of the current Texas legislation passes, new restrictions would be added on librarians’ ability to choose books, meaning students would have fewer books to check out.

“Since the beginning of time … people have had problems with knowledge, because knowledge really, truly is power,” Loera said. “The people that know are the ones that are in power, and they don’t want to share that power.”

When selecting which books will be at school libraries, librarians read reviews, look at education curriculums, and learn what books the students want, all while following guidelines set by the state.

“There are some parameters, but at the end of the day, they’re a little bit broad,” Loera said. “We don’t have the opportunity to read every single book that we have. We also read books, especially if they’re controversial, and then we make that decision.”

If House Bill 1804 were to pass, Loera believes the bill’s ambiguity could cause many books to be banned without being vetted adequately by librarians.

“Unfortunately, a lot (of the books) have to do with race (and sexuality),” he said. “They want to quiet, silence people of color’s experiences. They definitely want to do away with books that have to do with the LGBTQ experience.”

Close to half of the books that Texas wants to ban have to do with the LGBTQ experience, he says.

“Our communities are made up of a group of diverse people,” Loera said. “Books and libraries should be safe places for people to get books that they identify with and get information on things that they’re confused or curious about. By getting rid of those books, they’re not going to have that opportunity.”

The current attacks on books, Loera said, are highly political and a way to silence historical mistakes by those in power. He celebrates the decision by local libraries to make those books available.

“Many people feel that the more books are banned, the more attention you bring to those books, and those books get to be read even more,” he said. “The more displays we have like that, the more people will be aware and read those books.”

Loera believes the only people who should have a say in what children read are their parents, and not whatever political rhetoric is being used by those seeking votes.

“The problem comes when the legislature or political parties are wanting to make that decision for everyone,” he said. “As a parent, you’re welcome to go ahead and decide what your children can read, but it shouldn’t be extended to what others at the school should read.”

Fighting for books at school

Reyes and their classmates faced an attack on their freedom when a parent pushed to have the book, “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” removed from the Canutillo High School library. Reyes fought to have the school board reinstate the book.

“(The librarian) told me that the parent had called and threatened to burn the book inside the library,” said Reyes, who founded the Gender and Sexualities Alliance at their school. “(The parent) skipped going to the principal and just went straight to the school board. I went, and I gathered a whole bunch of people’s testimonies. Once I started advocating for this book and talking to the board … I got a lot of threats from parents and students in my school.”

Reyes took on the blowback, the insults and threats to be a voice for their community – seeking to emulate the efforts of their hero Adri Perez, an LGBTQ+ organizer and educator who was recently arrested at the Texas Capitol during a peaceful protest.

“I saw that (Adri Perez) were being called names and all these things, and I have been seeing this for years, but there are so many people still supporting them,” Reyes said. “No matter what happened, they still were a voice. But they still do it because if they don’t do it, no one else is going to do it.”

And so Reyes took on the battle.

“There are so many people out there who don’t have the voice that I have or are not in a safe place where they can talk about certain things,” they said. “I was in a position where I could do it.”

Rather than trying to indoctrinate or corrupt children, Reyes argues, these books are personal stories which authors share to connect with readers of different backgrounds.

“It is someone putting themselves out there, which lets other people know that they aren’t alone,” they said. “These authors and these people reading the books, we’re all one big community. No matter who comes out and says what about us, we know who we are, and we know what we’re trying to do, and we have to just keep fighting for what we’re trying to do.”

Possible sanctions for the city

The consequences for rebelling against the status quo can come in the form of state budget cuts for public libraries.

“The state of Texas can’t come into our facilities and tell us what we can and cannot have,” Annello said. “They’re saying they’re going to cut funding if we have these books. We’ve stood strong, and if it’s about finding other funding to keep our libraries going instead of silencing our community and silencing the stories, that’s something that we will do.”

The stories of minorities in the city are essential, according to Annello, who said El Paso will fight for racial and LGBTQ+ tales to continue to be available for those that want representation in the shelves of their libraries and the halls of powers.

“(Those stories) shaped this country and will continue to shape this country and are extremely important stories not only for the people of El Paso but across the country,” she said. Bills like these, Annello said, are used to silence these stories and voices.

“It is important for communities like El Paso and across Texas to stand up against them.”

This story was co-published with Next City as part of our joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship For Borderland Narratives.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This story was written by Uriel J. García and photographed by Evan L’Roy.

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

UVALDE — At 7 a.m. on a Monday in February, Jessica Treviño, with squinty eyes, goes into her sons’ bedroom and in a low, raspy voice tells them to wake up. Eleven-year-old David James rolls out of bed, but 9-year-old Austin, the youngest of the four Treviño children, doesn’t move from the lower bunk bed.

The siblings get ready for school. David James grabs the car keys and starts the family’s black Ram 1500 truck for his mother.

Austin, who is still in bed covered by a blanket, tells his mother he doesn’t want to go to school.

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“I can’t leave you by yourself,” Jessica, 40, tells him, leaning over his body as their fat bulldog, Chubs, tries to jump on the bed. “You have to go to school.”

Austin doesn’t move. The night before, the sound of police sirens woke him.

“It’s ’cause there were cop sounds last night so he’s kinda scared,” David James tells his mother.

It’s not the first time one of the children won’t go to school because something spooked them. And Jessica knows it won’t be the last.

Three of the four Treviño children were students at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, and were on campus for an awards ceremony as an 18-year-old with an AR-15 rifle approached the school.

That day, Jessica picked up David James, Austin and her now 12-year-old daughter, Illiaña, from the school about 11:30 a.m.

Jessica later found out that as she was driving off, the shooter had just walked into a classroom, killing two teachers and 19 students — including Illiaña’s best friend, a 10-year-old student in room 112, who was Illiaña’s defender when other children made fun of her.

A few days after the shooting, Jessica took Illiaña, whom she calls Nana, to Uvalde’s plaza to leave a teddy bear and flowers at a memorial for her friend. Suddenly, Illiaña’s heart began to race and she had trouble breathing. Jessica took her to the local hospital, which transferred her to an intensive care unit in San Antonio. The doctor there told Jessica that Illiaña was suffering cardiac arrest and her body shut down from acute stress. She was released after a week.

“Nana was born with a heart of gold,” Jessica says. “So when it breaks, that’s how she reacted.”

Now, things like the sound of police sirens, people yelling — just about any loud sound — can be triggers for Austin and Illiaña, who have developed post-traumatic stress disorder because of the shooting.

This morning, Jessica convinces Austin to get out of bed but agrees to let him miss school. She goes to the kitchen to get Illiaña’s antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine from a lunch bag filled with prescription bottles. Then she hands Austin the pink ear protectors he uses to block out noise.

Austin says he puts them on “only when I hear the screams.”

Jessica said Austin’s therapist has told her that the kids may talk about the shooting like they were there in an unconscious attempt to empathize with the children they saw at school every day.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, much of the public’s attention has focused on the families of the children who died at Robb Elementary. Artists from San Antonio painted murals all over downtown memorializing the students and teachers who were killed. A year later, the city’s plaza is still adorned with crosses and photos of those who died.

The shooting has also caused emotional and psychological damage to a generation of Uvalde children, particularly the more than 500 students who attended Robb last spring. For the Treviño family, the shooting has reshaped their lives and influenced their children’s outlook on life. It has forced them to learn coping skills and learn how to be resilient.

Illiaña, David James and Austin barely escaped the horror their fellow students endured — hiding in their classrooms and hearing gunshots and the screams of terrified children. They each lost friends and classmates in the massacre and are dealing with that trauma in their own way.

Illiaña gets panic attacks, and David James and Austin have nightmares. Austin wets the bed at night and has accidents at school.

Illiaña and Austin are in therapy. So is the family’s oldest child, 13-year-old Ameliaña, who was in middle school last year and since the shooting has taken on the responsibility of helping to emotionally support her younger siblings. David James refuses to see a therapist.

Between 2018 and 2019, more than 100,000 American children attended a school where a shooting occurred, according to research co-authored by Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“While many students are physically unharmed, studies have consistently found consequences to their mental health, educational, and economic trajectories that last for years, and potentially decades, to come,” Rossin-Slater wrote.

Most people “don’t think about the parents who had children who survived,” says David, Jessica’s husband. “All the costs that we have to pay for because of the shooting, like therapy and other things.”

Jessica says she gave the state-funded counseling at Uvalde’s new resiliency center a try for Illiaña but didn’t like its practice of rotating staff, which meant her daughter couldn’t see the same counselor at every visit.

Jessica takes a sip from the first of four cups of coffee she will drink today and swallows a tablet for her oral chemotherapy. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in November but opted not to undergo radiation treatment because she fears it would sap the last of her energy.

“I’m doing oral chemotherapy because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to take care of them,” Jessica says, motioning toward her children. “And as you can tell, it’s a job to take care of them.”

David, 42, stays in bed. He is paralyzed from the waist down, so it’s hard for him to help with the children in the mornings.

By 7:45 a.m., Jessica gets the four children in the truck and drops them off at their new schools: Illiaña, David James and Austin attend Sacred Heart, the local private Catholic school, while Ameliaña — an angsty teenager who’s easily annoyed by her mother’s advice — goes to Uvalde Classical Academy, a private high school. The Treviños hoped their kids would be safer at private schools and that maybe Illiaña wouldn’t face bullies.

After drop-offs, Jessica returns home with Austin, where she’ll spend the day with him until it’s time to pick them up again. She quit her job cleaning vacation cabins shortly after the shooting so she could be around her children as much as possible. Now they survive on David’s disability checks and Jessica’s dwindling savings.

David says he sometimes feels helpless, knowing that he doesn’t have the tools to help his children cope with the trauma the shooting has caused.

“It’s hard for me because I’m the type of man that if there’s anything in the way of my family’s happiness, I would move it out of the way,” he says. “But after [the shooting], there’s nothing to move out of the way, there’s nothing physically that I can do. It’s all mental. So that’s what makes it really hard for me.

“It’s just really hard because I know how my children were before the shooting.”

February 21

On a Tuesday evening, Jessica takes Illiaña and Ameliaña to a park near the edge of town for softball practice. The Treviños got all of the kids into basketball or softball after the shooting to help them stay busy. As her daughters join the other girls on the team, Jessica stands nearby, holding a can of Monster Energy drink. It helps offset the chemo pills, which make her lethargic.

A coach bats fly balls to the girls. Jessica looks on and laughs when she sees Illiaña, who is twirling and dancing in place on the field, entertaining herself. Jessica says Illiaña — a sassy preteen who enjoys drawing, reading Japanese comics and listening to rock music — joined the softball team mostly to spend time with her older sister, who takes the sport more seriously and dreams of playing on the Baylor University team.

Jessica treasures moments like this, when they can all forget what happened. But it instantly makes her feel guilty for enjoying her children. So many parents in Uvalde lost their children last year.

“It breaks my heart that I have mine and they don’t,” Jessica says. “The guilt eats me up.

“I just feel so blessed to still have them with me.”

In the first weeks after the shooting, Jessica gave media interviews explaining that while her children weren’t physically harmed, the tragedy affected their entire family’s mental health. She opened a GoFundMe account to help with their medical and therapy costs.

Most people were supportive, she said, but some strangers sent ugly messages, telling Jessica that her children don’t deserve help because they shouldn’t be considered survivors.

One person wrote: “Why is Illiaña getting help if she’s not one of the survivors?”

Later in the evening, Jessica gets a call from Ameliaña’s best friend’s mother, who tells Jessica that her daughter has troubling screenshots of a private chat group. A teenager in the group told the other participants that he hated Ameliaña and threatened to hurt Ameliaña’s father.

This worries Jessica enough that she goes to the police station to file a report, worried the boy may follow through on his threats.

Before May 24, Jessica says, she would have dismissed the incident.

“Before, I’d be like, ‘Déjalo,’” — let it go — “‘they’re just kids talking shit,’” she says. “But now you can’t second-guess yourself. Now that we know what could happen, now that we know kids have access to guns.”

February 23

After dropping the kids off at school on Thursday, Jessica drives an hour and a half to San Antonio for a follow-up appointment with her cancer doctor. The MRI results show she has another nickel-sized tumor, but the other tumors have shrunk. The doctor says she can continue with oral chemotherapy but eventually she will have to go through radiation.

Jessica plans to push that off for as long as she can.

“My biggest priority right now is to keep Nana safe at school and deal with the bullying,” Jessica says. “I usually put what the kids need first before anything else.”

The cancer isn’t her only worry: Before her diagnosis in November, Jessica developed desmoid tumors in her left leg — they aren’t cancerous, but they cause her constant discomfort.

“I’m in a lot of pain,” she says, rubbing her thigh as she picks up the boys’ clothes from the living room floor after returning from San Antonio. “Usually, it’s at night that I deal with a lot of pain, but I think it’s because it’s been hectic lately.”

Doctors have told her that surgery is an option, but there’s a risk the tumors will grow back. The pain gets so bad that Jessica says she’s thought about amputating her legs.

“My doctor said, ‘I’m game if you’re game.’ But we think about the kids a lot,” Jessica says, standing over a pile of laundry before she goes back into the kitchen to season chicken for dinner.

* * *

Having both parents in wheelchairs isn’t an option. David does what he can to help Jessica, but in his mind it’s not enough.

“I’ve always worked, that’s how I was built,” he said on a recent afternoon as he watered his lawn outside of their four-bedroom home on a quiet street shaded by large trees. “Sometimes I want to go to work but I can’t.”

As a boy, he earned money collecting lost golf balls at the local country club. As an adult, he worked in the oil fields, operated heavy machinery and then became a truck driver. In November 2019, he was driving an 18-wheeler on a rainy day and lost control. The rig rolled and threw him out of the cab. He survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Still, he helps around the house. He cooks, he plays basketball with the boys, he coaches Austin’s football team and he drives the kids to practice — he plays softball in a wheelchair league and connects with his children through sports. At his daughters’ softball games, he’s among the loudest parents.

Jessica and David met at a dance in 2008, two years after she had moved to Uvalde from her hometown of Houston. They started dating and nearly two years later Jessica was pregnant with Ameliaña. They got married in July 2011.

Since the shooting, Jessica says she wants to move out of Uvalde. She wants her children to grow up somewhere far from reminders of the shooting.

“I want my kids to get better, but how can I do that if they’re in the same spot?” she says.

David says he doesn’t want to move — he was born here and loves Uvalde too much. He says he wants his children to grow up with the same positive experiences he had.

Despite what happened at Robb, David still feels like Uvalde is a safe town — as safe as anywhere else anyway. He can go to El Herradero de Jalisco, a town watering hole, for Mexican food and see the same people there every time.

“I don’t have to worry about who’s around me and my kids,” he says.

March 21

It’s a sunny afternoon in March, and Austin is in the backyard hitting softballs off a tee into a net. He says he stayed home from school this morning because he had a hard time falling asleep the night before and woke up with a fever. Jessica gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him stay home.

Nearly every day since the shooting, Jessica has to convince Austin or Illiaña to go to school, and they miss school at least once a week. Sometimes Jessica gets a call to pick them up before the school day is done because Illiaña has a panic attack or Austin’s anxiety gets too intense.

Austin admits that he wasn’t really sick this morning: “I had a bad thought last night that I was going to be in a mental hospital,” he says, picking up a softball and setting it on the tee. He spends the next half hour methodically hitting balls, working on his swing.

“One more for the fans,” he says, pretending he’s in a real game. He swings but barely chips the ball, which dribbles off the tee.

“The fans deserve better,” he says, grabbing the ball. He swings again, this time hitting the ball squarely. It soars in the air before hitting a tree in the backyard.

“Yeah!” Austin yells, dropping the bat and running inside the house.

Illiaña emerges to take her own batting practice. Jessica wanders out to the backyard to watch as her daughter gathers the neon-colored softballs, puts them in a bucket and places one on top of the tee. One by one, she hits the balls into the net.

A few hours earlier, Jessica had rushed to Sacred Heart with hydroxyzine, used to treat anxiety, after the school called to tell her Illiaña was biting her fingertips and hyperventilating. Jessica decided to bring her daughter home. After the shooting, a doctor diagnosed Illiaña with post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder.

Jessica watches as Illiaña practices, wondering why her daughter continues having panic attacks and whether they’re going to increase as May 24 approaches.

“I don’t know if it’s the anniversary coming,” Jessica says.

She’s noticed that on the 24th of any month, Illiaña and Austin get more anxious and Illiaña’s panic attacks are more frequent. And just a mention of Illiaña’s best friend can trigger a panic attack.

Before the shooting, Illiaña was targeted for constant bullying by her classmates. Her friend was always there to confront the bullies. Now she’s gone, and Illiaña is dealing with a new set of bullies at her new school.

“Nana gets teased a lot about her height and weight,” Jessica says later as she fries corn tortillas in oil on the stove while Ameliaña does homework at the kitchen table. “I have to keep reassuring her there’s nothing wrong with her, that it’s OK to be different.

“It hurts me to see her crying because she doesn’t feel like she’s good enough to be someone’s friend,” Jessica adds. “And it’s just me to reassure them.”

March 22

Most days are unpredictable in the Treviño house. Jessica and David try to maintain a routine for their children, but anxiety and panic attacks force them to improvise.

At about 11:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, Jessica packs sandwiches in a red lunch bag with Ameliaña’s name on it, then drops the bag off at school and returns home to help her husband get dressed and in his wheelchair.

Half an hour later, a staffer at Sacred Heart leaves Jessica a voicemail, asking if she wants to bring Illiaña’s medication or pick her up — she’s having another panic attack. Jessica rushes to the school.

“This is always the worst part,” Jessica says on the way to the school. “I don’t know what I’m walking into, like does she just not feel well, or is she having a panic attack?”

Jessica goes into the school and emerges a few minutes later holding the 12-year-old’s hand. They get into the car and Illiaña says her stomach and lower back were hurting.

“Something was going through my head,” she tells Jessica.

“What did your counselor say you do when that happens?” Jessica says. “To think of something else and breathe.”

“But I couldn’t,” Illiaña says.

“What did you dream about last night?” Jessica asks Illiaña.

“About being at Robb and everyone was there and the kids screaming and yelling.”

When they arrive home, David is in front of the house, smoking a cigarette.

“Are you all right?” he asks Illiaña.

“My back was hurting,” she tells him.

Inside the house, Jessica gives Illiaña a pill, which she swallows with a drink of water.

* * *

An hour after Illiaña gets home, Jessica receives another message from Sacred Heart, asking her to bring a set of clean clothes for Austin, who had an accident at school. She grabs a pair of red shorts, a T-shirt and Huggies wet wipes.

“It’s one of those days, David,” she says.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

On the drive, Jessica says she’s going to take Austin home.

“As a parent, you’re never ready for stuff like this. We tackle it because we’re moms but deep down it tears you up inside,” she says.

She says she and David have tried to understand what their 9-year-old is going through. They have repeatedly asked him what’s wrong.

“When it first happened, Austin told me, ‘That guy got me all screwed up in the head,’” Jessica says, referring to the shooter.

“ ‘You can’t let him win,’ I told him,” Jessica says.

She goes into the school again and comes back out with Austin. On the way home, they stop at a convenience store, where she buys him some chicken tenders and a bottle of Coke. When they arrive home, Austin showers and emerges in clean clothes.

He grabs his Coke and goes into the backyard, where he lines up the bottle cap on the edge of a handrail and opens the bottle with a quick smack of his hand. The Coke fizzes out and he immediately begins to drink it before it spills.

He says last night he heard loud bangs outside his home and the noise kept him up and made him anxious. In class, he kept thinking about what those sounds could be. He says he decided not to tell his teacher what was going through his mind that caused him to have an accident.

Chubs, Austin’s brown and white bulldog, starts reaching for Austin’s food. The boy wraps his arms around the dog.

“He protects me from dangerous people,” Austin says.

* * *

After Jessica picks up Ameliaña and David James from school, she tells the girls to get ready because it’s picture day for the softball team.

Illiaña sits in her bedroom and begins to cry. Jessica goes into her room, strokes her hair and asks her what’s wrong. She tells her mom she doesn’t want to take pictures.

Jessica asks her why.

“They’re going to make fun of me,” Illiaña says.

Austin goes inside the bedroom and asks his sister what’s wrong. Illiaña, irritated, yells: “Get out of my room, close the door.”

Jessica leaves Illiaña’s room and begins to curl Ameliaña’s hair as the teenager sits on a chair in a living room, watching a video on her cellphone.

“It just hurts to see her like that,” Jessica says, passing a curling iron through Ameliaña’s hair. “She is just having a shitty day all around.”

When Illiaña finally emerges from her room and sees her sister ready for pictures, she decides to go after all.

March 24

Like most Fridays, David is grilling dinner for the family. The house is full of people: Their neighbors are here along with two of David’s cousins, Oscar Treviño and Ida Velasquez, who brings her 8-year-old daughter to play with the Treviño children.

The smell of boiling beans fills the kitchen. Outside, smoke pours from the grill and Mexican corridos play on a Bluetooth speaker as Austin and David James play basketball in the street, teaching Velasquez’s daughter how to shoot.

Illiaña stays in her room and begins to cry. Jessica grabs a bottle of pills and rushes into her daughter’s bedroom along with Velasquez.

“You’re OK,” they tell her.

“No, I’m not,” Illiaña snaps back.

Jessica calls for Ameliaña, who tries to get her younger sister to start a breathing exercise.

“I can’t,” Illiaña says.

Velasquez tries to rub Illiaña’s back to console her, but Illiaña doesn’t want to be touched.

“Let go! Let go! Let go!” Illiaña screams. “Stop touching me.”

Jessica tries to convince Illiaña again to do a breathing exercise. Illiaña buries her face into a plush bear and muffles, “I’m sorry.”

Illiaña then starts to bite her fingertips. Ameliaña rushes out of the room to get Steve, her favorite kitten from the litter that the family cat gave birth to recently. Ameliaña passes the kitten to Illiaña and after about 15 minutes, Illiaña calms down.

Everyone leaves the room. Illiaña stays in bed, caressing Steve.

In the kitchen, Velasquez wants to cry, too. It hurts her to see her niece struggling. Jessica tells her to hold it together. If Illiaña hears or sees her crying, she may break down again.

“You have to be mentally strong to go through this, because look what time it is,” Jessica tells Velasquez. “It’s not like you can take the kids anywhere right now for help.”

After dinner, Illiaña finally emerges from the house, walks to her aunt and hugs her without saying a word.

“You OK, mija?” Velasquez asks her. Illiaña nods her head.

It’s past midnight before the house is finally quiet again. Jessica walks to the back porch and lights up a Marlboro, staring off into the night. She leans against the porch railing, arms crossed.

“I come out here to think: ‘What can I do better the next day?’” she says, then stubs out the cigarette and flicks the butt into the yard.

March 25

The next day is Saturday, and like most weekends, the Treviños try to spend time away from the house as a family.

They pile into the pickup and drive to Del Rio, pulling up to a house where a group of men dressed in boots, denim jeans and black leather vests with the Bad Company motorcycle club logo are waiting with their Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

The bikers greet the Treviño children warmly.

The motorcycle group is made up of military veterans who routinely participate in public events to help raise awareness about mental health issues. Last summer, shortly after the shooting, the club came to Uvalde to take part in a community event for children affected by the shooting and met the Treviño children.

As part of the event, Austin also got to smash a pie in club member Albert Treviño’s face. Since then, Albert — who served four years in the Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, and was diagnosed with PTSD in 2016 — has stayed in touch with Austin and his family. Albert, 33, said he and Austin got along right away because of the boy’s charismatic personality.

He said he appreciates the Treviños doing everything they can to provide a support system for their children, even with their limited resources. He said his brother, who did two tours in Afghanistan with the Army, took his own life after struggling with PTSD, so Albert wants to give the Treviño children another adult to turn to for help.

“Growing up in a Latino family, mental health is kind of like a joke,” he said. “They say stuff like, ‘No, pobrecito, esta menso’” — No, poor him, he’s just dumb.

The bikers help Illiaña, David James and Austin put on helmets. The children sit behind the men, who rev the Harleys’ engines before they take off on rides around the city.

Alexander “Tripp” Arneson, a club member, said that veterans diagnosed with PTSD use motorcycle riding as a form of therapy.

“Riding the bike, you feel the cold wind hit your arms and just feel the speed of the bike,” he says. The club, he adds, wants to help the children create happy memories and have something positive to think about when they’re feeling anxious.

“They shouldn’t go through with what they experienced,” he says. “So whenever they’re feeling bad, this helps them remind them that there are people who care for them.”

When the rides are done, the family decides to go to Blue Hole Park, a popular local swimming spot.

The children excitedly run to a bridge over a broad stretch of San Felipe Creek and jump into the water.

David waits in the truck, out of the sun, while Jessica sits in a lawn chair nearby, wearing a hat and sunglasses, and watches her kids frolicking in the water. She wonders out loud: “Do you think the world still thinks of these kids?”

“Not really,” Illiaña chimes in as she emerges from the water, dripping wet in her basketball shorts.

“So you think they’re just like, ‘Whatever’ now?” Jessica asks.

“Yeah, there are other things that are happening in the world,” Illiaña responds before diving into the creek again. A teenage boy asks Ameliaña for her number. Austin chases him off with a Nerf water gun. “Get away from my sister,” he says.

Jessica smiles.

“At least they get to be kids here and be worry-free,” she says. For a little while, everyone is happy, and the day that a teenager walked into a school with a rifle and changed their lives feels far away. That’s what Jessica and David want for their children — to be able to forget and just be normal kids again.

“I don’t want them remembered as Robb kids,” Jessica says. “I want them remembered as good kids.”

May 20

It’s four days before the one-year mark of the Robb Elementary shooting. The Treviños have decided they don’t want to be in Uvalde for it. So they’ve rented an Airbnb in Del Rio for a week.

The children are excited to go. “It’s a lot of fun over there,” David James says.

“I think the kids need a break from everything going on here,” Jessica says. “It’s just not good for them, it’s not good for their mental health.

“Maybe next year will be different.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Some parents’ public comments against diversity and inclusion initiatives likely led to “increased fears and possibly harassment” of students, and the district’s efforts to reduce any harm were insufficient, according to findings from the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

The resolution required the Atlanta-area Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process, but concluded it did not violate federal discrimination and harassment laws when Superintendent Jeff Bearden directed staff to remove eight books last year for material it deemed sexually explicit.

Some anti-censorship advocates welcomed the department’s involvement.

“This is the most volatile time in history of book censorship,” said Pat Scales, a retired school librarian and former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “I hope that the [Office for Civil Rights] will look into more cases.”

That’s what Democrats in the House requested earlier this year when they asked the department to investigate whether restrictions on books and curriculum violate the law. The Georgia action — which a department spokesperson confirmed was the first time its civil rights division issued findings on book removals — could inform how other districts handle future challenges. But the spokesperson added that “neither the investigation nor the resolution agreement directs, supervises or controls curriculum.”

Democrats recently criticized the GOP-led Parents Bill of Rights, which they say will lead to more book bans. Republicans intend the measure to increase transparency into curriculum and reading materials.

The department’s resolution comes as Republicans continue to push restrictions on students’ access to library materials. The Louisiana Senate last week passed a bill that would allow parents to block their children from checking out books they considered inappropriate. And under a law that takes effect Aug. 1, librarians and educators in Arkansas could face criminal charges if they distribute texts labeled “obscene.”

Last week in Florida, nonprofit PEN America, publisher Random House, five authors whose books have been removed and two parents sued the Escambia County School District and board for withdrawing controversial books even when experts in the district advised against it. 

The district is “depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints, and depriving the authors … of the opportunity to engage with readers and disseminate their ideas to their intended audiences,” according to the complaint. 

Beyond its investigation into the 54,000-student Forsyth district, the department began looking into the Granbury Independent School District in Texas last December. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint calling the district’s removal of books with LGBTQ themes sex discrimination under Title IX. That investigation is ongoing.

In Forsyth, parents complained about books that included John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” a story of a boy at an Alabama boarding school that has a sex scene, and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up gay and Black by journalist George Johnson, one of the plaintiffs in the Florida lawsuit. The books, which were not required reading for any class, are young adult titles considered suitable for teens 14 and up.

The district removed eight books. In early August last year, the district’s media committee decided to return seven of them after reviewers considered a series of questions such as whether the books had a “high degree of potential user appeal and interest” and “promoted diversity.” Johnson’s book was the only one not returned to the shelves.

But leaders did not take “steps to address with students the impact of the book removals,” according to the department’s investigation. As part of the resolution, the district must survey middle and high school students next fall to ask about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Forsyth spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo said the district would implement the resolution and was “committed to providing a safe, connected, and thriving community” for students and families.

One Forsyth County student said a book ban focusing on LGBTQ and non-white characters “contradicts the idea of democracy.”

“Despite the claims that these bans are not based [on] discrimination, they have a ripple effect,” said Isabella Rappaccioli, who will be a sophomore at Forsyth’s Alliance Academy for Innovation this fall. She’s also a member of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, which campaigned against Georgia’s law restricting classroom discussions of divisive concepts. s.

“Challenges like these … vicariously send a message to our young people that they are different from their peers,” she said. “No child deserves to feel that way.”

But Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, called the resolution “federal overreach.”

“The agency’s analysis seems to have come down to this: Some students reported feeling that the school climate was hostile to their group, therefore it was,” he said. “But issues like this are much more complicated, including whether others felt keeping the books in libraries was hostile to them.” 

The department’s investigation is not the first time the district became embroiled in controversy over a decision to remove books some parents find inappropriate. Under a federal court settlement in January with parents who complained about several books, the district must allow the reading of explicit excerpts at school board meetings.

Mama Bears, a conservative parents group that advocates for book restrictions, sued the district last year when the board refused to allow parents to recite passages with profanity or sexually explicit language during public comments. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story sided with the parents. In a settlement, the district paid $107,500 in legal fees and agreed not to prohibit parents from quoting from any book in the district’s school libraries or classrooms. 

“It’s their First Amendment right to be able to give their opinions like anybody else,” said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which defended the parents. 

The nonprofit didn’t take a position on whether the books removed were unsuitable for students, and he said he would defend liberal parents if they were silenced for arguing in favor of such books. But he added that if districts are removing books because of political pressure, “that raises First Amendment red flags all over the place.”

Legal precedent on the issue dates back to 1982. The U.S Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York violated the Constitution when it removed books that some parents deemed to be “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.”

‘True education’

In Granbury, Superintendent Jeremy Glenn’s comments — such as there being “no place” for books with transgender characters in school libraries and that “there are two genders” — sparked the district’s review of books. Ultimately two of the three titles removed contained LGBTQ topics, including “This Book is Gay,” a nonfiction bestseller for youth coming out as gay, lesbian or transgender.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas filed a complaint arguing that removing books with LGBTQ themes amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX.

Scales, the retired librarian, said schools discriminate against students when they remove such books.

“Books help readers develop empathy,” she said. “Let’s give them the books and hope that this younger generation will see things differently than the folks who are trying to shut down true education.”

Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that he would veto a toned-down version of a bill to offer school vouchers in Texas and threatened to call legislators back for special sessions if they don’t “expand the scope of school choice” this month.

“Parents and their children deserve no less,” he said in a statement. His dramatic declaration came the night before the House Public Education Committee was scheduled to hold a public hearing on Senate Bill 8, the school voucher bill. That measure passed the Senate more than a month ago but has so far been stalled in lower chamber as it lacks sufficient support.

The committee is set to vote Monday on the latest version of SB 8, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, which would significantly roll back voucher eligibility to only students with disabilities or those who attended an F-rated campus. This would mean that fewer than a million students would be eligible to enter the program.

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Abbott doesn’t believe the revised version does enough to provide the state with a meaningful “school choice” program. Since the start of the legislative session, Abbott has signaled his support for earlier proposals that would be open to most students. The governor also said he has had complaints over the new funding for the bill, saying it gives less money to special education students. It also doesn’t give priority to low-income families, who “may desperately need expanded education options for their children,” he said.

The centerpiece of the original Senate bill was education savings accounts, which work like vouchers and direct state funds to help Texas families pay for private schooling.

The version approved by the Senate would be open to most K-12 students in Texas and would give parents who opt out of the public school system up to $8,000 in taxpayer money per student each year. Those funds could be used to pay for a child’s private schooling and other educational expenses, such as textbooks or tutoring. But that idea has faced an uphill climb in the House, where lawmakers signaled their support last month for banning school vouchers in the state.

Last week, state Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, chair of the House Public Education Committee, prepared a version of the bill in which children would be eligible only if they have a disability, are “educationally disadvantaged” — meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch — or attend a campus that received a grade of D or lower in its accountability rating in the last two school years. A child would also be eligible if they have a sibling in the program.

About 60% of Texas’s 5.5 million students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and kids in special education programs account for 12% of the total student population. Last year, about 7% of all school campuses graded received a D or lower but were labeled “not rated” because of coronavirus interruptions.

But even that proposal seemed to hit a brick wall in the House. Last week, the chamber denied Buckley’s request to meet in order to vote the new version of the bill out of committee, signaling that there was still deep skepticism.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Darek Perez knows the benefits of a good night’s sleep. The freshman psychology major at the University of Texas at El Paso researched the topic and presented the results during his “Introduction to Psychology” course last fall, but knowing the benefits of sleep and doing are two different things.

Perez was among a handful of UTEP undergraduates who said they went to bed around midnight only to wake up five, six or seven hours later to start their day. Most admitted to feeling drowsy and unfocused at some point in the afternoon. A cup of coffee or a nap often helped them get through the day.

College students often take pride in their ability to overextend themselves to accommodate their academics, outside jobs, personal responsibilities and time with friends, but researchers have found that burning the candle at both ends eventually will lead to burnout or worse. Common symptoms of sleep deprivation include fatigue, depression, anxiety and irritability. Severe symptoms could include hallucinations and impaired judgment.

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The National Sleep Foundation (NSF), the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the Sleep Research Society recommend that college students get seven to nine hours of sleep. Studies have shown that college students average about seven hours of sleep, but about 60% of them have poor quality sleep. That means they wake up tired and feel sleepy during the day.

“I know what I need to do, but I have not progressed to the point of putting more sleep into my schedule,” said Perez, who balances a full class schedule with an on-campus job. “I’m too busy.”

Students such as Perez are the reason that UTEP’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) developed several workshops that focus on how students can prepare for a restful sleep, and the many benefits of sleep. CAPS generally offers these programs once per semester, but it also makes these presentations at the request of faculty and departments with student workers, said Brian Sneed, CAPS director and a staff psychologist.

As college students prepare for their finals in early May, many of them will be stressed, and sleep deprived as they cram for exams. Sneed said the better suggestion to succeed academically around finals – and throughout the semester – is to get a good night’s sleep.

One of the more popular CAPS programs on this topic is “The ABC’s of Z’s,” where counselors emphasize the importance of having a routine before bedtime to train the body for sleep. He also recommends students refrain from caffeinated drinks later in the day and create a cooler sleeping environment.

Sneed said his counselors work with many students with newfound independence who have developed bad habits that hinder their ability to sleep well. He said that some students have mental battles between their priorities of academics and socializing and the workshops help students to refocus.

“A consistent eight hours of sleep is going to maximize your learning potential,” Sneed said during an interview in his CAPS office on the second floor of Union Building West. “Some people don’t prioritize that.”

The psychologist said science has shown that trying to catch up on sleep during weekends and late-night cram sessions before a test do not work. He said lack of sleep disrupts the ability for people to file short-term information in their long-term memory.

“If you don’t get enough sleep, it’s as if you’re crumpling (information) up and throwing it in a filing cabinet and then hoping at some point you can pull the right one out during the test,” Sneed said.

The NSF reported that a person taking a final exam after pulling an all-night study session has the same effect as taking a test with a blood alcohol level of 0.05%.

Researchers recently published the results of a sleep study of first-year college students at three different institutions. The findings in “Nightly sleep duration predicts grade point average in the first year of college,” in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) included that every lost hour of nightly sleep equated to a 0.07 drop in end-of-term GPA.

Dana Garcia, a freshman microbiology major, said that she usually goes to bed at midnight and wakes up seven hours later. Her pre-sleep routine is to brush her teeth, take a natural sleep supplement, and do a final check of her phone or laptop computer.

She said she gets tired by late afternoon, and usually rests after she returns to her Horizon City home.

“If I don’t get my seven hours of sleep, I have trouble waking up,” Garcia said. “It affects my school day.”

At workshops, CAPS representatives suggest self-awareness techniques that students can use to relieve stress, relax mind and body, and take care of the real issues that affect them as they prepare for sleep.

Sneed said one method is to combine thought and touch. Students use their thumb to touch their fingertips one at a time and contemplate a positive thought for each finger such as a good thing that happened that day, something that made them feel good that day, a happy memory, and something that makes them proud of themselves. This technique moves the mind from a stressful place of deadlines and assignments to a more positive plane.

Sleep is not an issue for Christian Sierra, a senior mechanical engineering major. He said he usually goes to bed at midnight and wakes up six hours later. He said that he drinks a cup of coffee in the afternoon to get through his classes.

“I stay up late because that’s when I can get things done,” Sierra said.

Before bed, he takes a shower, brushes his teeth and turns on his desk fan, which cools his room and produces a soft hum.

“If it’s too quiet or too warm, I know I forgot to turn on my fan,” Sierra said.

In serious cases of sleep deficiency, counselors work with students to learn if problems such as insomnia are brought on by stress, anxiety and depression, or vice versa, to offer the right treatment. Chronic sleep deprivation could build into psychosis, a mental disorder where the mind disconnects from reality.

If students come to CAPS with sleep-related issues, counselors initially will suggest the students rule out physical or biological issues. If the problem persists, CAPS will try to address it because they understand the value of sleep.

As Thomas Roth, former editor-in-chief of the journal Sleep, said, “Sleep is an investment in the energy you need to be effective tomorrow.”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a possible recession and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.

The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to temporarily salve the loss of funds tied to falling enrollment and delay cuts to staff and programs. Those funds dry up in 17 months. As budget deficits grow and housing costs drive families out of urban areas, education leaders are staring down a host of unpalatable options, from closing half-empty buildings to laying off staff.

“I’m not a pro-school closure guy. That’s the worst part of school reform,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant and a former Denver Public Schools official. “But if anyone was holding out hope for a bounce back, we have put that to rest.”

The Parkrose School District, outside Portland, Oregon, is one of many grappling with a budget shortfall.

“We have some decisions to make in the next few months,” said Sonja McKenzie, a board member in the district, where enrollment has fallen 12% since 2018. Now leaders might have to slash positions for special education assistants. Talk of layoffs is also surfacing in California, Washington and Wisconsin.

McKenzie went door-to-door last fall asking voters to approve a tax levy to fund 22 positions, reminding them that the district, where nearly 30% of students are Hispanic, heeded their call to hire bilingual family liaisons. Voters rejected the measure.

Some families, she said, have been “priced out” of the area, heading east to Gresham or across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington, where they can find more affordable housing. Those areas, McKenzie said, have “benefited from our challenges.” 

Desperation and aspiration

The 74’s enrollment analysis is based on figures from 41 states provided exclusively by Burbio, a data company, and additional data from the nation’s 20 largest school systems.

Since last year, enrollment has declined 2.5% in Chicago, 2.4% in Houston and 2% in Nevada’s Clark County, while New York and Los Angeles saw drops of just under 2%. The Hillsborough County district in Florida, which includes Tampa, and the Gwinnett County School District, near Atlanta, are the only two large districts where enrollment now exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

Large district enrollment trends from 2018-19 to 2022-23

The graphic below shows enrollment trends for the nation’s 20 largest school districts. Divided by region, the breakdowns include changes in overall enrollment as well as in kindergarten. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

In California, which has seen a whopping 5% drop in its student population since 2020, the enrollment decline has slowed, according to statewide data. But the downward slope in birth rates and exodus of parents from high-priced areas has left district and charter leaders with limited options.

Summit Public Schools in California’s Bay Area — a well-established charter network that spawned an online learning platform still used by 300 schools nationwide — will shutter one of its campuses at the end of this school year. 

Following a community sit-in and hunger strike in Oakland, the local school board decided in January not to close several schools. Now, amid an ongoing teacher’s strike, the board is reconsidering whether to merge some schools because of enrollment decline.

“There is always this quality and convenience tension,” said Lakisha Young, CEO of Oakland Reach, a parent advocacy organization. “Everyone wants a school in their neighborhood that they can walk their kids to.”

But she called the emotional debate over closing schools a distraction from more important issues — namely that a majority of students aren’t reading on grade level. A third of families in the city don’t choose district schools, and some have moved further inland to Antioch or southeast to the Central Valley. 

“If people have the opportunity to move to other places that are slower and quieter and safer, they are going to do that,” she said. “These decisions are not just made out of desperation, they are also out of aspiration.”

‘You just come here’

Some of those same aspirations are fueling a Republican push to give unhappy parents more options. Twelve states now offer education savings accounts, which allow families to use public funds to pay the costs of private school or homeschooling. Despite pushback from critics who argue such programs take funding away from public schools and lack accountability, similar legislation has been introduced in several more states, including Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina.

“This pandemic was the perfect incubation event that really caused homeschooling to thrive,” said Bob Templeton, another enrollment consultant with Zonda, a housing market research company. “We’re seeing this dramatic change in how we educate kids.”

In Texas, where the legislature is currently battling over an ESA bill, existing options like charters and homeschooling have contributed to a decline in what Templeton calls the “capture rate” — the percentage of children from a particular community attending their local public school. 

“If they’re down 200 kids in kindergarten and it doesn’t return, then in five to seven years, that district is going to be down several thousand kids,” Templeton said. “You need to get ready to close schools.”

Statewide enrollment shifts since 2021-22

*Click the circle next to state to see districts with the greatest enrollment gain, greatest enrollment loss and % change for state’s largest district. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

He consults for districts surrounding some of the state’s large urban systems and used to be able to reliably calculate that 100 new homes would result in 50 more students. Not anymore. 

He also monitors transfers between districts. One school system he works with, Pflugerville, near Austin, took in 584 students from other systems this year. But almost 5,400 transferred out to both charters and other districts. Leaders have put off closing schools for now, which Templeton said just “kicks the can down the road.” 

He and Eschbacher advise districts to stay competitive by designing school models that parents want. In some cases, that’s paying off. 

The San Antonio Independent School District has had success with a 2017 state law that provides incentives to partner with charters and nonprofit organizations to run schools. 

Rebecca McMains decided to enroll her daughter in one of them, Lamar Elementary, after considering close to 10 public, private and charter schools in the area. Because her daughter has disabilities and an “elaborate” special education plan, the choice wasn’t easy.

“I knew I was going to be heard at Lamar. They are very parent-focused,” said McMains. She said staff members respond to her texts and don’t push back when she has a request, like having a nurse accompany her daughter on a field trip to NASA. “I’m now being thanked for my advocacy.”

But some parents have found their local public schools loath to accommodate the needs of those they are used to seeing as a captive audience.

Jana Wilcox Lavin, a Las Vegas mom, runs Opportunity 180, a nonprofit that supports school choice and formerly led a statewide district that converted low-performing schools into charters. Nonetheless, she was willing to consider her Clark County neighborhood school for her daughter, who starts kindergarten in 2024.

When she called the local school to ask for a tour, officials turned her down, citing concerns about student privacy. She turned to a district administrator, who said she could visit the building but not observe classrooms. Spokesman Tod Story said that while no policy prohibits parents from visiting schools, officials “err on the side of caution to protect our students.”

 Lavin said she just wanted to make a well-informed choice.

“When I asked how I should assess if the zoned school was a good fit,” she said, “I was told, ‘We are your neighborhood school. You just come here.’ ”

An ‘absolute asteroid’ 

That’s less true than ever before. The options available to families have expanded so rapidly that researchers are struggling to keep up.

Counts of how many students are homeschooled are estimates at best and private school enrollment figures can be a year or two behind. That’s one reason Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who tracks enrollment trends, was unable to account for more than a third of students who left public schools. 

That uncertainty makes it hard to tell whether the American school system is experiencing temporary chaos or a more permanent sea change.

Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the pandemic an “absolute asteroid” of a disruptive event. Still, he doesn’t expect ESAs or other emerging models to cause as much damage to the public education system as some critics predict.

“It’s hard to overestimate the incumbent’s strength,” he said.

That’s the case in Florida, where enrollment grew 1.3% this year and the Hillsborough district expects to keep building schools for years to come to accommodate growth. 

In states with declining numbers, like Oregon, district leaders are more wary. School choice advocates hope to get an ESA initiative on the ballot next year, but McKenzie, the Parkrose board member, is concerned such a program would hobble district schools that are already strapped for cash.

“I can understand a parent may feel like they have a better option,” she said.“But it creates a divisive system of who has the resources and who doesn’t. Less resources for the classroom impacts the whole community.”

But despite initial momentum, three now-familiar letters stopped the bill in its tracks: C-R-T.

A mostly unknown conservative scholar writing in the National Review that month claimed the bill would “allow the Biden administration to push Critical Race Theory (CRT) on every public school in the country,” calling the Republican co-sponsors “naive” victims of a hidden leftist agenda. Critical race theory, which posits that racism permeates American institutions, has become right-wing shorthand for any classroom discussion of race.

Cornyn, who proposed the legislation and is the former GOP majority whip, dismissed the allegations, writing on Twitter that “the false, hysterical claims are untrue and worthy of a Russian active measures campaign, not a serious discussion of our bill.”

But truthful or not, the criticisms spread like wildfire. The National Review op-ed racked up thousands of interactions on social media and, within 24 hours, 1776 Action and America First Policy Institute, groups that support what’s known as “patriotic education,” had published dire reports pulling directly from the article. 

Then, just days later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mimicked the message, stating in a press release the $1 billion federal civics bill would “award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like Critical Race Theory.”

Soon after, far-right Breitbart News ran an article whose headline pulled word-for-word from the National Review editorial and targeted Cornyn as the bill’s key backer. High-profile commentators took to social media urging their followers to call their lawmakers opposing what they described as “Trojan horse garbage” sponsored by RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only.

The senators’ “Civics Secures Democracy Act” went no further.

How did this firestorm start and who wrote the op-ed that lit the match?

The story begins years prior and revolves around Stanley Kurtz, a little-noticed power player shaping the right’s recent offensives in the education culture wars.

An enemy of ‘action civics’

Though his writings are regularly shared by GOP heavy hitters including Fox News analysts, groups like Parents Defending Education and sitting U.S. senators, Kurtz has flown mostly under the radar.

“Nobody’s talking about his role at all,” said Jeremy Young, a senior manager for the free expression advocacy group, PEN America.

Kurtz, a 69-year-old former university instructor and longtime conservative commentator, has spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls “woke civics.”

“He certainly has a fairly large megaphone among conservatives,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

In Young’s estimation, only two figures have had a wider national influence on anti-CRT legislation than Kurtz: Christopher Rufo, the man who brought the lightning-rod term into the right’s vernacular, and Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, who has fought to add teeth to the bills. 

But Kurtz has made his mark in a niche way. 

He “goes after specific things like civics education that are not as central for some of the other [figures],” Young said.

At least eight bills proposed in five states have pulled from Kurtz’s 2021 “Partisanship Out of Civics” model legislation, according to a PEN America report, making the scholar one of the key thought leaders driving the recent surge in classroom censorship bills. And his advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers.

At the core of Kurtz’s activism is a central idea: That hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to “school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions.”

The scholar, who draws a roughly $172,000 yearly salary from a think tank and lists an apartment address in Washington D.C.’s affluent Forest Hills neighborhood in tax records, declined a phone interview, saying he “prefer[s] to comment by email.” In written messages, he explained he believes hands-on civics projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.”

“Any sort of political protest or lobbying done by students is subject to undue pressure from the biases of teachers, peers and non-profits working with schools. Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said.

Kurtz’s arguments amount to a fabricated “boogeyman,” said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor. 

Nonetheless, the idea that “frothing-at-the-mouth Democratic teachers [could] create little warrior bands of students to go out and fight their political wars for them” has become a captivating concern for some on the right, Black said, largely thanks to Kurtz.

It’s a worry that traces back to 2017 when the National Association of Scholars’s David Randall, who told The 74 he’s a “personal friend” of Kurtz’s, published a report warning of the proliferation of a “New Civics” that teaches students “a good citizen is a radical activist.”

At issue for Kurtz was a type of programming known as “action civics” popularized by the nonprofit Generation Citizen. In the approach, celebrated by several academic researchers, students learn to navigate local government by picking an issue they care about, studying it and presenting their findings to officials. 

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

The 74 reviewed over three dozen student projects from Texas and found that the vast majority dealt with apolitical local issues, such as reducing texting while driving in school zones. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin did lean left, such as on gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

McCluskey, at the Cato Institute, has documented over 3,400 ideological “battles” in public schooling for more than a decade and said he has yet to see “compelling evidence” that liberal bias in civics classes has become a widespread problem. A 74 review of McCluskey’s tracker revealed that only a handful of incidents concerned civics.

Accurate or not, Kurtz’s depiction of “woke civics” is now being felt in America’s classrooms. 

A bill with ‘wonderful’ uptake

When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for “lobbying” or “advocacy” at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced. The response was thanks, in part, to impeccable timing: Kurtz published just a few months before policies to restrict lessons related to race and gender began to crop up in dozens of state legislatures nationwide.

The Manhattan Institute, where Rufo now works, included the bill’s anti-lobbying provisions in its own model bill that author James Copland said he presented at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, an annual forum to swap right-wing law-making proposals.

And Linda Bennett, a recently retired GOP South Carolina state representative, introduced a 2021 bill by the exact same name as Kurtz’s “Partisanship Out of Civics Act.”

“No need to reinvent the wheel if somebody’s got it right,” she told The 74.

Bennett insisted that her office had become flooded with young students, coerced by their educators, demanding that she “please support allowing teachers to teach critical race theory.” But neither she nor Copland could name a specific school or teacher that had distorted their civics lessons in such a way or influenced students to take an activist stance.

In Texas, where a piece of Kurtz’s model legislation on civics became law, the result was an unprecedented restriction on students’ civic engagement. Legislators tucked a clause into the eighth page of their classroom censorship bill outlawing all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials.

In the two years since passage, Texas educators say they have been forced to abandon time-honored assignments such as having students attend a school board meeting or advocate for local causes like a stop sign at an intersection near campus.

“There are all sorts of other civics education that’s getting rolled up here,” PEN America’s Young said, adding that it’s a byproduct of what he calls “shockingly vague” legislation.

Sarai Paez, a recent high school graduate from a suburb outside Austin, said the new law is “a step backwards.” Students in her ninth-grade civics class passed a 2018 city ordinance calling for youth representation in their local government — advocacy that would now be outlawed. 

“There’s no need to take away something that has affected … a group of people in a positive way,” she said.

Though Kurtz said by email he has “a policy of not commenting on any consultations by office holders or policy experts,” Texas state Rep. Steve Toth, the bill’s Republican sponsor, acknowledged to The Texas Tribune that he “conferred” with Kurtz in drafting the legislation.

Toth and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP sponsor in the other chamber, did not respond to requests for comment.

In Ohio and South Dakota, where proposed legislation also pulled from Kurtz’s bill, Kurtz himself testified on behalf of the policies in 2021 and 2022, respectively, though neither proposal passed.

Randall, research director at the National Association of Scholars, where Kurtz published the model legislation, said he’s been quite pleased with the bill’s uptake.

“If you had asked me when this was published, ‘Would you be happy if, several years from now, it had been turned into law in Texas?’ … I would have said that was a wonderful result.”

Money trail

Kurtz and the right-wing lawmakers and advocates who have helped translate his policy agenda into practice are linked by more than just shared philosophy. They’re also connected by money.

His employer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” has a dozen funders in common with the Manhattan Institute, tax filings reveal, including mega-donors like the Charles Koch Foundation.

Copland, at the Manhattan Institute, said he did not consult with Kurtz while putting together his anti-CRT model legislation, but acknowledged some of his colleagues may have.

Toth, in Texas, also receives campaign funds from the Koch Foundation. And Gov. DeSantis, in Florida, shares at least one donor, Fidelity Investments, in common with Kurtz’s think tank. 

On more than one occasion, the issues Kurtz speaks out on have soon found their way to DeSantis’s bully pulpit. The governor recently doubled down on civics education rooted in “patriotism” and his rejection earlier this year of the College Board’s AP African American Studies curriculum came just a few months after Kurtz began writing critically about the issue. Kurtz named two authors specifically in his September article, Robin Kelley and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who the Florida Department of Education later objected to.

Education department press secretary Cassie Palelis said Florida’s concerns with the course were the “result of a thorough review,” and that its correspondence with the College Board had begun in early 2022. When asked whether officials referenced Kurtz’s work during that process and, if so, what role it played, Palelis did not address the question.

Kurtz’s work drew one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s more sizable recent donations, according to the most recently available tax records. In 2019, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation donated $150,000 to support one of his projects. The foundation funds a variety of causes including instilling “America’s founding values in the next generation of citizens.”

The Ethics and Public Policy Center did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the overlapping web of donors, Young, who has tracked the nationwide spread of anti-CRT laws, does not see a coordinated campaign.

“There are some people who look at this and sort of see a conspiracy,” he said. “I just see a bunch of people talking to each other who have aligned interests.”

Lawmakers tend to pull from legislation circulating in other states and “it just snowballs,” he added. 

As for the Kurtz model legislation, its influence continues to spread. Randall, at the National Association of Scholars, which shares nine funders in common with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the organization’s work in advancing the bill continues, particularly at the local level.

In January, a district outside of Colorado Springs voted to adopt a new “Birthright” social studies curriculum developed by Randall’s Civics Alliance that bans awarding course credit for service learning or action civics.

“We are in it for the long haul,” Randall said. “Our mission is to inspire as many Americans as possible to join this work.”

Disclosure: The Stand Together Trust, which was founded by Charles Koch, provides financial support to The 74, which also participates in the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

Since state legislators in 2021 passed a ban on lessons teaching that any one group is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” one unprecedented provision tucked into the bill has triggered a massive fallout for civics education statewide.

A brief clause on Page 8 of the legislation outlawed all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials. Educators could no longer ask students to get involved in the political process, even if they let youth decide for themselves what side of an issue to advocate for — short-circuiting the training young Texans receive to participate in democracy itself.

Zamora-Garcia’s 2017 project to add student advisors to the City Council, and others like it involving research and meetings with elected representatives, would stand in direct violation.

Since 2021, 18 states have passed laws restricting teachings on race and gender. But Texas is the only one nationwide to suppress students’ interactions with elected officials in class projects, according to researchers at the free expression advocacy group PEN America.

Practically overnight, a growing movement to engage Texas students in real-world civics lessons evaporated. Teachers canceled time-honored assignments, districts reversed expansion plans with a celebrated civics education provider and a bill promoting student civics projects that received bipartisan support in 2019 was suddenly dead in the water.

“By the time we got to 2021, civics was the latest weapon in the culture wars,” state Rep. James Talarico, sponsor of that now-defunct bill, told The 74.

Texas does require high schoolers to take a semester of government and a semester of economics, and is one of 38 states nationwide that mandates at least a semester of civics. But students told The 74 the courses typically rely on book learning and memorization.

Talarico, a former middle school teacher and the Texas legislature’s youngest member, came into office during a statewide surge in momentum to deepen civics education. A 2018 study out of the University of Texas highlighted dismal levels of political participation — the state was 44th in voter registration and 47th in voter turnout — and Democrats and Republicans alike were motivated to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, academic research found lessons directly involving students in government could activate future civic engagement. 

So when the freshman legislator proposed that all high schoolers in the state learn civics with a project-based component addressing “an issue that is relevant to the students,” colleagues on both sides of the aisle stamped their approval as the bill sailed through the House. Although the legislation then stalled in the Senate, Talarico said he came away “very optimistic” the policy would become law next session.

But in the two years before the next legislative session, he watched as the political tides turned. Flashpoint issues like George Floyd’s murder and the Jan. 6  insurrection brought on a “disagreement over democracy itself,” he said. And when his conservative colleagues passed a 2021 bill limiting school lessons on race and gender, he mourned as a few brief clauses dashed all his hopes for project-based civics.

“Students are now banned from advocating for something like a stop sign in front of their school,” Talarico said.

A battle over civics

The sections of the 2021 law limiting civic engagement pull directly from model legislation authored by the conservative scholar Stanley Kurtz, whose extensive writings seek to link an approach called “action civics” — what he calls “woke civics” — with leftist activism and critical race theory.  Critical race theory is a scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in America’s legal and social institutions, but became a right-wing catch-all term for teachings on race in early 2021. 

Kurtz argues the practice is a form of political “indoctrination” under the “deceptively soothing” heading of civics, a cause long celebrated on both the right and the left. 

The action civics model was popularized by the nonprofit Generation Citizen and is used in over a thousand classrooms across at least eight states. It teaches students about government by having them pick a local issue, research it and present their findings to officials.

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

Generation Citizen’s method has been studied by several academic researchers who found participants experienced boosted civic knowledge and improvements in related academic areas like history and English.

Kurtz, however, contends the projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.” 

“Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said in an email to The 74.

Civics experts, however, argued otherwise.

The notion that “it’s activism happening in classrooms … that’s just so far from the truth,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Boston.

Rep. Steve Toth and Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP lawmakers who sponsored the 2021 anti-CRT legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.

The 74 reviewed over three dozen action civics projects in Texas from before the 2021 legislation and found that the vast majority dealt with hyperlocal, nonpartisan issues.

Students most often took up causes like bullying, youth vaping, movie nights in the park or bringing back student newspapers. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin could be considered progressive, including projects dealing with gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

Under the 2021 law, all of those projects now must avoid contact with elected officials. The restrictions have resulted in initiatives more contained to schools themselves like advocacy for less-crowded hallways or longer lunch periods, educators said.

“This particular legislation … ties [students’] hands as to how involved they can get while in high school,” said Armando Orduña, the Houston executive director of Latinos for Education.

His own political awakening, he said, came three decades ago growing up in Texas when a teacher assigned him 10 hours of volunteering on a political campaign of his choice. He opted to work on the 1991 Houston mayoral campaign of Sylvester Turner, then a young state representative who lost his bid that year but went on to become the city’s mayor in 2016.

“Back then, the attitude was how to fight teenage apathy regarding politics and now it’s quite the other way around,” Orduña said. Now politicians are working to “tamp down the next generation of leaders.”

Young progressives have become a considerable force in American politics, fueling recent electoral wins in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Chicago mayoral race and a base-rousing standoff in the Tennessee legislature. In the eyes of some members of the GOP, their activism is seen as a threat.

‘Everything got turned upside down’

Though some project-based civics lessons in Texas continue with a pared-down scope, others have disappeared altogether.

One school district north of Dallas decided “out of an abundance of caution” to reverse years of precedent and stop offering course credit to students involved in a well-regarded national civic engagement program, The Texas Tribune first reported.

And Generation Citizen, too, has seen its footprint in Texas dwindle. 

After a 2017 launch in the state, the organization underwent several years of steady growth, with more than a half dozen districts using its programming or curricula. At the time, districts in San Antonio, north Texas, the Rio Grande Valley and several rural regions had expressed interest in beginning programming, former regional director Meredith Stefos Norris said. She spent most of her days criss-crossing the sprawling state meeting with interested school leaders. Austin schools expanded their contract with the nonprofit to $58,000, according to records The 74 obtained from the district through a Freedom of Information request. And Dallas said it wanted to bring Generation Citizen programming to every high schooler in its 153,000-student district, Norris said.

“It felt at the time that we were just going to keep going and keep growing and there was no reason that we weren’t going to be a statewide organization,” the former Texas director said.

Then came the 2021 legislative session and “everything got turned upside down,” said Megan Brandon, Generation Citizen’s current Texas program director. It zapped their efforts and districts backed out of partnerships.

The organization now primarily works with just three Texas districts, including an updated contract with Austin schools for $3,000 — a tiny sliver of the sum from a few years prior. The other two are Bastrop Independent School District and Elgin Independent School District.

Meanwhile, across the state’s northern border in Oklahoma, where Generation Citizen also operates, lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill around issues of race and gender, but one that did not limit students’ contact with elected officials. The organization has been able to maintain all its programs while “following the letter of the law,” Oklahoma director Amy Curran said.

“This isn’t organizing about big culture wars, national stuff,” she said. “This is, literally, the sidewalks are unsafe around our school.”

Brandon, a former social studies teacher herself, grieves not just for the Texas branch of her organization, where the nature of the projects are similar, but for the youth in her state. Her former students in Bastrop ISD outside Austin, most of whom did not have parents who attended college, never had access to civic engagement opportunities before her class, she said.

“Students in Texas need civics more than students in many other states,” she said. “It feels like we’re going backwards in time.”

Opportunity cost

Zamora-Garcia remembers striding to the dais of the Bastrop City Council in 2017 with seven of his peers — the boys clad in too-big blazers and bow ties, the girls in dresses and laced-up heels. For a project they began in Brandon’s civics class, the team sought to boost youth voices in their local government. After meeting with officials, researching models and drawing up bylaws, the students eventually made history by passing a city ordinance in the Austin suburb to add student advisors to the City Council.

“It made me feel more important and more involved, actually being able to have a voice that can make a change,” said Zamora-Garcia, now a junior at Texas State University studying business. 

The course activated his potential in class and in the community, he said. Before the experience, school had felt more like being a “cog in a machine,” he said. 

Mabel Zhu, who took the same class two years later, said the experience was “life-changing,” igniting her passion for civic engagement for years to come.

After the class, she began working with a local nonprofit, then organized a youth summit bringing awareness to the issues of mental health and substance abuse. She eventually joined the Youth Advisory Council that Zamora-Garcia and his classmates helped launch and worked with the Cultural Arts Board to put up a new mural that will define her city’s downtown space for years to come. A waving flag on the painting proclaims, “The future is ours!”

“Without [the class], I wouldn’t have been able to make such an impact within my community,” Zhu said.

The loss of such opportunities are what Rep. Talarico calls the unseen “opportunity cost” of the culture wars. 

“What are we missing out on that we could be doing if we weren’t playing political games with our students’ education?” the Democratic lawmaker asked.

Many students in Texas either learn how to engage with the political system in school or not at all, teachers said. Kyle Olson, an educator at an East Austin high school that serves predominantly immigrant families, taught his students that, as constituents, they could write letters to their elected representatives.

“They didn’t know that that was even something that was possible,” he said. 

Neutering those lessons flies in the face of American democracy itself, argues Alexander Pope, who leads the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Maryland’s Salisbury University.

“Part of the job that schools have in this country is to help prepare people for democracy,” he said. “The idea that, in a representative democracy, you’re going to literally ban … people from writing their elected representatives is just backward.”

The risk, believes ​​Tufts’s Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that a generation of Texans may grow up with a stunted sense of citizenship.

“It’s going to really damage their idea of what democracy is,” she said.

Texas lawmakers on Wednesday voted against a bill that would prohibit public school employees from using corporal punishment on students.

House Bill 772 received a 58-86 vote in the lower chamber. Rep. Alma Allen, a Houston Democrat and former public school educator, has carried a bill to eliminate the controversial practice in each biennial session for the past 18 years. The bill passed 5-2 out of the Select Committee on Youth Health and Safety earlier this month.

On the House Floor on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, and Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler, said schools should be able to continue using corporal punishment, which includes hitting, spanking, paddling or deliberately inflicting physical pain on a student’s body to discipline them.

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“Kids do need to fear leadership,” Toth said. “And so I ask respectfully that we adhere to that in our schools.”

Arguing against the bill, Schaefer referenced a biblical proverb that he said endorses disciplining children. “We will be wise members to follow the design that God has for disciplining children,” Schaefer said.

Until this year, Texas was one of 19 states, most of which are in the South, to allow corporal punishment in public schools. Colorado and Idaho passed bills this month to bar the practice.

Texas educators can use physical means of punishment if a school’s board of trustees adopts a policy allowing it. However, a parent in one of those districts can opt a student out of receiving corporal punishment by providing a written notice to the district.

It is not entirely clear how many districts in Texas use corporal punishment. A report by the Intercultural Development Research Association found that during the 2017-18 school year, 1,165 Texas schools used the practice to discipline nearly 13,000 students. The nonprofit found that Black students and students with disabilities were disproportionately impacted.

A wide body of research has found that corporal punishment can be harmful to students both physically and psychologically. During a public hearing earlier this month, parents and disability rights activists spoke against the practice and urged the Legislature to ban it.

Clayton Travis, director of advocacy and health policy for the Texas Pediatric Society, said he and other medical professionals have seen kids who suffer from fear and anxiety after facing physical violence from adults. He said nonviolent practices, such as setting boundaries and using positive reinforcement, are more effective discipline tools.

“I’d like for schools to be [students’] happy place where they learn and where they are very comfortable,” Allen said on the House floor. “Not where they’re going to get beat.”

Adoneca Fortier, legislative director for Allen, said the representative will carry the bill again during Texas’ 89th legislative session in 2025 if asked. Allen was not immediately available for comment.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The Texas House on Tuesday gave final approval to legislation that is calling for significant investments to beef up schools’ safety, including hiring at least one armed security officer at every campus, providing incentives for school employees to get certified to carry a weapon and installing silent panic alert buttons in every classroom.

House Bill 3, authored by Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, passed 119-25. It now heads to the Senate.

The proposal would also require regular safety inspections of school buildings and would give grants to students who want to attend another school district if their current one is not complying with safety standards. In addition, the bill was amended to give schools $100 for each student who regularly attends classes, plus an additional $15,000 each year, to upgrade their security. The change would raise the cost of the bill from $300 million to about $1.6 billion.

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HD Chambers, executive director of the Texas School Alliance, said the state must strike the right balance between making schools safer and not creating environments where children are afraid to go to school.

“Access to mental health services is as important as any effort to harden campuses,” he said. “Ultimately, each school district is unique and needs the resources and flexibility to enact solutions that work for its community.”

School safety is a priority for both chambers this session after the Uvalde shooting left 19 children and two teachers dead last year. The House voted on HB 3 and two other school safety bills less than a week after the Senate passed a proposal to make sure that hundreds of Texas school districts without active-shooter plans get up to speed. The Senate’s school safety bill also includes many of the provisions in the House bills passed Monday.

In their budget proposals for the next two years, the House has allocated $1.6 billion for school security while the Senate calls for a nearly $1.3 billion investment. Members from both chambers will meet behind closed doors to negotiate what will make it into the final budget.

But while both chambers have passed bills on school security in response to Uvalde, it is unclear whether lawmakers will listen to Uvalde families who want to raise the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic guns from 18 to 21. The bill that would do that had a hearing at the House last week, but it faces stiff opposition from Republicans.

Under HB 3, armed security officers would be hired to be present at every campus during school hours. The Texas School Safety Center — a Texas State University think tank that has been reviewing schools’ safety protocols since the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting — would be required to conduct checks of a school district’s buildings at least once every five years to make sure they are following the state’s safety standards. The Texas Education Agency could withhold any grant money from a district until the agency finds that it is in compliance.

In the Uvalde shooting, the gunman entered Robb Elementary through a back door that failed to properly lock.

During the floor debate on Monday, Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos, D-Richardson, brought an amendment that would bar teachers from being armed on campus. Under the current language of the bill, a school district could arm a teacher to meet the requirements of having an armed officer at every campus. The amendment failed.

Robin Breed, the Austin legislative lead for Moms Demand Action, a group that advocates for public safety policies to protect people from gun violence, said she was disappointed that the amendment wasn’t approved.

“Law enforcement officers like those that were at Uvalde have enormous training requirements,” she said. “We know that even with those training requirements, those officers at Uvalde were unable or unwilling to stop that shooter. So, asking a teacher to be able to perform better than the officers is ridiculous.”

The House also approved House Bill 13, authored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian. It passed with a 125-21 vote and now heads to the Senate. The bill would give district employees a $25,000 incentive for each year they’re certified as so-called school guardians, or staff who can carry a gun in school.

School employees have been reluctant to get armed. About a month after the Uvalde shooting, a survey showed that Texas teachers do not want to take a gun to school.

HB 13 would also require law enforcement to do regular walk-throughs of school buildings and require district employees who regularly interact with kids to attend a mental health and first-aid training program. It would set up grants of up to $250 million for schools to upgrade their security and allocate $100 for each student who regularly attends classes.

In addition, the House passed Senate Bill 838, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, with a 145-0 vote. The proposal, which now heads to the Senate, would require districts to use part of their school safety budget to place silent panic alert buttons in each classroom. The buttons would immediately alert law enforcement agencies during emergencies. The proposal appears to be in response to the police radio failures inside Robb Elementary during the Uvalde shooting. Creighton’s bill was the companion to House Bill 669, authored by Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, an identical piece of legislation that was part of the House’s school safety package.

Erin Douglas contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

There was an eleventh-hour proposal on that night’s agenda, but no vote took place. Instead, the meeting dissolved into a fracas, as trustees screamed at one another, members of the audience screamed at the board and police wrestled people out of the room. The board adjourned without addressing the looming deadline.

It was the fourth month in office for newly elected trustee Sue Deigaard, a longtime education advocate and the parent of two Houston ISD graduates. Now, almost exactly five years later, as the state appoints a board of managers to take over the sprawling school system, her feelings are … complicated.

The law in question — which Deigaard, like most Texans, refers to by its legislative file number, House Bill 1842 — was the brainchild of a Houston-area lawmaker frustrated by years of district inattention to the impoverished schools in his portion of the city. In 2015, a bipartisan majority voted to require the state to step in and take over when a district has had one or more “F” schools for five years. 

Lawmakers later amended the law to let districts stave off state intervention by closing the schools or giving control of them to a nonprofit partner such as a university, city government or charter school network. 

Because they can provoke vociferous opposition, school closures are among the most difficult decisions an elected board can make. And the prospect of charter school partnerships was anathema to the district’s teachers union. As Deigaard notes in this 74 Interview, the result was that small but impassioned groups of people shouted down every proposal for a local solution.

A few months after the Houston board adjourned without taking any action to head off sanctions, Texas officials announced they were investigating complaints that board members — not including Deigaard — had engaged in irregularities involving contracts and that a majority had violated state law by meeting in secret to work out a plan to replace interim Superintendent Grenita Latham. The results of the investigation also justified a state takeover, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said.

In 2019, the board sued the agency, claiming it had no authority to install a board of managers. In January 2023, the state Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped Morath from moving forward. Dominated by new members, the Houston board voted to stop pursuing the lawsuit. Many of those who had opposed the changes were quick to claim that the ensuing takeover, which is slated to take place June 1, was a politicized move against a blue-city district by a Republican governor bent on privatization.

Deigaard will stay on after Morath appoints the nine-member board of managers, though she will be stripped of her official powers. State officials have said current board members will be asked to serve as advisers to the appointees. The state will eventually return control to elected board members.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Set the stage for us. You ran for a seat on a school board that had been embroiled in one high-profile controversy after another for years. You must have both a titanium spine and a vision for transformation in Houston ISD.

I wanted to try to take the politics out of it. I wanted to transform what our public education system looks like. We have a system that was created in the middle of the 20th century, in a very different time societally, economically. That system was not designed to be effective and equitable for all kids. It was intentionally designed not to. And all we keep doing is trying to tinker around the edges — in a time where our society and our economy are incredibly different. 

It’s not like I entered the lion’s den having never visited before. I had been going to board meetings. I knew who the players were. I knew we were coming through this tumultuous time. I knew we were still transitioning to a new superintendent. 

Of the nine board members, three of us were new that January. Six weeks after we were sworn in, new superintendent Richard Carranza announced he was leaving to go to New York. In June, we rejected a proposed budget in the hopes that the [district] administration would bring us back something better. They didn’t. We ended up voting to adopt the exact same proposal. We were going to have our own district form of government shutdown, because we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. 

At that point, it was just chaos. 

House Bill 1842 was looming. Houston ISD leaders knew, starting in the spring of 2015, that we were at risk of sanctions in the fall of 2018. In 2017, the legislature had passed a policy giving districts two options to avoid those sanctions: improve the campus in question or close it. By 2018, we had a third option, and that was to find a partner. 

A lot of districts around the state, like San Antonio, saw the writing on the wall and took action. Dr. Grenita Lathan, our chief academic officer at the time, had a very well thought-out plan how to address our chronically underperforming campuses — not just the ones that were going to trigger sanctions, but the ones that were on the runway coming up to the trigger point. 

There were community meetings to help impacted schools understand what the recommendations were going to be, but they basically got shut down by a small, vocal community of people who didn’t like whatever the recommendation was for a given school. They didn’t want their school consolidated. They didn’t want to close it, didn’t want to partner. So none of it ever happened.

We were eventually presented with a potential partner for the schools that were going to trigger sanctions later that year. We never voted on it. The meeting got out of control. People were arrested. We made The New York Times. And we did nothing. We were the only district in the state, to my knowledge, that did nothing. 

I remember talking, when we first triggered the law in 2019, to somebody who had testified in favor of House Bill 1842 in 2015. He said, “Well, we never imagined that this would happen in HISD.” I said, “Because you thought they’d give us a path out?” And he said, “No, because I thought you guys would do what you needed to do to avoid it.”

We had the opportunity, and we didn’t. We interfered with the leaders that we entrusted to bring us good recommendations. We shut it down.

Do you think the things Lathan proposed would have made a difference?

If the board had supported Grenita despite the noise, and if there were real and meaningful community engagement. Grenita and her team could have worked with these communities: “Hey, we’re going to do a closure, or a restart. What do you want school to look like? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?” I think if the board had stood behind her on that, our story today would be very, very different. Student achievement would have increased. And I don’t think we would be in a position where we’d have a board of managers coming in. 

When the board decided not to endorse the plan that the interim superintendent brought forward, was there an alternate plan? 

You’re presuming nine people, plus at that point in time a superintendent, were all having constructive conversations together about a plan? I don’t think you should make that presumption. 

I was actually called the day [after the fractious April 2018 meeting] by somebody else who asked whether, if they come back next week with a partnership with another organization, would I support it? I said, I’m not going to vote for that. There needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive student-centered plan here.

This is about improving the learning outcomes for students in a way that is equitable. My objective wasn’t to save the board.

Between 2018 and now, were there more efforts to come up with an improvement plan, or was the idea to just wait for the suit to work its way through the courts?

We’ve had a lot of inconsistency in administrative leadership. We had a longstanding superintendent, Terry Grier, who left two years before I got on the board. We had an interim for a few months. We had Richard Carranza. We had Grenita as interim superintendent for 3½ years after that. We have all the battles between different factions of the board, including the five members who abruptly fired [Lathan] and appointed somebody else one day, triggering a special accreditation investigation with the state. We came finally to the other side of that and hired Millard House, who’s now been here for a year and a half. At this point, me and Elizabeth Santos are the senior board members, and we’ve only been here for five years. 

So you don’t have a lot of continuity. Which in one way was good, because in 2020, when we had four new board members and I was board chair, I’m like, we’re going to double down on governance and build a foundation and figure out where we’re trying to go so that when we hire somebody to take us there, we’ve got a plan. 

We have board members who wanted to see large-scale, systemic changes in our incredibly large, diverse and complex system. Who can see the opportunities that exist, can see where inequities exist. Your board and your superintendent don’t have to agree on everything, right? I actually think you have to have diversity of thought. But you have to have everybody centered around a core set of beliefs and values on where you’re trying to go. And we have that on paper. But I don’t feel that we’ve ever as a board been partners in that work, and certainly not our superintendent.

We just got stuck. We’re grounded in this governance model, but we weren’t seeing things come from the administration that were really challenging the status quo of what an education system can and should look like for children — and almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century. 

There’s some irony there. You had an interim superintendent who had put deep thought into systemic change and a board that wouldn’t sign off. And then you ended up with a board that wanted change but an administration that wouldn’t advance a plan. When the Texas Supreme Court decided to lift the injunction, the board had the option of continuing with the suit, as unlikely as victory seemed. But you voted not to do that. 

I’m going to say this for me, because I don’t want to speak for my colleagues on this. There’s a saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. We have been in an adversarial relationship with our state agency in some ways since before I was on the board, before we even triggered 1842.

I think there was a realization that we were unlikely to win. We could either move forward in a collaborative, student-centered way or we could continue to fight. For me personally, I made a commitment to always put students first. I don’t believe that the outcome would change if we persist in this legal battle. It prolongs a period of instability for our kids.

What matters most is, how do we make sure kids are learning and growing with the least amount of disruption we possibly could have? I’ve always believed that with all of what our district has gone through in the past five years, there has to be something better for kids on the other side of it all. And how do we get to that better other side as quickly and harmlessly as we possibly can? If it’s even possible.

If the appointed board of managers and new superintendent are going to succeed, they’re going to need community support. And at the moment, there’s still a lot of shrieking.

Our public school system belongs to the public. We want the kids who have been left behind for far too long to no longer be left behind. That is a shared value between our current district governance team of 10, our board and superintendent, and our state [education] agency and therefore, presumably, whoever they will appoint. That’s a shared value.

The divergence is going to be how that is achieved. On a Saturday afternoon, not at rush hour, it takes an hour to drive from one side of Houston ISD to the other. When you go from east to west, you’re going from oil and gas plants, the shipping channel with tankers coming in and out and all of that, to the west side. That’s also oil and gas — but in shining office buildings. 

If this group can come in, understand the diversity of need and build true partnership and collaboration with communities in their pursuit of systemic changes, I think they’ll be successful. If they come in thinking they have all the answers and they’re just going to put all these things in place, nothing’s going to really be different for kids. 

It’s all about making decisions with families. That’s where the magic can happen. And we haven’t done that.

What happens to you now? You’re still an elected board member, but you don’t have any power as of June 1. Do you have ceremonial duties? 

I don’t know. I think so. Keep in mind our state agency has overseen the transition to a board of managers in other districts before. But we’re the biggest. This is not something that one new superintendent and nine appointed board members are going to be able to do on their own as quickly as they’re going to need to ramp up. They’re going to need help being introduced to the community as something other than, you know, agents of a conspiracy. 

When you have an elected board, you have people — especially if they’re viable to win — who have relationships and roots in a community. And who build more through the campaign process, through the different civic clubs they visit with, the doors they knock on and all of that. As you build these relationships, you build an understanding of the fabric of the community. 

The board of managers, they’re going from 0 to 100 while skipping that process. I think there could be value in taking a second tier of candidates [for the board of managers who do not get appointed] and creating some kind of community council that helps support that appointed board.

I do believe in democratically elected governance of public systems and public dollars. But I also know that at least in our state, long before HB 1842 came into existence, there was a process supported by both Republicans and Democrats. As a school board, you have independence from other governmental entities. But if, in cases of financial impropriety, legal malfeasance and student performance, if you’re not serving kids well, if you are engaging in behaviors that create a risk to children, then there’s going to be intervention. To make sure that kids are learning and growing and that the dollars that you were trusted with are actually being spent on the children’s learning and growth.

I don’t know that there’s an easier right thing in that equation. It’s an imperfect democracy. We’ve known that since it started over 200 years ago. It’s all about how you just keep striving for something better within those values. 

Don’t let me push you off a cliff here, but I want to know how this feels. 

Back up before we get to that, because you’re going to lose me after that. We’re so big. We’re not a suburban district with a bunch of giant one-size-fits-all schools. We know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work for all kids and it doesn’t work for all families. 

We also know that money matters, but money not spent effectively doesn’t change outcomes. The unfortunate thing about the [COVID recovery] dollars is we’re probably going to learn that in a really harsh way in the coming years. How we chose to spend it actually either made a difference for kids or didn’t. 

But we’re stuck in this conversation where it’s just about more money. We need to evolve to new school design. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional models for students for whom that works, but in a district like ours, with the number of buildings and students we have, there is absolutely room to try things out and to scale what we know works. That was always my vision. 

One of the most poignant stories from my early days of being on the board — I have all these kids’ faces in my head from visiting schools — was this little second-grader eagerly raising his hand in class. But he didn’t even have a teacher of record, he had a long-term sub. Is he going to be okay? 

I was visiting our disciplinary alternative education program, and I asked the school leader, “What’s your biggest challenge?” He said, “The kids are here for a certain number of days, so the first challenge we have is some kids start to self-sabotage so they don’t have to go back to their home school. The other challenge is kids that get back to their home school and self-sabotage so they can come back.”

That’s kids telling us what they need, and we’re not listening. The families who have left our system for charter schools, private schools, to homeschool, they’ve done it because we’re not giving them something they want and need for their kids. And until we start talking to families in a real way, we’re not going to be able to build a holistic system that meets the needs of all kids, and we’re going to keep leaving kids behind. 

So how do I feel? Angry that I couldn’t achieve that. Disappointed that I couldn’t achieve that. We stole five years from kids. Five years where we could have given all our focus to the needs of students without the distraction of a lawsuit and all the impediments that instability has brought to our system. We should all be angry about that.

Six years ago, Gov. Greg Abbott riled up a crowd of school choice supporters on the steps of the Texas Capitol, calling on lawmakers to send him a bill that would allow parents to use tax dollars to take their kids out of public schools.

“I hope and I urge that that law reach my desk,” Abbott said, donning a yellow scarf — the uniform of school choice advocates — to mark National School Choice Week.

That never happened, and soon enough, the proposal lost momentum as state leaders realized just how uphill of a battle it was. For the next two legislative sessions, Abbott skipped the Capitol rallies for National School Choice Week and was more muted in his support for the proposals.

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But now, Abbott is pushing harder than ever for school choice as part of a broad focus on “parental rights” this session, strongly signaling that the issue is his top legislative priority. He has crisscrossed the state speaking at a dozen “Parent Empowerment” events often at nonpublic schools in more rural communities, laying out why he believes the Legislature should back so-called education savings accounts for every Texas parent.

But passage of a school choice measure is anything but a sure bet, as there is little evidence that he’s been able to convince rural Republicans in the Texas House — who have for years been a reliable firewall — to drop their opposition.

To go all in on such a risky bet is an unusual play by Abbott, a cautious operator who’s used to getting his way when it comes to his highest legislative priorities — and who tries to avoid waging losing battles. On issues that have split his own party, Abbott is known to withhold wielding his political capital until there’s a clear path for victory — as was the case with the 2021 passage of permitless carry of handguns, as one example.

“There does seem to be more emphasis and more of a priority on getting this legislation passed this session,” said Shannon Holmes, executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, which opposes Abbott on this issue. “Obviously in past sessions … bills have been filed and it hasn’t been a real focus for Abbott.”

“School choice” generally refers to policies that allow parents to take their kids out of their assigned neighborhood public school and send them to other types of schools, like private or religious, with the help of government funding. The chief school-policy proposal this session is Senate Bill 8, which would create an education savings account with up to $8,000 in taxpayer money per student. The proposal differs from vouchers, which were the previous vehicle for school choice legislative proposals, in that the money would go straight to the parents instead of the school. The Senate Education Committee approved that bill Tuesday.

Such proposals have been met with resistance in the House by Democrats and rural Republicans who are protective of the public schools they see as the lifeblood of their close-knit communities. Lawmakers have sought to win them over this time by shielding school districts with fewer than 20,000 students from any funding losses caused by SB 8.

Abbott has named “education freedom” one of seven emergency items for the session and hit the road for it more than any other priority. Since early January, he has spoken at a dozen “Parent Empowerment” nights across the state, spanning Texas from Corpus Christi to Amarillo.

Some advocates for school choice who’ve previously criticized Abbott for a lack of commitment have taken notice of how far the governor is going now. Luke Macias, the far-right Texas consultant who previously worked for an Abbott primary challenger, said on a recent podcast that Abbott’s efforts were “incredibly encouraging.”

“I haven’t seen anything like it,” Corey DeAngelis, the national school-choice activist, tweeted last week. “This is true leadership. All Republican Governors should be fighting just as hard to empower all families with school choice.”

Abbott’s intense campaigning has anti-school-choice lawmakers on alert. But they’re confident that their coalition in the Legislature will withstand the governor’s lobbying effort.

“I think that coalition is holding strong and I think Gov. Abbott knows how unpopular vouchers are in the Texas Legislature,” said Rep. James Talarico of Round Rock, one of the Democrats on the House Public Education Committee. “That’s why you’re seeing the governor putting as much lipstick on this pig as possible.”

Talarico and other lawmakers hope that the House will send a strong signal on the issue Thursday, when it is scheduled to take up the state budget and consider amendments to it. In 2021, lawmakers approved an amendment that prohibited the “use of appropriated money for school choice programs.” It passed 115-29, with a majority of Republicans joining Democrats to approve it. The amendment never made it into the final budget, but it served as a key indicator of the House’s appetite for such proposals.

The author of that 2021 amendment, Rep. Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, has proposed a similar amendment for the budget debate Thursday. A copy of the amendment released Monday features the support of Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, a key member of House GOP leadership who serves as speaker pro tem.

The first stop for any school choice bill in the House would likely be the Public Education Committee, which has a new chair this session, Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, who has generated considerable intrigue. When House Speaker Dade Phelan. R-Beaumont, appointed Buckley to lead the panel in early February, school choice advocates voiced optimism. But it was unclear why — Buckley has been on the record against vouchers — and most groups did not explain why they were so hopeful.

One pro-school-choice group, the American Federation for Children, remains confident in Buckley.

“We praised Rep. Buckley’s appointment because he has always been a fair-minded guy and has long been committed to providing the best education possible for Texas children,” AFC spokesperson Nathan Cunneen wrote in an email. “We still believe that.”

Buckley has repeatedly declined to share his thinking on the matter this session. And he did not attend the second parent empowerment night that Abbott headlined, which was just outside Buckley’s district in Central Texas.

“I look forward to hearing bills that explore a wide range of options that keep parents at the center of their children’s educational opportunities,” Buckley said in a statement for this story. “In the end, the members of the public education committee will decide which options, if any, make their way to the floor for debate.”

Of the eight House Republicans that Abbott has appeared with on his parent empowerment tour across the state, four voted for the budget amendment in 2021 that banned state funds for school choice programs. Three opposed the amendment. The eighth Republican was not in the Legislature at the time.

The Texas Tribune reached out to all eight House Republicans that Abbott has appeared with and asked if they supported universal education savings accounts. Their offices either did not respond or declined to comment.

The Tribune also contacted the offices of nine more House Republicans, all representing rural areas, and they also chose not to comment on Abbott’s push.

Notably — and perhaps strategically — the education savings account legislation also contains other school priorities important to some Republican lawmakers, including a provision that would restrict classroom discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity through the 12th grade.

Phelan himself has said he is fine with an “up-or-down vote” on the proposal, but he has noted the historical opposition it has faced in the House. He also was the only one of the so-called “Big Three” — a reference to the governor, the House speaker and the lieutenant governor — to not name school choice as priority legislation.

As for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate’s presiding officer, he has long championed school choice and proclaimed in his inaugural address in January that he is “all in” on it with Abbott. Patrick has also vowed to try to force a special session if lawmakers cannot pass a school choice bill in the regular session. That decision is ultimately up to the governor.

Abbott’s office did not answer a list of questions for this story, including whether he was prepared to call a special session over the issue.

Abbott’s evolution

Abbott’s last push on school choice came in 2017, when the Senate passed an education savings account bill, but it died in the House. The same thing happened in 2015.

The issue fell off the radar in the 2019 session, when Abbott and other state leaders decided to prioritize property tax relief and public education funding ahead of what was expected to be a challenging election.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. School choice advocates say the pandemic opened parents’ eyes to what their kids were being taught and spurred frustration with prolonged school closures at the hands of Democrats and teachers unions.

“They just went too far, and it’s a perfect storm,” said Dave Carney, Abbott’s top political adviser.

Indeed, it was a natural next step for Abbott, who had spent much of the pandemic fighting to make sure no local entities — including schools — could mandate COVID-19 safety policies.

Parents wanted more control over issues like mask mandates. Then, as the nation endured a racial reckoning after George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, some parents and politicians started pushing back against conversations and books about race in schools.

After the 2021 session, Abbott rekindled some hope for school choice advocates when he signed into law an expansion of an education savings account program for students with disabilities.

It was not until his reelection campaign began that he really seized on the issue, introducing a “Parental Bill of Rights” in January 2022 that offered a host of ideas for giving parents more say over their kids’ schooling. His most consequential statement, though, came four months later, when he declared during a San Antonio campaign stop that parents should be able to “send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student.”

It was his clearest support yet for a voucher-like plan. And he later acknowledged it was a deliberate move, saying he wanted to make it “abundantly clear” he not only supported school choice but the strategy to achieve it.

The timing of the statement was intriguing. Abbott had already won his primary, but the governor, ever attuned to criticism on his right, was getting flak from some — including DeAngelis — for endorsing Texas House candidates in primary runoffs that month who allegedly opposed school choice.

Like many moments in Abbott’s reelection campaign, he bet — successfully — that soothing his right flank was worth the wrath of the other side. His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, assailed Abbott over his comments that funding should follow the student, especially in rural Texas, but lost by 11 percentage points in November.

Abbott came off that win believing he had a mandate for the next legislative session to push harder for school choice than ever before.

“I’ve talked about school choice every year that I’ve been governor,” Abbott said in early March while addressing the Texas Pastor Council in Austin. “But not only do we have a better opportunity this session than we’ve had before, but as I will explain to you, we have a necessity.”

One factor that Abbott cited, in an explanation that he does not often use publicly, was “an extraordinary movement to expand transgenderism in schools in the state of Texas.” He accused public school teachers of “using their positions to try to cultivate and groom these young kids” into being transgender.

If Abbott prevails, it could be a legacy-making moment for a third-term governor who occasionally faces questions about what exactly he will be remembered for. It could also bolster him with Republicans if he decides to run for president in 2024, a race that already includes former President Donald Trump.

Abbott regularly gets compared to a likely 2024 candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed a universal school-choice bill into law Monday, expanding a suite of programs the state already had in place. During a visit to Texas in early March, DeSantis gave a speech to Harris County Republicans in which he wished Texas luck in “bringing a big school choice package across the finish line.”

The rural Republicans

Speaking to the pastors, Abbott was frank about the challenge before him, saying it is House Republicans who “are holding up our ability to pass school choice” and they are “coming from rural Texas.”

Abbott has sought to appeal to rural Republicans by trying to convince them that the policy is popular. Over 80% of Republican primary voters approved a ballot proposition on it last year — and it enjoyed nearly as much support in rural Texas. Abbott’s office has further broken it down by House district, eager to show individual members that their base voters would have their back.

In some settings, Abbott has spoken more harshly about the forces weighing on rural Republicans.

“These Republicans who say, ‘Listen, I want to support it, but my constituents back home, they just are against it’ — that’s wrong!” Abbott said. “Now, some of their constituents are against it. We call them ‘educrats.’ The educrats — whether they be superintendents or some teachers or primarily the teacher unions — they’re against it, but they’re a minority and they’re a minority of voters in that district.”

Abbott’s appearances have put rural Republicans in a tough position politically — caught between their historical opposition to vouchers and their desire to please their party’s popular leader. The makeup of the legislation — which includes “anti-woke” policies that mimics Florida’s infamous “don’t say gay” legislation — also muddies the waters for Republicans who are at odds with only the education savings account component of the bill.

For the House Republicans who have agreed to introduce Abbott at his school choice tour events, their remarks have been carefully worded — and have avoided any specific policy endorsement.

One House Republican introduced Abbott at his event last week in Giddings by touting the schooling options that are already available to parents.

“Here in Texas, parents have great choices for how they choose to educate their children — excellent public schools, charter schools, private schools and more freedom to educate their kids at home than any other state in the country,” Rep. Stan Gerdes, R-Smithville, said.

One of the most interesting lawmaker appearances on Abbott’s school choice tour came in Corsicana, where Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, introduced the governor. A member of the House Public Education Committee, Harris has firmly opposed vouchers but has been an Abbott booster on other issues. (His Twitter profile picture is a photo of him talking with the governor.)

In his introductory remarks in Corsicana, Harris did not explicitly back Abbott on school choice but found a way to appeal to his rural constituents.

“[Abbott]’s leading the effort to push back on the woke indoctrination of Texas kids that we’re seeing in urban schools,” Harris said. “And he’s doing that by putting you, the parent, back in the driver’s seat.”

In reality, Abbott himself has rebuffed the notion that such “indoctrination” is a solely urban trend. He told the pastors it was happening regardless of whether “you’re in a tiny little town in East Texas or a large urban area.”

Regardless of whether it is successful, the school choice battle will likely spill over into the 2024 primaries for state House as members will face pressure to explain why they sided with — or against — Abbott on the issue. Abbott’s campaign says it stands ready to help lawmakers who stick out their necks to support his agenda.

“There should be no question, except if you drink too much, that Abbott doesn’t back up your support of him with his political support of you around election time,” Carney said.

Disclosure: The Association of Texas Professional Educators has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The upcoming takeover of the Houston Independent School District by the Texas Education Agency is a bold action necessitated by a state law requiring that, in the case of persistently underperforming schools, the state intervene either by directly closing the campus or by implementing a temporary, districtwide governance replacement. The state has chosen the latter — a big intervention for a state agency.

There is a lot to be said about the move, the laws that triggered it, and the roles and intent of all those involved. I know this as someone who was on the ground as a teacher in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, when the state’s Recovery School District was created; as a founding member and former deputy superintendent of Tennessee’s state-run school district; and as a systems innovation consultant who eventually got the full-circle experience of helping support the reunification of the state and local school districts in New Orleans in 2017.

These are each highly scrutinized and studied efforts, and yet the lessons learned don’t deliver a clear roadmap for state intervention.

I’ve learned a lot — from parent power to policy levers — about the potential for a huge impact and unintended consequences when a state intervenes in a district. With the June 1 date set, it is time now to lay the groundwork for a strategy that goes beyond a temporary fix. Those at the state, school and community levels do not need to see eye-to-eye, but they must get below the storm on the surface to create the conditions for success on behalf of the students impacted. Doing so requires shifting relationships and power for parents and students, the system and the broader community. 

The tools to transform schools and reimagine districts lie in how they work, not just what they do. The “how” matters both on an interpersonal level and in how solutions are generated. As the Texas Education Agency develops and prepares to execute its intervention strategy in Houston, here are some lessons learned from previous bold state interventions that I hope can inform this big Texas move in a way that improves schools and the system it operates in, with student and family voices at the center.

Understand the Challenge

Schools are a multigenerational effort and experience. While the state may have access to a wide range of historical data and analytics, the experiences of those in a school community — both within and outside the building — are key to understanding the real and perceived challenges of a persistently struggling school. Understanding challenges requires more than just an academic, curricular or performance lens. State leaders must make time to truly engage with the community, not for a broad listening tour or to share slideshows about the intervention, but to actively hear and empathize with the students, caregivers, community leaders and the school and district staff impacted. This can shine a light on ways that policies and programs designed to help might not make it to the classroom; lift up and engage great talent and partners who possess potential parts of the solution; and learn what “success” and aspirations the broader school community has for its kids. This empathy work is a front-end investment of time. A state team that is impatient for action (usually a positive), can get shortsighted when it comes to understanding the root causes of the challenge and planning to address them effectively. Any strategy that roots itself in analytics without empathy is void of the context needed to successfully and collaboratively implement an intervention strategy.

Move at the Pace of  the Agency’s Capacity

When intervening in a district, state-level leaders must be sure to have the capacity to truly execute their plan. Considerations include ensuring that:

1. The state agency’s team does not take on too many roles too quickly (e.g., school operator, regulator, support provider, coalition builder)
   
2. Implementation scales at a speed that doesn’t outpace the skills and capacity of leadership and local talent, forging of a political constituency or community support
   
3. The state is only one of multiple partners bringing together local talent, various school operators and nonprofit organizations as a coalition to support the intervention with shared purpose and collaboration.

Developing a shared vision for success rooted in the aspirations of the community, via building state-level capacity and local partnerships, can help set and attain clear, sustainable instructional goals.

Create Shared Understanding and Ownership

Elevating student and parent voices is key to unlocking school transformations and systems change throughout and beyond the state’s involvement. Carrots and sticks from the state will not be enough to shift the school and district behaviors and mindsets necessary to sustain any positive changes and impacts that come from the intervention. Those who were in the school community before state intervention must be a key part of determining what elements already in place can be part of a successful transformation of the school. Further, they will help identify needed district-level changes critical to supporting school change and sustaining the work after state intervention ends. This shared ownership must come with the humility to learn from all those in the community, share accountability for walking the walk of systems change in a way that builds authentic relationships and allows diverse perspectives  to be incorporated in the solutions-finding process.

For state intervention to make a real, lasting difference for students and families, the state, school, families and broader community must all work together to find and keep the right people engaged in developing and implementing solutions, and to make adjustments so the district will sustain positive changes. The Texas Education Agency’s existing work to make district systems more strategic, with an emphasis on managing school performance and expanding quality school options; equip them with better data; ensure high-quality instructional materials are in use; and help expand local talent pipelines creates an opportunity to build an intervention approach that combines the best of state strategies with the wisdom of those impacted by state-, district- and school-level decisionmaking.

Transforming chronically struggling schools, which typically reside in marginalized and underinvested communities, is a moral imperative bestowed upon those taking action. Ultimately, it is the opportunities of the students, now and into the future, that will determine the intervention’s success.

A sweeping public education bill that would allow families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools and restrict classroom lessons on sexual orientation received initial approval Tuesday and will now go before the Senate for a full vote.

The Senate education committee, led by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, voted 10-2 to advance Senate Bill 8. The vote took place along party lines, with Republican lawmakers favoring the bill and Democrats José Menéndez of San Antonio and Morgan LaMantia of South Padre Island voting against it.

The committee also voted unanimously for an accompanying piece of legislation, Senate Bill 9, which would give pay raises to teachers and increase funding for classrooms, among other measures. The bill will also go to the Senate floor for a vote.

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The bill would give parents who opt out of the public school system access to a savings account with up to $8,000 in taxpayer money, per student, which could be used to pay for a child’s private schooling and other educational expenses, such as textbooks or tutoring.

A priority for Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the bill would also restrict classroom lessons, school activities and teacher guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in all public and charter schools up to 12th grade. The bill is one of several pieces of legislation under consideration that could affect the lives of gay and transgender Texans, including one that would restrict the type of health care transgender children can receive.

The bill’s language banning certain types of lessons mirrors a highly controversial law in Florida. Those in favor of the bill say parents are best equipped to teach children about topics like gender identity and sexual orientation.

Historically, rural Republicans have opposed programs similar to vouchers because they fear they could take away money from their local school districts, which are often large employers with fragile budgets. SB 8, however, seeks to address those concerns by shielding school districts with fewer than 20,000 students from any funding losses caused by the savings account program.

Schools in Texas are largely funded based on student attendance numbers. Those smaller districts would receive $10,000 for two years for every student who enrolls in the savings account program and leaves their district.

SB 8 is likely to get approval from the full Senate, but it is not yet clear if the added funding for smaller districts will be enough to get the legislation through the House, which has been traditionally more skeptical of similar programs.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

As illegal opioid use rises among young people, several bills filed by state lawmakers would require Texas teachers to be trained and equipped to treat fentanyl overdoses, both on campus and at school-related events.

Several bills call for educators and school staff at public, charter and private schools, as well as those at colleges and universities, to know how to reverse deadly opioid overdoses with Narcan and other overdose medications known as “opioid antagonists.”

Eight bills calling for some sort of opioid emergency training for school personnel have been filed by Democrats: state. Sen. José Menéndez of San Antonio and state Reps. Philip Cortez of San Antonio, Bobby Guerra of Mission, Jolanda Jones of Houston, Erin Zwiener of Driftwood, Sheryl Cole of Austin; and Rep. James Talarico of Round Rock.

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These bills cover a wide range of topics regarding the use of overdose reversal medications, including allowing physicians to dispense such medication to schools without requiring identification of the user and setting training standards for school personnel.

“We are adding this to the things that we’ve already done in the past when it comes to epinephrine pens and medication for people who suffer from asthma,” said Menéndez, author of Senate Bill 629. “We’re just saying that this is important as other lifesaving measures that you have in schools.”

Narcan (the brand name for the drug naloxone) or other opioid antagonists would be stored on campuses and school personnel would be trained in its use. All of these bills would also require the state health commissioner to establish an advisory committee to conduct a follow-up review after each time the medication is used.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Prescription fentanyl can be taken safely when prescribed by doctors. But a rise in its illicit use began during the pandemic and continues today.

“Currently, an opioid epidemic is sweeping the nation, and Texas is not an exception,” said Hannah Reinhard, chief of staff for Cortez. “This bill comes from the fact that anyone can suffer from addiction and a potential overdose. Not only that, but children can easily mistake an opioid for candy and risk devastating effects.”

These bills would put Texas in line with similar states like South Dakota that have provided naloxone, the overdose-reversing nasal spray, to schools through a grant program.

“The more people authorized to administer naloxone, the better,” said Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “I’ve heard from some people who have tried to get naloxone in schools that nurses/teachers have felt they aren’t allowed to administer it. The law would clear up any liability concerns and thus encourage more schools to have it available throughout campuses.”

Menéndez’s bill doesn’t specify how the medication and the training would be funded, but the San Antonio lawmaker believes settlement funds the state has received from opioid companies should be more than enough. Texas is estimated to receive about $1.17 billion over the course of 18 years from three large pharmaceutical distribution companies through a settlement agreement reached in 2021.

House Bill 4801, authored by Talarico, would allow the state to use money from the opioid settlement to purchase opioid antagonists in bulk from manufacturers to decrease the price burden on organizations distributing the medication. First responders and groups that work with people who use drugs have difficulty supplying Narcan because of its cost — about $125 for a kit with two doses.

Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 107,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2021, the last available year. Synthetic opioids were responsible for 71,000 of those deaths, and they were largely from fentanyl.

Opioid overdose deaths increased by 94% among people ages 14 to 18 from 2019 to 2020 and by 20% from 2020 to 2021, the CDC reported. Since the pandemic began, there’s been wider accessibility to fentanyl and other opioids through social media.

In Texas, the CDC reported more than 5,000 people died of drug overdoses between October 2021 and October 2022. Overdose deaths involving fentanyl in the state rose 399%, from 333 people dying in 2019 to 1,662 people in 2021.

A majority of people who ingested a fatal dose of fentanyl had no idea the synthetic opioid had been laced with other drugs they were attempting to use.

Makers of illegal drugs often use fentanyl as a booster for other drugs they are selling,

Since September, Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has reported three student deaths while six others were hospitalized, all from fentanyl overdoses. Four Hays Consolidated Independent School District students died last year from fentanyl overdoses. None of these occurred on school campuses.

Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The agency has warned that fentanyl is increasingly finding its way into “fake prescription pills” that are “easily accessible and often sold on social media and e-commerce platforms.”

Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been recently working together when it comes to tackling the growing fentanyl crisis in the state.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, has teamed up with state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, to push through a bill to decriminalize the use of testing strips and other methods used to detect fentanyl.

Late last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott came out in favor of legalizing fentanyl test strips which help users identify whether the drugs they are planning on taking contain the deadly synthetic opioid. Abbott previously opposed such a policy but said the increase in opioid overdose deaths had brought a “better understanding” that more needs to be done by the state to tackle the problem.

The Texas governor also said he wanted to make Narcan more readily available across the state.

Rep. Ryan Guillen, R-Rio Grande City, has also proposed a bill that would create a task force to study methods to incentivize manufacturers of opioid antagonists to increase production. The task force must submit a report to the Legislature no later than Dec. 1, 2024.

The commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services would be required to issue a statewide standing order prescribing opioid antagonists to those in need and would have all liability removed to accomplish this under Senate Bill 954, proposed by Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock. A matching bill, House Bill 1543, was authored by Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, and Democratic Reps. Donna Howard of Austin and Venton Jones of Dallas.

Menéndez said the idea for his bill came after hearing the fears from local parents and students about how easily fentanyl can accidentally be consumed.

“There is a powerful drug out there in our society and we need to be prepared,” he said. “It’s scary how pervasive this thing could become very quickly. And how damaging, unless we get on top of this, it can be specifically for those living in areas with limited access to health care.”

Texans seeking help for substance use can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. They can also access services in their region through the Texas Health and Human Services website.

Disclosure: Rice University and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

With its high rates of drug cartel deaths and femicide, Ciudad Juárez has often been described as one of the most violent cities in the world – if not the single most dangerous city.

“When you speak about Juárez, you have to speak about violence,” said Luis Mendoza, who has been living in the city across the border from El Paso his whole life.

“We have to think about where the roots of the violence are and where we can prevent violent behaviors and situations from happening in the future,” added Mendoza, who serves as the chief operating officer for the Juárez nonprofit Fundacíon Paso Del Norte. “So you really have to work with youth and children.”

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Now, the foundation’s Escuelas de Bienestar, or wellness schools, are using sports and play to deter young children from entering a life of violence while helping them develop self-awareness and skills to interact and communicate with others, and teaching them how to manage emotions and build relationships through physical activities.

“We know that sports and play is a very powerful tool for organizations, individuals, teachers, schools, and other foundations to affect social change,” Mendoza said. “The problem is we have kids at school that are expressing or replicating cycles of violence or unhealthy behaviors. We have teachers that don’t have a curriculum or they don’t have tools to connect with the kids. That’s when we come into play.”

From 2008 to 2012, the city of 1.3 million was widely deemed the most dangerous place on earth. Murders shot above 3,111 in the worst year, 2010. In 2022, Juárez reported 1,045 homicides, a 26% reduction compared to the previous year.

A study by the World Health Organization found that youth violence is a global public health problem that ranges from bullying and fighting and can escalate to severe sexual and physical assault and homicide.

“Worldwide, an estimated 200,000 homicides occur among youth 10 to 29 years old each year, making it the fourth leading cause of death for people in this age group,” the study showed, noting that youth homicide and non-fatal violence often has a lifelong impact on a person’s wellbeing.

The foundation – a sister organization to the Paso del Norte Community Foundation and the Paso del Norte Health Foundation in El Paso that work together to improve the quality of life in the region – searched through available programs and partnered with Coaches Across Continents to find a way to help the youth of Juárez.

A United Kingdom-based nonprofit, Coaches Across Continents teaches active citizens and strengthens organizations to create sustainable social impact in their communities.

“They reach underserved communities, and it’s not about learning something that’s in the school curriculum,” Mendoza said. “It’s about learning topics that are important for their health, human development, communications, and tough topics that sometimes they don’t have the tools to manage.”

Coaches Across Continents is partnering with FPDN to train physical education teachers in Juárez so that they’re able to meet the needs of their students while addressing challenging topics such as human rights, drug use, drug prevention, sexual health, violence and emotional health and well-being.

“It’s a train-the-trainer model to teach teachers on how to use play to develop those life skills and to address social topics that are hard to talk about in other educational settings,” Mendoza said. The teachers are going to talk about nutrition, mental health, human rights, women’s rights, and other topics, in addition to sports.

Physical education teachers are oftentimes seen as less sophisticated than other educators. However, Mendoza said these educators need to be acknowledged for their impact on their students.

“The power that PE teachers and coaches have on the development of children and youths is enormous,” he said. “We have learned that they want more training to diversify their classes, so they’re not only focused on gym class but on sports and play. They want to be able to use their tools to strengthen abilities and skills.”

Since the inception of Escuelas de Bienestar in 2017, 303 participants have joined the program impacting 77,018 school children in Juárez. About 60% of those enrolled in the program work as PE teachers, while the remainder is church youth groups, community centers and other groups that work with children regularly.

The trainers sign-up for a three-year commitment and receive training on developing games to use with their students while receiving support from the foundation.

“After those three years, the data shows us that (the trainers) already know how to make up games by themselves without the accompaniment of the Fundacíon or coaches and they are able to improvise,” Mendoza said.

As part of the three-year commitment, participants must attend at least one yearly training where Fundación Paso Del Norte facilitates members of Coaches Across Continents who fly across the globe to offer training in Juárez.

“They would work with my program officer and my coach locally, and both of them would deliver the training for teachers,” Mendoza said. “In this four-day training, these two coaches are in charge of facilitating the whole methodology.”

Besides the in-person training, participants have access to an international information hub where members from all over the world upload new games, materials, tools and resources for all to use and incorporate into their classes.

Mendoza said connecting with Coaches Across Continents was an easy process resulting in a fruitful relationship.

“Usually, they want to work with communities that have a challenge in human rights and social development with some sort of a problem that the sports and games could be useful to use as a tool,” he said. “It was not difficult.”

The lack of resources for teachers is a worldwide phenomenon affecting instructors in lower-income places the most. Escuelas de Bienestar is conscious of this when offering training to ensure the programs succeed with their available supplies.

“We would have loved to give every school that we work with a full kit of PE class material,” Mendoza said. “We couldn’t do it with every school, but we did invest resources to fully equip 20 schools in Juárez. And every teacher participating in our program gets a donation of soccer balls that (don’t go flat).”

The organization received 5,000 soccer balls from the One World Play Project, 4,200 of which have been distributed throughout the program.

“[Sting, the singer] started this organization with the objective of getting soccer balls to the poorest communities and underserved communities around the world because he believed that playing could change the world,” Mendoza said.

The One World Futbol, the project’s flagship product, is an ultra-durable ball that doesn’t need a pump and never goes flat, even when punctured. Its design allows withstanding the most demanding playing conditions.

“The organization understands that the context of the kids is so different,” Mendoza said. “We have kids that play in the streets.”

In 2023, FPDN is reviewing the previous years of the program and learning how to continue helping the children of Juárez. It plans to survey program participants and other instructors outside of its network to evaluate its impact and identify resources and tools they have. From there, it will make adjustments.

“This year, we are very excited to explore how the program could be sustained in the community in one way or another,” Mendoza said, adding that the foundation plans to host one workshop in 2023 as opposed to the three it held in previous years.

Based on the findings for this year, the program will be updated and modified to provide support year-round available for every teacher in the country to access it and learn from the years the program operated.

“We don’t want to mention it as an exit strategy or as it is phasing out,” said Mendoza. “We prefer to communicate that this year we’re exploring how the program can become self-sufficient at some point with the help of teachers and community.”

This story was co-published with Next City as part of our joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship For Borderland Narratives.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The agency is soliciting applications from Houston residents who are interested in serving on a board of managers that is expected to take control of the 190,000-student school system no earlier than June 1. Morath is also expected to name a new superintendent to replace Millard House II, who was appointed in June 2021.     

In a letter to district leaders and an extensive interview with the Houston Landing, Morath said he has three priorities for the new leaders he will appoint. He wants the managers, who he said will serve indefinitely, to improve conditions in Houston’s lowest-performing schools — some of which have failed to meet state standards for more than a decade. He wants them to concentrate on the district’s ongoing struggles to provide special education services to students with disabilities. And he said he wants his appointees “consistently focused on improving student outcomes, and not something else.” 

“Even with governance challenges, many students are flourishing in Houston ISD schools, due in no small part to the extraordinary work of the district’s teachers and staff,” Morath noted in his letter. “In fact, Houston ISD operates some of the highest-performing schools in the state of Texas. But district procedures have also allowed it to operate schools where the support provided to students is not adequate.”

Besides academic performance, a state investigator’s finding that some members of a previous Houston ISD board had engaged in irregularities was a factor cited by education officials when they first announced they were stepping in in late 2019. A state court put the takeover on hold pending the outcome of a district lawsuit that charged Morath was acting improperly.        

In January, the Texas Supreme Court lifted the injunction, ruling that Morath was complying with the law by intervening. Last week, eight of Houston’s nine elected board members voted not to continue the legal challenge.

“This is certainly not a situation that anybody aspires to when they run for office,” said Sue Deigaard, who was elected to the school board in 2017. “I believe that right now what kids need is for the community to support this district and its ambitions to improve learning outcomes for all students, especially our historically underserved students. And to offer that support no matter who is sitting at the table.” 

A second board member, Kendall Baker, acknowledged the district’s recent struggles in comments to Houston’s ABC affiliate, KTRK. “What has occurred in the past has got us in a little trouble,” he conceded. 

In the weeks that followed the court’s order, local groups led by the Houston Federation of Teachers protested, insisting the takeover was a pretext by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to “further his public school privatization agenda.”

However, the law requiring Morath to intervene when local leaders would not was a bipartisan creation. Indeed, two current school board members have ties to Democratic state lawmakers who voted in favor of the policy.

Written by a Black Houston Democrat, Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., the 2015 takeover law was intended specifically to prod the district — now the eighth-largest in the nation — to invest in a number of deeply impoverished schools. Because locally elected boards often resist making bold changes, the law requires state education officials to act when one or more schools in a district have earned failing grades on state report cards for more than four consecutive years. 

Under the law, when a school earned a fifth “F” from the state, education officials had to choose one of two actions: Close the program in question or take over the district’s board. In 2017, as the first embattled districts realized they were staring down that deadline, lawmakers created an alternative.

A district could forestall sanctions for two years by turning the failing schools over to a nonprofit partner for a reboot. Because the eligible nonprofits included public charter school networks, and because the partners, which could also include universities and community groups, would control staffing, the teachers union protested.

Houston was supposed to meet the five-year trigger point for state sanctions in 2017. But because of damage from Hurricane Harvey, Morath granted a one-year reprieve. Simultaneously, school board members were supposed to notify the state whether the district would take advantage of the law’s new flexibility by seeking partners to run their lowest-performing schools.

A number of civic organizations had offered proposals to operate specific schools, but the meeting where the possibility was to be considered ended with board members — some of whom wanted to “send a signal” to the state by refusing to choose — deadlocked. At the same time, state investigations found past board members violated open meeting laws and engaged in contracting irregularities. 

Two years later, following another round of “F” grades for struggling schools and damning findings of board misconduct by state investigators, Morath formally notified the Houston district that the state was stripping the elected board of its authority and appointing a board of managers in its place. District leaders sued.

Evidence on the effectiveness of state takeovers of failing school systems is mixed, but the policies being tested in Houston are unique, said Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Texas law gives Morath’s appointed board of managers the flexibility to take advantage of a number of policies pinpointing specific interventions.

“Having a menu of options allows them to tailor the solutions to the job,” she says. “It’s where they depart from other states.”

Before he was appointed state education commissioner in 2016, Morath spent two terms on the Dallas Independent School District board. There, he championed a combination of school-level reforms — many of them now part of a model known as Accelerating Campus Excellence — that enjoyed some success. He has promoted those tactics as head of the Texas Education Agency, along with efforts that showed promise in other districts, including engaging outside nonprofits to run underperforming schools.

In San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and other communities where those strategies have borne early fruit, they have enjoyed enough centrist support to fend off the kinds of protests that have racked Houston in recent years. Still, local leaders say Morath would be wise to select a new superintendent who can generate the good will the temporary, appointed leaders will need if their reforms are to succeed.    

A bill filed Friday in the Texas Senate would prohibit public colleges and universities from awarding tenure to professors hired after September, legislation that critics have said would make it extremely difficult for the state to recruit top faculty and negatively impact the reputation of its higher education institutions.

The bill, filed by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, is one of three pieces of legislation in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s list of priorities for higher education this session.

Creighton also filed a bill that would prohibit Texas’ higher education institutions from considering diversity, equity and inclusion when hiring new employees. The third bill, filed by Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, would prohibit faculty members from teaching that any race, ethnicity, sex or political belief is “inherently superior to another.”

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If they pass as filed, the bills would markedly change how the state’s universities operate.

Critics contend this legislation will create a chilling effect in college classrooms as teachers and students try to determine what is acceptable to discuss, putting restraints on core tenets of higher education, such as academic freedom and free inquiry.

“Tenure and academic freedom were designed to protect scholars who sometimes study unpopular things, from the very kinds of political influence that Texas and Florida and other states are trying to exert over the classroom,” said Victor Ray, a professor at The University of Iowa who has written a book on critical race theory. “[This] harms the U.S.’s ability to create new ideas and innovate and do the kinds of things that conservatives claim they’re interested in doing. If there’s entire branches of ideas that are off the table, you can’t debate them and figure out what’s right and move forward.”

Last year, Patrick announced a proposal to eliminate tenure for future hires as a way to combat faculty members who he said “indoctrinate” students with teachings about “critical race theory.”

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that studies the way race and racism have impacted America’s legal and social systems. Over the past few years, conservatives have used “critical race theory” as a broad label to attack progressive teachings and books in college and K-12 schools that discuss how race and racism are taught in schools.

When Patrick released his list of legislative priorities earlier this session, he called Hughes’ bill a ban on “critical race theory” in higher education. Patrick’s announcement to ban tenure was also in response to a resolution issued by the University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council in February 2022 affirming instructors’ right to teach about racial justice and critical race theory in the classroom.

Since then, multiple university system leaders have expressed concerns that eliminating tenure might harm their ability to recruit top faculty. Last year, House Speaker Dade Phelan said he disagreed with Patrick’s proposal to end tenure. Abbott has been largely silent on the issue.

As filed, Creighton’s bill would let employees who have or were awarded tenure before Sept. 1 hold on to the benefit. And it allows the board of regents of a university system to establish their own “tiered employment status for faculty members.”

Tenure is an indefinite appointment for university faculty that can only be terminated under extraordinary circumstances. Professors who are considered on track to earn tenure typically work for five or six years as a professor before they go through a monthslong tenure review process. Typically, all tenured and non-tenured faculty already receive annual performance reviews, while tenured professors undergo a periodic review process. At UT-Austin, for instance, tenured professors undergo a comprehensive review of their teaching, research and other contributions to the university every six years.

In a press release Friday, Creighton criticized tenure as “a costly perk that is detrimental to innovative research and quality instruction.”

“At a time when colleges and universities have unprecedented endowments, bloated administrative costs and ballooning tuition it is time for lawmakers to reevaluate an outdated practice that guarantees lifetime employment at taxpayer expense,” he said.

Creighton also filed a bill that would prohibit the use of diversity statements in hiring; ban offices that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and expand the powers of boards of regents in hiring top administrators at their universities.

Under the bill, board members, who are appointed by the governor, would be able to approve or deny the hiring of vice presidents, provosts and deans, as well as approve courses in the core curriculum.

The bill says that universities cannot require students or faculty members to “endorse an ideology that promotes the differential treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on race, color, or ethnicity.”

Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office sent a letter to public universities and state agencies saying that considering diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring practices violated federal and state employment laws and barring them from hiring on factors “other than merit.” Legal experts have said the governor’s office mischaracterized the legal practices employers use when considering diversity in their hiring.

In response to the governor’s order, multiple university systems prohibited diversity statements in future job applications. These statements are short essays where a potential employee could describe their experiences working with diverse student groups or share their experiences working with diverse populations and their commitment to helping a diverse group of students succeed. Conservative critics have characterized them as political litmus tests.

Creighton’s bill prohibits these statements statewide. It also says a university may not create or have a diversity, equity and inclusion office that considers anything but “color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes,” conducts trainings or activities related to “race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation,” unless those trainings are approved in writing by the university’s general counsel and the Texas Attorney General.

The bill says the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will maintain a list of people who are found to violate this section of the law, and that universities cannot hire people on that list. If the coordinating board finds that a university violates this section, it can charge the school up to $1 million or 1% of the amount of the institution’s operating expenses for the prior fiscal year.

“The elevation of DEI offices on campuses have only furthered divides and created a chilling effect on open dialogue,” Creighton said in the press release. “This legislation will ensure Texas college campuses are environments that are open to differing ideas, foster meaningful, reasoned dialogue, and encourage intellectual discourse.”

Also on Friday, Sen. Joan Huffman, R- Houston, filed another bill creating a new endowment stream for Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, Texas State University and the University of North Texas.

The bill would rename the existing National Research University Fund, which provides extra funding to universities trying to boost their research arms, to the Texas University Fund.

Texas voters must approve a constitutional amendment allowing the change and to add $2.5 billion to the endowment before the state can officially start the fund.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Watching her older brother lead a math club from the front porch of her family’s quaint coastal home in the Dominican Republic helped foster Rosa Aristy’s love for STEM education as a child.  

Like her brother, Aristy grew up surrounded by family members who taught her the value of investing in others — a commitment she now makes to not only the students in her kids’ homeschool co-op but also their parents.

“That front porch they would sit at was the very first math club I was exposed to,” Aristy told The 74. “Seeing them laugh because they were having so much fun learning together became something I wanted to instill in others.”

Aristy’s upbringing served as the inspiration for Bridges to Science, a Houston-based nonprofit that addresses diversity gaps in STEM education through math, robotics and coding programs for homeschool students.

Through the support of the VELA Education Fund, Bridges to Science has expanded its mission to train homeschool parents on how to teach their children math.

Today, Bridges to Science serves more than 50 homeschool students across Texas with the help of local universities, organizations and volunteers.

“It’s a very near and dear vision of mine…and the intent is to support our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access,” Aristy said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: How would you say your upbringing and being a homeschool mother influenced the creation of Bridges to Science?

When we first moved to Texas, I noticed the school system was really focused on annual testing. It was beginning to rob my children of the joy of learning and I didn’t want that to happen. That was the one thing my parents in particular instilled in me and I want my kids to be lifelong learners. 

One day the moms at my children’s homeschool co-op asked the students to vote on what courses they wanted to learn. They pretty much said they wanted more coding, robotics and STEM classes. The moms and I just stared at each other wondering who would have the courage to teach these classes. No one seemed committed to doing this and I didn’t want to let our students down. I had done some programming before, not the kind they wanted to learn, but I thought that I could learn something child-friendly and get up to speed. 

But before I did that, I was aware that homeschoolers in my community use a curriculum and approach to math that’s memory-based and very common in school systems. I knew that it wasn’t giving the kids the math foundation they needed to go into the sciences. So I said, let me first start off with a math club like my brother’s growing up and once the foundation is set we can do coding next. That’s how Bridges to Science first started out. 

How has Bridges to Science supported homeschool parents teach their children math?

We just got a grant for that and we’re super excited. This summer we’re going to launch a math workshop for parents similar to the ones we have for students. We want parents to have the opportunity to interact with mathematicians and see the beauty of math because it takes a village to impact our children’s lives. If we get parents to bring down their fears about math, they’ll feel more comfortable facilitating inquiry-based sessions with their children. 

I think the stress around math roots from parents wanting to solve the problem for their students and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to rob them of the joy of discovering the way out of those problems. So that’s our intent. We’re using a very solid approach that is backed by research, but we’re tailoring it to the needs of homeschool moms that is culturally relevant and through methods that respond well to their educational scenario.

What is something important to keep in mind when it comes to educating homeschooled families?

Homeschool communities have grown in its diversity and flavors. Sometimes I sense that there’s a stereotype of who we are that doesn’t really reflect who my students are. For example, we’re seeing more families from underprivileged neighborhoods try out homeschooling. And we’re seeing many single moms stepping up to homeschool their children too. They’re not doing it for any ideological reasons but really just for practicality. So I think the world needs to know that homeschooling, at least here in Houston, is a little more diverse than what you may think.

I understand that Bridges to Science is geared for underserved students — primarily Hispanic students. As a Dominican immigrant, tell me more about why it’s important for you to bridge that diversity gap in STEM education.

I like to envision my organization through a spectrum. On one end, we have our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access. On the other end, we have universities, organizations and corporations we work with that have an abundance of resources. We serve as the bridge to unite them so our students can see beyond their existing scenario. 

It’s a very near and dear vision of mine because, in a way, I see myself in them. I grew up in a very small town and my father passed away when I was 12. I had to grow up really fast during my middle school years and get a job to help my mom. You don’t have to go through a big transition like I did, but my life was always at a crossroads. I want our children to explore all the beautiful things they can do in STEM without worry.

You speak about your work with so much love and conviction. Where would you say this energy comes from?

It must be from my mom and dad. Both of them were passionate educators and people who invested into the lives of a lot of people — especially youth. The one thing I learned, particularly from my mom, was to love my students and see them as a whole.

As a kid, I vividly remember my mom stopping me one day from watching videos because we needed to go to someone’s house. I was a typical kid and complained and asked her why me? Why was it so important for us to be there? She told me that she noticed one of her students was sad and realized that her parents were thinking of getting a divorce. So my mom went there to act as a counselor and see if there was anything she could do to help the parents. That really spoke volumes to me. My mom had five kids but she made the time to do those kinds of things. It taught me how important it is to invest in others.

As Bridges to Science continues to expand its reach, what do you hope families take away from their experience?

Half of our students have some sort of adversity attached to them. It could either be due to race, socioeconomic or neurodivergence. When I started Bridges to Science, I set out to give our children the privileges they didn’t have access to. As I’ve invested in my students, I always tell them that they need to pay it forward. And little by little, that’s the vision we have moved towards.