A daily round-up of education news and views for the Lone Star State

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Education has distributed all $122bn in school COVID-19 relief funding from the American Rescue Plan to all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. "We are urging states and school districts to deploy funds now to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Omicron variant, on our school communities. We continue to encourage state and local education leaders to utilize funds for testing, personal protective equipment, and staff recruitment and retention," said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. "In areas where these funds are being deployed quickly, we are already seeing the positive impact that this infusion of federal support is having directly in schools and communities. We know what it takes to keep our schools open safely for in-person learning, and these funds will help us achieve that goal."

 

CNN

Cathy Lee Hernandez is moving on from the superintendent position for La Feria ISD, with the school board unanimously approving her resignation/retirement agreement and appointing Lillian Ramos, the district’s executive director of special education, as interim leader. The new interim said she was honored by the decision and pledged to instill a spirit of open communication in the district. “I will do my best to continue keeping the district in line and working with our team for the improvement of our students,” Ms. Ramos added.

 

The Monitor

A record-high number of COVID-19 cases in Richardson ISD has caused a substantial increase in the number of elementary students seeking remote learning. This has put a strain on the remote learning offered to students quarantining due to COVID-19, according to a letter to parents, with higher student numbers “making the learning environment less productive for many students.” Richardson ISD did not immediately have figures for the number of students who are learning remotely. That figure is expected to be available sometime today, following the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. 

 

Dallas Morning News

A Bastrop nonprofit is hoping to build the city’s first recreation center on the site of the former Emile High School, a segregated school for Black students that closed in 1969. The Emile Multicultural Center/Recreation Complex is hoping to build the center on the plot of land on which the school once stood; it has met with an architect to discuss tentative plans for the 42,000 sq ft facility, with a 5,000 sq ft multicultural museum. The facility is also proposed to have a 27,000 sq ft gym which would be open for a variety of sports including volleyball, basketball and pickleball.

 

Austin American-Statesman

School employees are stepping up across the U.S. to provide classroom instruction, as a lack of available substitute teachers compounds ongoing staffing shortages caused by COVID-19-related teacher absences. Some school districts have boosted pay to try to lure back reluctant substitutes or attract new ones, and several states recently eased rules for fill-in teachers. “The staff shortage, and shortage of substitutes, is significantly worse than I’ve ever seen it,” said Debra Pace, superintendent in Osceola County, Florida, which has 74,000 students. More than 300 of the roughly 4,000 teachers at her Central Florida district have called in sick lately, she said. Yet the district is able to find subs just 40%-50% of the time, whereas normally the rate is around 90%. At the same time, those teachers who are able to get to the classroom are facing scenarios where as many as half of students are absent because they have been exposed to COVID-19 or their families kept them at home out of concern about the surging coronavirus. Some of the country’s biggest school systems report absentee rates around 20% or slightly more, with some individual schools seeing far higher percentages of missing students. The schools in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, typically have 90% attendance, but that figure has dropped to 83%. In Seattle, attendance has averaged 81% since the return from winter break. Los Angeles public schools marked about 30% of the district’s 600,000-plus students absent on Tuesday last week, the first day back after the break. “This is really taking a toll on the learning. If you have three kids in your class one day and you’re supposed to have 12, you have to reteach everything two weeks later when those kids come back,” said Tabatha Rosproy, a teacher in Olathe, Kansas, and the 2020 national Teacher of the Year. 

 

AP News

Los Angeles Times

Wall Street Journal

In a December survey of educators conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, 18% of respondents said their school was “not currently doing anything” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in cafeteria settings. Among those that were, 50% of respondents said students are required to social distance in the cafeteria, and 47% said their school had reduced the number of students who could eat in the lunch room at a given time. Even as the Omicron variant spreads and case counts spikes around the country, there haven’t been broad renewed conversations about changing lunch protocols, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which advocates for school meal professionals. Approaches vary widely around the country, and sometimes between schools in the same district, she added.

 

Education Week

Students are more likely to enroll in college if they believe their family can afford the cost of attending, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics.  The center found a 20-percentage point difference in actual enrollment between students who thought their family could afford college versus those who didn’t. The data comes from NCES' High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which surveyed more than 23,000 9th grade students nationwide and tasked them with answering questions between 2009 and 2016. The center then reviewed college transcripts in the 2017-18 school year, analyzing views of college affordability and employment three years after high school. Bill Ziegler, a Pennsylvania high school principal and board member of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said he’s not surprised by the NCES findings.  “I think students don’t want to put a burden on their family, and that’s where I think as school principals we have a responsibility to come alongside students and teach them how they can afford college even beyond what their family can contribute to scholarships and other things like that,” Ziegler said.

 

K-12 Dive

William Cannings, an associate professor of sculpture in Texas Tech’s School of Art, housed within the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts, is to have his work displayed at the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston. The installation of 30 inflated steel clouds will take place in May, and will be a permanent fixture. “The clouds themselves were inspired by the Llano Estacado and all the beautiful clouds we see in the sky here,” Cannings said. “It was a simple idea, but I thought it fit well in the airport’s atmosphere. Airports by nature can be stressful places, so I wanted to create something whimsical that could transport people as they move about the concourse.”

 

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal