News Briefs

Bus Accident Reports
Charters and ISDs have until
Aug. 31 to complete and return the TEA’s Bus Accident Reporting System questionnaire. The TEA has never received a 100 percent response rate, despite a state law making responding to the survey mandatory.
more info

Foster Care
A 363-page report by two monitors appointed by a Dallas federal judge overseeing a years-long federal suit over foster care in Texas concludes that the state still runs “a disjointed and dangerous child protection system,” in which “harm to children is at critical times overlooked, ignored or forgotten.”

Gov. Abbott was quoted in the Dallas Morning News (paywall) as saying that he hadn’t read the report, but that the Legislature in 2017 granted his emergency item that resulted in lawmakers devoting billions of dollars to make sure that children will be better taken care of — and criticized the millions of dollars the monitors are being paid. (Click here for the Texas Standard's free article.)

Download the full report here (very large file - 3.3 MB).

Data “Leaks”
Texas, followed by California, are the biggest “hot spots” when it comes to the number of public and private K-12 data breaches since 2005, a new report by Comparitech reflects.

Although Texas was reported to have had 40 data breaches exposing 448,878 records, California’s 37 reported breaches exposed more records (617,405).

When data breaches by K-12 schools and colleges/universities are combined, California leads Texas, 157 data breaches to 79 — and California, with 2.8 million records exposed, far exceeded Texas, with 990,709 records exposed.