School Bus Grant Update
The Texas Clean School Bus Program to award grants to ISDs and charters to retrofit or replace aging diesel buses announced on Jan. 7 has proven so popular that the requests for grants quickly exceeded the funding availability by $7.4 million.
As of Jan. 21, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) reported receiving funding requests for $13.6 million. The Legislature appropriated only $6.2 million for the program.
No grant funds have been awarded thus far, and the commission has not announced any plans to change the current application cut-off date of Dec. 17, 2020, with grants to be awarded on a first-come, first-awarded basis. Click here for the program's updated status page.
Student Suspensions
Students in the 19,000-student Beaumont ISD were suspended at a rate more than six times the state average — far
As districts across Texas have scaled back on suspensions and “zero tolerance” approaches to discipline in recent years, Beaumont has gone in the other direction, with administrators issuing 46 suspensions per 100 students last year, the state’s highest rate over the last decade, the publications reported.
By comparison, the district with the state’s second-highest rate, Port Arthur ISD, issued 31 suspensions per 100 students. The state average was 7 per 100.
The reporting (in the Houston Chronicle article) contained a searchable database of student suspension rates for Texas charters and ISDs and their campuses.
School Bond News
It’s taken two months to finally conclude that the Midland ISD $569 million Nov. 5 bond election failed by 26 votes.
That’s according to the just completed (Jan. 17) vote count of ballots that were found inside a box that had been overlooked by Midland County election officials and was only discovered in mid-December.
At various times since election night, the MISD bond package had been reported as either passing or failing by tiny vote margins.
Prior to starting the process to count the ballots in the box that was found, lawyers for entities supporting and opposing the bond proposal pledged not to challenge the outcome in the courts.
Meanwhile, Dallas ISD is reportedly considering three options for a “no tax increase” future bond proposal, ranging from $2.7 billion to $3.7 billion, for the November 2020 ballot. A final decision is to be made this summer. Any of the three proposals would be the largest ever put before voters by a Texas school district, published reports reflect.
“Dixie” Nixed
The school board of the 700-student Refugio ISD unanimously voted (Jan. 14) to stop the district’s many-years-long practice of playing “Dixie” as the ISD’s fight song.
The song had been played without lyrics at RISD football games, but had not been used at the football team’s most recent games after school officials decided to pause its use until a final decision was made. The RISD board had voted 5-2 to keep “Dixie” last November.
But supporters of dropping the song, citing its racist history and lyrics, continued to press for the district to discontinue the tradition.
“Most Educated” Ranking
A new report (Jan. 20) by the WalletHub personal finance website considered 18 educational attainment metrics, and concluded that Texas ranks 39th — ahead of Oklahoma but behind Arizona — in the overall “most educated states” educational attainment rank.
Texas ranked 1st in the nation in the metric for the narrowest educational attainment gap between male and female genders, and 49th nationally of adults age 25 and older with at least a high school diploma.
Some of the other metrics, and how Texas ranked included: 1) average university quality (30th), 2) percent of bachelor's degree holders (28th), 3) percent of graduate or professional degree holders (33rd) and 4) racial gap in educational attainment (5th).
Media Awards
The governor’s office announced applications are being accepted (until Feb. 17) for the 2020 Barbara Jordan Media Awards. The award honors media professionals and high school and college students who produce media covering the experiences of people with disabilities.