The Texas Education Agency will remove the Fort Worth Independent School District’s elected board members and may appoint a new superintendent to oversee its operations, Commissioner Mike Morath announced Thursday morning.

The decision to assume control of the North Texas district follows months of speculation about how the state would respond to one of the Fort Worth campuses not meeting Texas’ academic accountability standards for five consecutive years. The district closed the sixth-grade campus at the end of the 2023-24 school year, but Morath in the spring that state law still required him to intervene. 

Dallas’ local news station first reported news about the takeover Wednesday evening. 

In a statement Wednesday night, the district said it was aware of media reports about state action but would wait for an official announcement before sharing information with families.

“Our focus remains on our students by providing uninterrupted learning,” the statement read. “We are grateful to our educators and staff for their continuous commitment to our students and families.”

State takeovers of districts can only be initiated if one of its schools receives a failing grade from the TEA for five consecutive years, and allows the replacement of elected school board members with state appointees. The state can also direct districts to shut down the failing schools rather than replace the school boards with a board of managers.

While Fort Worth ISD shut down Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade before the TEA gave it its fifth F rating, Morath said in a March letter that it would not halt potential state action.

Fort Worth ISD was among school districts at risk of a state takeover, a record number in Texas. Beaumont, Connally, Lake Worth and Wichita Falls independent school districts have all amassed five consecutive failing grades at one or more of its campuses. Morath visited Lake Worth ISD on , where Marilyn Miller Language Academy received five consecutive F ratings.

A state takeover of the North Texas district would be the second largest in the state, and Morath three of its schools in August as the TEA considered a takeover. 

With the state taking control of Fort Worth ISD, there have been 11 state takeovers of districts in Texas since 2000, including Houston Independent School District, which is the state’s largest. That takeover began in 2023 and was to 2027 in June. 

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Staring down the nearly 80-year history of modern suburbia, Herold finds that the effort produced mostly “disposable communities” across the country. While they served their first few sets of residents — his family included — they have failed to deliver the promise of the American Dream to the families of color who followed. Case in point: He notes that in the north of Dallas, where his reporting takes him, Black mortgage loan applications are now denied at a rate 23 percentage points higher than those of white applicants with similar incomes.

And while many families sought suburban homes in large part for their superior schools, even that isn’t a given anymore, he finds — especially if you’re not white or born in the U.S.A. Instead of an educational upgrade, he reports, many families now find troubled, underfunded schools, intractable bureaucracies, teachers’ union contracts that make “any wholesale changes difficult” and, perhaps worst of all, maddening discrimination in the very place where they’d sought refuge.

A longtime Education Week staffer who now teaches journalism at Temple University, Herold spent four years examining the historical record and found a pattern: As suburbs age, municipal revenues often fall, even as the costs of maintaining infrastructure rise. An “entrenched culture of political backscratching and can-kicking” exacerbates these problems.

In one suburban district in Evanston, Ill., outside of Chicago, crusading superintendent Paul Goren tells Herold, “I landed in a district that had a foundation of quicksand. It was wobbly on the instructional side, with lots of people doing their own thing because that was what they had done for years. We were [also] facing some level of financial doom.”  

Eventually, Herold writes, what befell so many suburbs was what he calls a “relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”

His book, out Tuesday, follows five diverse families in suburban Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. He actually grew up in the Penn Hills neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, and finds one of his subjects just three doors down from his childhood home.

Herold spent years getting to know these families, offering a deeply reported and closely observed account of five families’ struggles to capture what his family so easily enjoyed. 

����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

Benjamin Herold: Suburbia worked great for my middle-class white family and millions of others like us who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks and sparkling new infrastructure, including public schools we got decades to mold in our own image. But all that was made possible by trading short-term wealth for massive debts and liabilities that we pushed off on to future generations. Eventually, the bills come due. That’s what we’re seeing now.

You write that America’s suburbs since World War II have resembled a kind of Ponzi scheme that has stuck later investors with the bill. So we’re in the “after” part of the cycle, right?

All too often, it’s newer suburban families of color who get stuck paying for all the opportunity that whiter and wealthier families like mine already extracted. Because this cycle plays out over large geographies and multiple generations, it can be difficult to recognize when we take snapshots of a single suburban community at a single point in time. That’s why I followed five families living in five suburban communities that are each at a different stage of this process.

It’s also why public schools are such a valuable lens — we can only really see the bigger picture when we pay close attention to the anger, frustration and disillusionment that so many suburban parents feel when they’ve done everything right, yet still have to deal with their children being called racial slurs, subjected to unfair discipline and denied access to opportunities like gifted programs.

Just three doors down from your old house in Penn Hills, you knock on a door and find one of your five subjects: Bethany Smith, a Black woman who bought the place with her mother. That Bethany’s experience is so different from your family’s seems to reveal what you’re getting at in the book. Tell us about her. [Note: Herold uses pseudonyms for all of his subjects with the exception of Smith, who writes the book’s epilogue.]

Bethany’s family and mine wanted the same things: a quiet street, good public schools, homes that steadily increase in value, systems and services that just work. The difference is that my white family got most of those things without paying full price, while Bethany’s family had to pay extra to receive declining services, a school district that was raising taxes and slashing services and a stagnant housing market. 

Your subjects — almost all of whom are people of color — seem in many ways left to their own devices when it comes to pursuing these dreams in mostly crumbling, formerly white suburbs. What should communities be doing differently to help these families?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s why: In suburban Atlanta, I followed a middle-class Black family named the Robinsons. Both parents have advanced degrees, good jobs, rich social networks, and a strong spiritual foundation. Both also unabashedly love learning. Nika, the mom, was pursuing her PhD in public health, and Anthony, the dad, was a network engineer and former middle school teacher who stayed up late each night re-teaching geometry concepts to his teen son. Both parents were extremely active in their children’s schools, volunteering in the library, going to every parent-teacher meeting and maintaining running email correspondence with their kids’ teachers. And both Nika and Anthony are extremely kind and funny to boot. So for me, the question becomes: How on earth does a well-regarded system like the Gwinnett County Public Schools not only fail to connect with a family like the Robinsons, but actively alienate them, by gradually whittling away their oldest son’s spirit, joy, and sense of self, despite the abundant resources, assets and gifts the Robinsons bring with them?

So how can we understand the Robinsons’ experience through your lens of suburban decline instead of incompetence at the school level?

By 2019, Gwinnett County was nearly two-thirds Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial. But in many ways, the Gwinnett County Public Schools operated as if it were still the early 1990s, when the population it served was still 90 percent white. During the period I write about, this was evident in big racial disparities in school discipline and access to gifted programs; Black and brown children now made up about two-thirds of all the district’s students, but barely one-third of the kids the district identified as gifted and talented.

Above all, though, this dynamic was evident in the district’s leadership. Prior to 2018, Gwinnett had somehow never elected a person of color to its five-member school board, which was largely controlled by three older white women, one of whom had held her seat for 47 years, and all of whom were vocal in their beliefs that changing the way things had always been in order to reflect the priorities and values of a changing population was tantamount to diluting the quality of the education the district offered. There was plenty of incompetence, but it occurred within the larger context of a $2.3 billion organization with policies, practices, and personnel that too often showed flagrant disregard for the majority of families it served. 

Eventually, things start to fall apart for nearly all of your subjects, it seems. Even the Beckers, a conservative and affluent white family, ultimately give up on the public schools in their exclusive Dallas exurb after a single year. They end up in a private Christian academy in a Plano strip mall. That makes me wonder: Is at least some of the “unraveling” you’re describing just the messiness of life, parent restlessness writ large?

I approached writing Disillusioned from two angles. I wanted to illuminate a big economic, social, and political pattern that we all now live within because America is such a suburban nation. I also wanted to explore the choices everyday families make and the lives we build as we try to figure out our relationship to that pattern. So I don’t think the Beckers’ relentless search for better schools is separate or distinct from the cycle of suburban churn they’re trying to navigate. As with the rest of us, these larger forces help determine the available options, and the choices we make in turn help shape those larger forces. 

You note throughout the book that Black and brown students have always had a fraught relationship with their suburban schools: “For so long,” you write, “so much of suburbia had been organized around trying first to keep those kids out, then treating them as a problem to be managed.” Yet in Compton, Calif., which is now almost entirely Black and brown, you find a measure of promise. Can you say more?

Jefferson Elementary in Compton is housed in a ramshackle facility consisting of several rundown bungalow buildings with narrow slits for windows that are almost reminiscent of a prison. But what I saw inside Jefferson and Compton Unified was a multiracial collection of adults — including a Black superintendent and school board chair, a Filipino principal, and a Latino fourth-grade teacher whose classroom I followed — who were unflagging in their belief that Compton’s children were bursting with talent and deserved all the opportunities and supports the system could muster. 

One of my favorite little examples of this was a narrative essay the fourth-graders were asked to write. The kids had to describe what a typical day would look like if they worked at . A boy named Jacob, whose family I was following, wrote this incredible piece about designing new droids and prototyping new light sabers and having water-cooler conversations with George Lucas. Between assignments like that, after-school robotics clubs, the chance to create a class newspaper, engineering lessons through [a well-regarded STEM-focused curriculum], and a class-wide mock trial, the kids were flooded with opportunities to imagine themselves shaping America’s future. And Superintendent Darin Brawley was extremely intentional about this, at a very big-picture level — he recognized that his retirement and his own family’s progress would depend on how well he prepared the students in Compton Unified, and so he took that responsibility not just seriously, but personally.

Your idea to pay Bethany Smith, the Penn Hills mom, to write the book’s epilogue strikes me as a bold choice. She’s quite blunt, for the record, writing that white people “are always fucking some shit up, then expecting everybody else to go fix it.” Why, among all of your subjects, does she deserve the last word? After the century-long narrative you’ve woven, is this the message you want readers to take away?

I love Bethany’s epilogue. I think it’s just tremendous. I’m so grateful she agreed to write it, and I’m even more grateful she was willing to get really, really honest, even when doing so was painful for her and unflattering for me. 

A central question drove me to give four years of my life to this project. I wanted to know how the opportunities my white family enjoyed in Penn Hills a generation ago are connected to the declining fortunes of the families who live in Penn Hills now. And I think Bethany’s epilogue really helped capture and communicate the answer. But it took me a long-time to actually be able to really hear what she was saying, in part because I had to shed a lot of my own illusions.

The breakthrough came when I finally realized I had to engage these questions emotionally, not just intellectually. And that meant putting under a microscope my own experience as a white person who grew up in suburbia, reaped its benefits and left behind a mess so I could go build a comfortable life somewhere else. Doing that made the book much richer, and that was a direct result of the challenge Bethany issued to me. So I’m extremely thankful to her, and to all the families and educators featured in this book who helped create a space that allowed all of us to give as much of our hearts as we felt comfortable sharing. 

Disclosure: Benjamin Herold received support from at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Greg Toppo is a Spencer Fellowship board member.

Thousands of delegates to the National Education Association Representative Assembly will not be meeting in Dallas in July as scheduled, and the reason has nothing to do with COVID-19.

The union took the unprecedented step of canceling its Texas plans due to its displeasure with having to do with voting, abortion and critical race theory, internal NEA sources say. Several state affiliates had threatened not to send their delegates to the convention if it were held in Texas.

One of these was NEA New Hampshire, which boycotted the 2019 assembly that was held in Houston for similar reasons. That year, the controversial Texas legislation concerned what the union saw as discriminatory policies against undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community in Houston and the state.

The NEA Representative Assembly meets for four days once a year to set the national union’s policies and elect officers. Due to COVID, the assembly was held virtually in 2020 and 2021.

Considering the estimated 6,000 delegates involved and hotel rooms needed, it will be difficult to find another venue on such short notice. One source reports that NEA is looking at Chicago and Orlando as possible destinations. If an alternative cannot be found, the 2022 assembly will be held online.

There was no word from NEA or other state affiliates as to whether this action means further sanctions against travel to Texas.

NEA, NEA New Hampshire and the Texas State Teachers Association did not respond to requests for comment.

A complicating factor is whether NEA is willing to continue down this boycott path. Will it schedule future meetings only in blue states? That could get tricky and expensive.

Virtual conventions are a mixed bag for NEA. On the one hand, they greatly reduce the $6.5 million the national union spends annually on in-person assemblies, along with millions of dollars in expenses state affiliates incur by sending delegates.

On the other hand, online assemblies mean a greatly reduced scope of business conducted and completed. Delegate participation in the 2021 virtual convention was way down, bringing in fewer than 5,600 members, even though they didn’t have to leave home.

But one has to wonder if NEA considers that a bug or a feature. Representative assemblies often get bogged down in long debates over issues that rarely result in any concrete action. Two years of no in-person events haven’t resulted in any perceivable change in union policies or operations. Maybe the money is better spent elsewhere.

The state is poised to resettle approximately 4,500 Afghan refugees, second in the nation behind California. 

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“These students are resilient,” said Salimah Shamsuddin, Refugee Family Support Coordinator for the Austin Independent School District where about 50 refugee students from Afghanistan have recently been resettled. 

“They’ve been through something so traumatic, and they’re coming to a new country, learning a new language, and it all can be challenging, but even so, they do pick up English a lot faster when they’re in the classroom.”

Still, she said educators are keeping in mind the hardships they have faced and the worry they feel about those left behind in Afghanistan.  

“We do have to consider that they’re still really concerned for the well being of their family back at home,” she said. “So even though they’re here, it’s still a challenging time.” 

The students, who join about 350 refugee students from Afghanistan who had previously been resettled in the area over the past few years, are arriving with limited English-language skills, so teachers use imagery as much as possible, she added.

Using images or drawings can help students express what they know conceptually before they have the words, Shamsuddin said, adding visual cue cards are used with words like “line up,” “stop” and “take turns.” 

The cue cards are currently being translated into Dari/English and Pashto/English, Dari and Pashto are the most widely spoken languages in Afghanistan. 

ESL teachers are equipped to teach second-language acquisition skills, said Cody Fernandez, director of Secondary Multilingual Education at Austin ISD. 

Austin ISD uses counselors and may also refer students to outside providers as well who understand different cultures, Shamsuddin said.

She said that for many, especially those who arrived in August and September — when the Taliban took over and there was heightened instability — there were concerns about families still in Afghanistan. Some may have experienced trauma,  depression, anxiety, PTSD and other challenges.

Shamsuddin and her team have conducted training for educators so they can be aware of cultural differences, including body language and communication style differences.

 In western societies, people are individualistic and value the promotion of personal goals, while in non-western societies, there is more of a focus on group goals and the social unit, she said. In the school system, there is also a peer-support program that pairs a newcomer with an established student to better equip both with learning about the other person. 

Shamsuddin noted that Austin ISD is used to new students arriving and that interpreters are available for families.

“So often, an interpreter is not used for things,” she said. “And if we really want to be truly equitable, then it’s important that we’re communicating to parents in their preferred language.”

Meanwhile, at Dallas Independent School District, the district considers not only the time needed for a newcomer to learn the language but also the new cultural and social environment, said Zeljka Ravlija, program coordinator for the Refugee School Impact Program.

Ravlija is currently conducting orientation lessons via Zoom using a PowerPoint presentation to prepare the schools and educators for the newcomers. 

“These orientations are teaching on the cultural background of Afghans,” she said, including   lessons on ethnicities, the various regional languages spoken, and religious values in the country.

Educators are also being taught basic phrases such as “hello” and “thank you,” what holidays are important to the students in their home countries, gender roles, and name pronunciations, among other topics

Ravlija noted the challenges that many refugee students experience before their arrival in Texas, which may include poverty, war, trauma and other unstable factors. They often spend time in a refugee camp before resettlement.

As COVID cases surged across the country this summer, fueled by spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined the American Academy of Pediatrics in recommending that all students and staff wear masks in school. But in Texas, as in a handful of other conservative states, an executive order banning mask mandates forbade school districts from following that guidance.

In Dallas, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa felt that he was faced with a choice: risk over 153,000 students’ safety or risk legal challenges. The superintendent chose the latter, defying Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban and paving the way for dozens of other districts in the state to follow the same path.

Now nearly a month into the school year, and as COVID rages through the Dallas community, the struggle is making its way through state courts. And all the while, Hinojosa is contending with the urgent question of how to bring students back up to speed after a year of disrupted learning.

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This year, Dallas is rolling out discipline reforms to end racial disparities in suspension, new social-emotional supports and revamped school calendars to boost students’ learning time.

����Ӱ�� caught up with Hinojosa over the phone to hear how those efforts are unfolding and get the latest on the district’s legal showdown over masks.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: It’s been a pretty surreal back-to-school season and Dallas has been in the news a lot. What’s top of mind for you right now?

Hinojosa: Last year was a year like no other, and this August has been an August like no other. Even as surreal as last year was, this August has been even crazier.

On Aug. 3, our county went to code red (representing high COVID transmission). The very next day, I’m attending a meeting of some superintendents … and we heard from a very prominent attorney that maybe the governor can’t enforce this (ban on mask mandates). So the Houston superintendent calls me and is telling me they’re thinking about implementing a mask mandate protocol and so I said, “I’m with you.” I really felt it was under my authority, since I have the authority to run the day-to-day operations of the school district.

Aug. 9 we announced our mask protocols, and then everything breaks loose.

I’ve been following along with the legal developments. Dallas ISD’s mask mandate was challenged, and then a judge ruled in your favor. But now the state attorney general has appealed. Can you give me a sense of where you think this whole thing is headed?

Well, it changes almost on a daily basis.

We prevailed at the district court. But the governor (Greg Abbott) and attorney general (Ken Paxton) can appeal to an appeals court and we think we’ll win there. But we think eventually we’re going to lose at the (Texas) Supreme Court … because they’re all conservative members.

It’s very interesting that the attorney general and the governor have both said publicly that they’re going to prosecute anybody who implements a mask protocol. But in the court pleadings, they said that they had no authority to do that. Then the commissioner of education (Mike Morath) has come out and said that they’re not going to enforce anything until all of these court proceedings are over.

So what I predict is that eventually this will go to the Supreme Court and we will be told at some point that we cannot have our mask protocol as we want it. But there’s going to be no enforcement, because I don’t see the local district attorneys coming after all 60 superintendents in Texas that are defying the governor’s executive order.

We’ve said all along, this was temporary. Come November, if we get back under 500 COVID cases in the county and we’ve stopped the spread on campuses, then I’ll be glad to lift the mask mandate. I don’t really like it myself, but we’re trying to protect the health and safety of our students.

As I’m sure you know, the federal government is opening civil rights probes into five states over their ban on mask mandates in schools. Texas isn’t on that list because the issue is already in the hands of the courts. But more broadly, what type of federal involvement might be useful in Texas? And do you see bans on mask mandates as a civil rights issue?

One of the reasons [the U.S. Department of Education] didn’t go after Texas is that they now have the understanding that what the governor has done is unenforceable. So that’s why we weren’t included in that order.

But it could be a civil rights issue. We’ll have to see how that plays out. We do get federal dollars for special education and economically disadvantaged students and, of course, they have given us significant dollars for the Recovery Act. So the feds do have some skin in this game and they’re not just sitting on the sidelines.

Seems like the federal government is trying to find out whether bans on mask mandates systematically exclude specific students, perhaps immunocompromised students from the classroom.

Yeah, that’s the focus of their inquiry, which gives them standing on this matter and, of course, those students are all over the country, so it does give them an entrée, I believe. But I’m not an attorney.

Over the weekend, Dr. Fauci told CNN that school [COVID] vaccine mandates for eligible students are a good idea based on the benefit-to-risk ratio. Schools already require a number of other vaccinations for enrollment and the FDA recently gave full approval to the Pfizer shot for folks 16 and up. What are your thoughts on the topic of mandating student vaccinations?

I’m supportive. I’m not ready to litigate at this time yet. What we’ve done instead to start with is we’re giving a $25 gift card for any student who provides his or her proof of vaccination. So we’re going down that path, we’re going a little bit more slowly (than we did with our mask policy).

But we would be supportive, especially when our younger students can take the vaccine, and we’re now hearing late November, early December when that vaccination will be available. I would be in favor of [a student immunization requirement]. You’re exactly right. We require other vaccines and so I would be very supportive of that, although I’m not going to be as assertive on that one as we have been on the mask protocol.

So just to clarify, when students under 12 do become eligible for shots that might open the door for Dallas to move toward mandating student vaccines? 

Yes, I would definitely consider it at that point because it’d be much more universal.

And for staff vaccine mandates, they’re banned in Texas but have been implemented in a number of states. Do you think making COVID shots mandatory for teachers might be an appropriate public health measure? And how do politics play in?

We have 22,000 employees and so we told them that we would give them a $500 stipend if they prove that they were vaccinated. Within three hours, we had 6,000 staff turn in their documentation. We are now up to around 11,000 and then the ones that just went out and took the vaccine, it takes them a while to get their documentation. So we anticipate we’ll get probably three-quarters on a voluntary basis.

But to answer your question, yes, I would be very supportive, especially for campus employees who deal with children to be required to have a vaccination. But even our county hospital can’t require vaccination in Texas for their nurses because of the state laws that are in place. When San Antonio ISD tried to do that, they got halted by the attorney general.

And in a sentence or two, what’s at stake in these safety decisions for students, families and teachers?

Everything’s at stake here.

Not only their safety, but the data is overwhelming that in-person instruction is by far the best. A few, maybe five percent of the students, do better virtually. But can you imagine if we have to have students at home because [COVID] spread got so bad that they lose another year of instruction? A whole generation could be at risk of falling so far behind that they can’t catch up. So there’s a lot at stake.

We’re very proud that we got to 97 percent of our projected enrollment and out of that, 96 percent of it is in person. So our students are glad to be back. Our families are glad to be back, but boy, we’ve got a big hill to climb academically.

On that topic of catching students up, especially given the fact that more often than not, some of those students who fell furthest behind last year were those who perhaps had fewer supports or financial resources at home, what efforts are underway in Dallas to help kids get back up to speed? I read about a tutoring program, for instance.

Well, we had 36,000 households without connectivity, so we put together a program called Operation Connectivity to connect our families and we executed on that plan. [At first] we did hotspots, but now we put up towers so that at least they can have access if they’re having to learn from home.

We’re also going to have tutoring during the school day, afterschool and in the summer.

But we now have three different calendars. One of them is a year-round calendar, where you get more time. Another one is what we call an intersession calendar, where you go five weeks, and then you’re off a week, go another five weeks, and you go off a week. We catch students up [who are behind during that week off]. For our most challenging schools — we have 60 that we call “high-priority campuses” — we have a very robust afterschool program from 3 to 6 p.m. for enrichment activities and strong academic activities to try to get them caught up.

And we’ve completely reinvented our summer school. So we’re doing all of those things all at the same time to accelerate learning.

Can you tell me a bit more about those different calendars? Where did the idea come from, what’s the goal, and do you know of other districts using that same model?

There’s a school district in the El Paso area called Socorro that has had this intersession calendar ever since the ‘90s and they’ve had good academic results where they bring in the students that are behind during the week that they’re off. Garland ISD, which is one of our neighbors, went to that calendar last year, but there is no other district that has the multiple options that we have.

To be one of the five schools using the year-round calendar or [one of the] 41 schools that are in intersession calendars, each had 80 percent of the teachers and 80 percent of the parents opt into those calendar options. … We didn’t want to force families to take one of those calendars.

At scale, nobody else is doing it like we are, other than the two that I mentioned, Garland and Socorro. So we think that students in those schools they’re going to have a better opportunity to catch up than if you just went with a traditional calendar.

We’re using a lot of our federal ESSA dollars to pay for this extra time. We know who our best teachers are, and our best teachers get more money to teach those intersession opportunities. Instead of working 180 days, they’ll be working 210 days. So there’s significant dollars that will be going into the pockets of our teachers, and especially our best teachers, because they’ll get the opportunity to do a lot of those enrichment and intervention opportunities.

I know last year Dallas moved to end suspensions. Where does that effort now stand?

We’re pulling forward with it. Ten percent of our students are African-American males, yet 51 percent of our suspensions were African-American male, until now. If you [engage in severe misbehavior] you will still be suspended, but we’re talking about the discretionary suspension and the discretionary suspensions were 75 percent of our suspensions. We’re going to have a different alternative on how to redirect their behavior.

We’ll have some data sets at the end of the first nine weeks about where we are and we’ll also have data in a year about how this journey to redirect behavior through these reset centers went. So stay tuned.

We’ll be following those results. Turning to the social-emotional well-being of the wider student population, I know that last fall Dallas ISD teachers were trained in trauma-informed care. What results did you see from that training? How do you see Dallas ISD’s commitment to social-emotional learning changing in response to COVID-19 traumas? 

We got $7 million from the Wallace Foundation to implement social-emotional learning districtwide. They hired the RAND Corporation to do a research study. But we ran into a problem because we couldn’t have a treatment group and a control group. All of our campuses wanted to have that training and so we kind of threw the research out the window.

We trained the teachers first so they could help deal with the students and we also hired 58 mental health and social work professionals last year, knowing that we were going to need them this year. … We just went all in, as many as we could afford.

Last question, what’s sustaining you through the pandemic? Where are you finding positive stories to counterbalance all the tense circumstances?

People don’t want a whiner. They want a problem solver. So if you lose hope and aspiration, then that gives other people permission to lose hope. I’m generally a positive person, I look for solutions.

I’ve had very little pushback on my mask mandate protocol. In fact, I’ve had mostly universal support and so I think that just shows that if you’re willing to take a risk, and look to the future in a positive way that people will climb aboard with you. So far, so good.

“We’re definitely seeing pent up demand,” said Perot Museum CEO Dr. Linda Silver.

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Schools are feeling the pressure, she said. Fifth grade science scores dropped precipitously last year. Not only was science on the back burner as schools doubled down to salvage reading and math, what science instruction did happen lacked stickiness.

“Science is best taught in a hands-on, experimental, participatory way,” Silver said. That simply couldn’t happen with half the class in remote learning, as was the case in many schools.

Teachers will be under immense pressure to help kids gain ground, and fast. With that in mind, Texas museums are presenting themselves as assets for classroom teachers by offering lesson plans and guides to help visiting classes make the most of exhibits. But with the pandemic and the more contagious Delta variant as unpredictable as ever, museums are also providing videos and other tools when field trips aren’t possible.

However they can, museum officials plan to continue promoting curiosity—an attribute they say will help kids make the most of classroom STEM instruction.

At The DoSeum, a children’s art and science museum in San Antonio, vice president of education Dr. Richard Kissel and his team are preparing a series of lesson plans based on the Texas curriculum standards.

The online lesson plans help teachers prepare for upcoming field trips, so the various exhibits can be used as, essentially, lab equipment designed to efficiently teach concepts, but also to enhance curiosity and wonder that will propel further learning.

Even as news broke of the Delta variant, Silver and her colleagues remained committed to getting kids’ hands onto STEM experiences this year. Unlike the chaotic cancellations and unknowns of spring 2020, Silver said, the museum has contingency plans ready to go, and they are good ones.

In fact, some of the tools they developed specifically for the pandemic will continue no matter what Delta has in store. “We’re planning for multiple scenarios,” she said.

If schools don’t conduct field trips this year, the Perot Museum will still reach around 300,000 students through its outreach programs. Hands-on STEM projects often require more materials and staff than low-cost afterschool programs can afford, so the museum sends TECH Trucks (Tinker, Engineer, Create, and Hack) to providers around the Dallas area. During the pandemic the TECH Trucks also distributed Wonderkits, take-home boxes with projects and experiments the kids could do at home.

It’s okay if some science education happens outside the classroom, Silver said. That’s been the case since long before the pandemic. She cited several on the role of informal education in giving kids the kind of positive science experience that leads to a lifelong love, even a career, in STEM fields. Elementary school seems to be the prime time for those experiences, .

Of course, this begs the question of equity, and who does and does not have access to these informal positive experiences, especially if field trips go away again.

With reduced capacity and safety protocols, the Perot Museum plans to stay open for now, and even if field trips cannot happen safely, family visits have been operating safely since last summer.

The Perot Museum wants more families to take advantage of the experience, especially those who might not see themselves as the museum’s target audience.

Working with 16 community partners like the North Texas Food Bank and neighborhood groups, the museum has given free memberships to 5,000 Dallas-area families. The partners usually organize the first group trip to the Perot Museum, and Silver said, many come back again, and bring their kids.

That first trip is key, she explained, because it breaks down the non-financial barriers around culture and education level that might be keeping families away.

Right now participants in the community partner program make up about 10 percent of the museum’s daily attendance, along with those who qualify for $1 admission anyone who can show proof that they are enrolled in a public assistance program.

Whether or not informal visits and field trips can happen during the surge in Delta variant cases, Texas students are learning in person, and museums are prepared to help teachers cultivate curiosity and wonder in the classroom.

The Perot Museum has produced a bilingual science show, the . Each episode covers topics required by Texas curriculum standards for a given grade range, and is available for free on the museum’s website. So far the program has around 60,000 subscribers.

Silver said, and the museum is offering it to schools across the state. Even though a show is not necessarily hands-on, the Whynauts episodes create whimsical narratives with real world uses for things kids will learn in the classroom.

Since it opened in 2015, The DoSeum has provided professional learning opportunities for teachers to cultivate curiosity and excitement in their classrooms. In addition to numerous single day programs, this year The DoSeum joined with several other local museums to form the Museo Institute, where 40 teachers per year will learn the various tools and techniques used in informal learning environments.

The teachers learn not only how to make the most of a field trip, but also how to translate the methods back to the classroom.

With a “slight flip” in how it’s taught, Kissel said, so much is possible in STEM education.

“If you don’t have (curiosity and wonder) you’re not going to get as far as you’d like,” Kissel said. It can be difficult, he knows, because the content and history of science — definitions, names of scientists, etc. — is only the beginning.

Even more critical is the ongoing process of understanding, he said. The more interested students are, the more of that content they will appreciate and absorb.

Even though these open-ended, inquiry based experiences are important, Kissel said, teachers need not feel the same pressure they feel with regard to getting grade-level content in front of kids. Kids aren’t “falling behind” in wonder and curiosity. In his experience as a researcher and educator, he said, “Scientists are simply those kids who never stopped asking, ‘why?’”

The scientific process can come alive for any kid at any time, he said, and museums will be there to light the fire.

Aiming to upend policies that have disproportionately punished Black students, the Dallas Independent School District is moving to rewrite its school disciplinary code, ending suspensions for low-level infractions like disrupting class or using profanity.

Instead of kicking students out of school, the district plans to use digital tools that have become part of school life during the pandemic to create in-school “Reset Centers” where students can Zoom into classes and access mental health professionals and teletherapy.

If approved by the Dallas school board as expected, the new policies in Texas’ second largest school district would be unprecedented in the state and one of the most progressive discipline reforms in the country, education experts said.

“If it’s done correctly, it could be truly historic,” said Andrew Hairston, Director of Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, a social and economic justice nonprofit.

The move would not only end suspensions for minor behaviors, but also change how more problematic issues like fighting and bullying are handled.

Students involved in more serious infractions such as sexual assault and felony drug possession, will still be expelled as required by state law.

“Suspension was never the right structure, but it is certainly not the right structure coming out of a global pandemic,” said former Dallas ISD school board trustee Miguel Solis, part of a task force charged with overhauling how the district handles disciplinary issues.

After the murder of George Floyd sparked a national reckoning on issues of institutional racism, Solis said, Dallas ISD resolved to take a clear-eyed look at its systems and policies. Board President Justin Henry called on trustees to suggest comprehensive policies addressing the unequal experience and academic outcomes of the district’s Black students.

In the 2019-2020 school year, Black students made up 21.6% of the district’s enrollment, and accounted for 51.6% of out- of-school suspensions. Meanwhile, Black students’ academic outcomes were worse than their peers.

“Every way we sliced the data, African American students are at the bottom, but when we look at special education and discipline, they’re at the top,” said Pam Lear, a member of the task force and Dallas ISD Chief of Staff and Race Equity Officer.

Anticipating a “second pandemic” of mental health challenges as students return to school next academic year, the task force recommended capitalizing on technology schools have used to connect teachers and students for more than a year during COVID-19.

Tools like teletherapy, Google Classroom, and Zoom — though rarely used before the pandemic and considered not as effective as in person counseling or classes — have become ubiquitous. Dallas officials say they can be used to connect struggling kids to help safely rather than banishing them from school.

Mental health issues, academic frustration, social anxiety, and a lack of coping skills often fuel incidents that get students kicked out of class, said Solis. All are likely to increase as students re-learn how to be in a school building with their peers and process the economic hardship, fear, instability, and grief of the past year.

While people used to be skeptical of teletherapy for behavioral and mental health support, that perception is changing with the pandemic, said Stephanie Taylor, clinical director of psychoeducational services for PresenceLearning, which provides online special education services for thousands of schools across the country. “The pandemic forced some changes,” she said.

School districts now have the chance to be proactive as they account for the trauma students have endured and adjustments they will have to make to reacclimate to school, Taylor said. “Those who anticipate the different settings and the different levels of need … are the ones who will have the easier transition.”

Without the right resources, ending out-of-school suspensions ultimately leads to more in-school suspensions, which, Solis said, are harshly punitive and academically damaging.

He remembers, as a middle school teacher, seeing students under in-school suspension wearing orange safety vests so teachers could identify them, he described “like prisoners.” Relegated to a portable building for most of the day, the students would travel in a supervised group for bathroom breaks.

“It was a quasi-criminal justice situation” Solis said. The teacher in charge was not trained in restorative justice, didn’t teach lessons, didn’t do anything except oversee the preteen inmates.

Dallas has been adopting restorative practices for years, but fully ending discretionary suspensions and making proper use of the Reset Centers will require full buy-in from teachers, said Lear. “Everybody who is implementing has to go through the process of ‘why are we doing this?’”

According to a by social and economic justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, school suspensions have been a common school discipline tool in Texas at least since 1969 when lawmakers wrote disciplinary standards into the state’s education code under the title “Law and Order.” Efforts to end the practice have been opposed by teachers and administrators as well as state lawmakers, Texas Appleseed senior staff attorney and former educator Vicky Sullivan said.

The desire to end exclusionary discipline as much as possible has existed in the district for a long time, Solis said. In 2017 the school board banned suspension for grades Pre-K-2, a local policy that became state law later that year. However, the peak year for suspension was 7th grade, and Solis wanted to see the ban used where it was needed most.

“This issue never went to sleep for me,” Solis said.

Not only was exclusionary discipline heavier in certain grades, but in certain schools as well. It was a district-wide problem, but looking closer, it was possible to see clusters of expulsions, teachers who relied on it more heavily than others.

“We also have to look at implicit bias,” Lear said. “We need to ensure that there is awareness.”

To help with this, the task force is proposing increased training for teachers and the creation of an early warning system to help address trauma and prevent larger problem behaviors. The goal is for teachers to have classroom cultures that minimize stress, for campus staff to intervene with mental health checks before a disciplinary code is even needed.

“The teacher student dynamic is going to be radically different,” Solis said.

Lowering the emotional temperature will serve teachers who have their own trauma and strain from the pandemic, which stretched many of them well past what they’d been trained for in the classroom, on top of fears and losses from the virus.

Implementation will be everything, said Hairston, and initially Dallas ISD should expect to hear from administrators and teachers that “kids are still acting out.” The change in culture won’t happen immediately, he said, but neither did the punitive system Dallas is trying to replace.

“It took (decades) to create this behemoth — it will take more than a few years to address the full magnitude of its past and present harms,” Hairston said, speaking not only of Dallas ISD, but of the national K-12 public school system’s heavy reliance on suspension and expulsion.

Retooling a disciplinary system for more than 150,000 students is no small feat, Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa acknowledged. But it could be one way that the “new normal” created by the pandemic is better than the old. It may take time to get every teacher at every campus on board, but Hinojosa wants to see progress beginning in August, assuming the board greenlights the initiative, which should cost around $4 million, in May or June.

“I’m going to be patient, but also impatient,” Hinojosa said. “We’ve got to get it right.”