This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
I echo Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea's statement. There are indeed no words for this, for Gov. Greg Abbott's recklessness. My heart goes out to this family for their incredible loss. This should never have happened.
"Necropolitics" is what we should call this. Via his mandate against requiring masks, he traffics in death.
AUSTIN, Texas — The health authority for Austin Public Health reported the first child death Tuesday from COVID-19 for the Austin area during a joint briefing with the City Council and Travis County Commissioners Court.
Local Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes announced the death during the weekly Austin Public Health covid update for local leaders. She said the child had a “comorbidity.” That’s a separate serious health issue that could result in death.
While hospitalizations are seen to be plateauing, there has been a surge in COVID-19 cases in schools.
Dr. Walkes told council members and commissioners that case numbers in schools have gone up tremendously. "We do know that the case numbers in our schools have gone up tremendously in this past week, and so we're cautiously optimistic about whether this plateau that we're seeing is going to persist or whether we're going to see another increase in our cases."
She said school numbers reflect not using last year's mitigation techniques. "We found a marked increase in school cases across the state of Texas with schools reopening and not using the mitigation efforts that we used last year to decrease case spread in that environment and congregant setting when children are in close quarters and not social distancing," Dr. Walkes said.
Just in the last week they counted 817 pediatric COVID cases in Travis County schools and identified 17,240 close contacts and 67 clusters. But they note Texas Education Agency does not mandate that the close contacts quarantine themselves following an exposure.
Children under 12 currently are not allowed to be vaccinated, but it's possible that could change by the end of the year.
County Commissioner Brigid Shea blasted Gov. Abbott for his fight against mask mandates, "I don't even have words for how reckless and dangerous it is that the governor is preventing school districts from requiring masks for a population in elementary and secondary school that legally cannot be vaccinated."
Unsettling news in today's Austin American-Statesman. Here's what's key:
"If we have an initial condition of around 200 initial infections, 60% vaccination rates and relatively little mitigation measures, then we would expect exponential growth," said Kaitlyn Johnson, a postdoctoral fellow at UT and a lead author of the report. "And we would expect a high, high percent of the student body, part of it vaccinated and part of it unvaccinated, to become infected."
Of course, we want to have strong mitigation measures. For the first time today, I heard and learned the word, "Multidemic." That's what we're entering into—a pandemic of different variants.
All of us must wear masks and social distance. We should all get the vaccine, too. This should not be an issue of personal liberty, but social responsibility.
You can't kill a virus. It's not a bacteria that you can kill with penicillin or medicine. You can only eliminate its home, meaning keeping our bodies from being hosts to it.
Take care, my friends. Masking up needs to be an expression of love and caring. We owe that to our students, fellow staff and faculty, as well as to each other and our children and grandchildren.
Thousands of University of Texas students could become infected with the coronavirus during the fall semester if university leaders don't take any mitigation measures and if students don't change behavior, according to a new report by UT's COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.
That scenario could occur if UT administrators do not implement proactive testing of unvaccinated students twice a week and if students do not wear masks in response to an increased presence of the virus, the report says.
The report, released Wednesday, doesn't go as far as to say that UT needs to require masks.
The report estimates that an average of 57% of UT students will be vaccinated when the fall semester begins. Under those vaccination rate projections, the average total number of students infected with COVID-19 during the fall semester is expected to be 11,200, with a range from 5,000 to 16,300, without proactive testing.
If unvaccinated students were tested twice a week, the report estimates that the number of infected students in the fall semester under the same vaccination conditions would drop to a range of 900 to 3,900, with an average of 1,700. A vaccination rate of 80% among UT students could lead to an average of 1,500 infected students, even without testing of the unvaccinated.
"If we have an initial condition of around 200 initial infections, 60% vaccination rates and relatively little mitigation measures, then we would expect exponential growth," said Kaitlyn Johnson, a postdoctoral fellow at UT and a lead author of the report. "And we would expect a high, high percent of the student body, part of it vaccinated and part of it unvaccinated, to become infected."
Details of UT modeling consortium's report
The consortium, a network of researchers and health professionals, made the model of COVID-19 transmission to project the health and economic costs associated with UT’s reopening. The models do not predict any viral, policy or behavioral changes and assume that vaccine coverage, vaccine efficacy and transmission rates remain constant through the end of the semester.
Details of UT modeling consortium's report
The consortium, a network of researchers and health professionals, made the model of COVID-19 transmission to project the health and economic costs associated with UT’s reopening. The models do not predict any viral, policy or behavioral changes and assume that vaccine coverage, vaccine efficacy and transmission rates remain constant through the end of the semester.More:Texas now has the fewest ICU beds available it's had during the entire COVID-19 pandemic
"These findings highlight the need for continued mitigation measures such as testing prior to returning to campus, wearing of face masks, social distancing, frequent testing throughout the semester, self-isolation when symptomatic and other risk-reduction measures as UT reopens during a time of high levels of community spread," the report said.
The report says that, if vaccination rates remain at about 60%, proactive testing for COVID-19 should be offered to students at least two times per week, or about 20,000 tests a week, to provide a 95% guarantee that symptomatic infections will not exceed the "very high risk threshold."
Exclusively symptomatic testing would be enough to control the spread if 80% of students were vaccinated, the report says. The report defines a very high transmission threshold as 140 symptomatic cases per 100,000 people over seven days.
"Our projections suggest that proactive testing of unvaccinated students can help to suppress transmission and be cost saving overall, particularly if vaccination levels remain relatively low. However, increasing vaccination coverage among students is likely the most effective means of reducing the burden of COVID-19 and keeping costs low," the report said.
COVID-19 testing required for first day at University of Texas
UT will be requiring all students to be tested before the first day of classes on Aug. 25, but UT spokesperson Eliska Padilla said the university does not plan to require regular testing of students after the first day. Gov. Greg Abbott has prohibited agencies that receive state funding from requiring vaccinations.
"The university continues to encourage and offer vaccination as the best tool to contain the spread of COVID-19, has made living in a campus residence hall conditional upon receiving a negative COVID-19 test prior to move-in, is asking all students returning to campus to get tested before classes start, as well as continues proactive community testing for people with no symptoms," Padilla said.
The report estimates the prevalence of COVID-19 among UT students in Austin during the first day of classes will be between 0.38% and 0.47%, or a range of 187 and 236 UT students in Austin infected with COVID-19
The current modeling assumes that 50,000 students will be on campus in about two weeks. The vaccination estimates were based on vaccination rates reported for 16- to 49-year-olds in Texas and for people older than 18 in the home counties of students from outside of Texas.
The report assumes nearly all students will isolate after a positive COVID-19 test result, and that 50% of unvaccinated students would be willing to participate in proactive testing while acknowledging that percentage might not be attainable.
More COVID-19 cases projected this fall
Last year, a similar report by the consortium before the beginning of the fall 2020 semester said between 82 and 183 students could arrive infected with COVID-19 during the first week of fall classes. The report assumed that 12,000 students were already in Austin and 5,000 to 15,000 students would arrive in Austin before the first day of class in fall 2020. At the time, COVID-19 vaccinations were not available.
It's impossible to say how many students arrived infected at the start of classes last year because UT did not require all students to be tested when they arrived.
Johnson said the higher numbers for fall 2021 are due to significantly more students on campus and surging COVID-19 cases.
Assuming only symptomatic cases are detected and that about 60% of students are vaccinated, the model projects a peak occupancy of 13 to 45 students living in UT residence halls requiring an isolation room in a single day. That range could decrease to a peak of 2 and 11 students in dorms requiring isolation if 80% of them were vaccinated, the report states.
These estimates do not account for any additional cases identified through contact tracing or proactive testing, which could increase the number of students requiring isolation.
I had the honor and privilege of meeting this extraordinary professor featured in this piece written by Melissa Taboada in the context of a Catch the Next webinar today where I spoke.
It was so powerful to hear about Dr. Anne Fletcher whose experience as an Austin Community College professor captures well what we know in education to be the power of authentic care and caring, a core theme in my book, Subtractive Schooling.
It is so very touching and inspiring to read the story of a professor who stepped up to the plate throughout this pandemic to protect her students' personal and intellectual well-being. Thanks to Dr. Maria Martha Chavez, C.E.O. at Catch the Next, for her gracious invitation to the webinar.
By Melissa Taboada | The Hechinger Report | May 20, 2021
It’s been more than a year since the coronavirus shut down most college campuses, and many of the problems that emerged at the start of the pandemic still plague Fletcher, who teaches English and developmental writing at Austin Community College.
More students than ever have dropped her courses. They’ve been battered first by the virus and, more recently, by a brutal winter storm and a major power crisis. A student who contracted COVID-19 this semester has fallen behind, but every effort Fletcher has made to reach him has been fruitless.
Two of her students have been hospitalized with the virus. Several have family members who died or lost their jobs. Others struggle to remain engaged in their new virtual world.
“I do feel in a sense that I’m failing some of these students,” Fletcher said. “I know in my mind I’m doing the very best I can. But they’re up against so much.”
“From the very beginning of my career, I was concerned about the students who struggled,”
said Anne Fletcher, who has been teaching for 50 years. With her students, she has had
to contend with the pandemic and a brutal winter storm this past year.
Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
Fletcher, who is 78, has been teaching for 50 years, but the days since March 2020 have been some of the bleakest of her career. The spread of COVID-19 forced the community college to shutter all 11 of its campuses in Central Texas just before spring break last year. More than a year later, the vast majority of courses remain online only.
In the beginning, teachers scrambled to record video lessons and help students get access to courses. Fletcher’s materials were already online, but she had never recorded instructional videos before and also had to quickly learn to teach live lessons and host online office hours. The college provided training and support, but some of Fletcher’s students couldn’t establish any internet connection at all. Others tried to keep up with her course using only their phones.
“That was a nightmare,” she said. “We lost some. They were used to in-person learning, and they didn’t know how they could do it. This was not what they bargained for when they signed up to start college.
“And we as professors could not express our frustration, our panic and our nightmares,” said Fletcher, an adjunct professor of English in composition and literary studies, who has taught at the college for 11 years. “We had to remain calm and do everything we could to help make the students feel more at ease and comfortable with online learning.”
On the weekend everything first shut down, as people retreated indoors and scrambled to find available face masks, Fletcher found a public library branch that had not yet closed. With students’ papers in hand, she met several of them there, to help them with needed revisions. In the fall, she drove 30 miles to a nearby city, San Marcos, to bring students in another class books on their reading list.
At her age, Fletcher is more vulnerable than younger people to getting severely ill if she contracts COVID-19. But she said she wasn’t thinking about getting sick; she just wanted to ensure her students had what they needed.
About half the students Fletcher teaches are considered at high risk of not completing college. Many grew up in low-income families, are English language learners or come from historically marginalized communities. In addition to first-year English composition courses, Fletcher teaches developmental classes, for students who were admitted but did not score high enough on a state college entrance exam to be considered college-ready; those students simultaneously take college-credit English courses, which Fletcher also teaches, to help them make progress. In her first seven years at the college, she also was a GED instructor, teaching all subjects to adults seeking to pass their high school equivalency exams.
“From the very beginning of my career, I was concerned about the students who struggled,” said Fletcher. “Those students need extra help. I think I understand their needs. Not every teacher is aware that they need extra help and how to help them.”
She also is an instructor in the college’s Ascender program, which works to boost completion rates among Latinos and other underserved student groups.
Alejandra Polcik, the Ascender program manager at Austin Community College, said Fletcher frequently works on weekends, answers emails after hours and talks often to her and other program organizers about students’ progress. “She is conscious of the obstacles that we are facing,” she said. “She accommodates her students, but she never lowers her standards.”
Fletcher’s mother, who emigrated from Ireland to New York City at age 16 with only a sixth grade education, inspired her to become a teacher. Her mother worked cleaning houses during the day and attended night school to earn first her high school diploma, then her nursing degree.
The example set by Fletcher’s mother, along with those of many strong teachers who “were there for me steadfastly all my life,” instilled in Fletcher a love of learning.
“I admired them and I wanted to be like them,” Fletcher said.
Anne Fletcher tends to her plants on the patio of her home in South Austin. Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
In her own career, Fletcher, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Good Counsel College in White Plains, New York (later merged with Pace University), and a master’s in special education at Fairfield University in Connecticut, started as a special education teacher in New York. She then spent years in Ohio working with children who had physical and cognitive disabilities. At other times she taught students in community college who needed more intensive instruction in reading and writing, to prepare them to enroll in college-level courses.
She returned to that work in 2010 after moving to Austin to be near her children and grandchildren.
“When I had the chance to come to Texas, I was seeking those who were struggling with English, the Latinx students,” she said. “They were the most in need. I saw that there were adults who also struggled with reading and writing, and they were actually more in need, because they were adults who were trying to improve their quality of life.”
In 2019 the college gave her the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) Excellence Award, established to support individual schools’ recognition of their top teachers. She waves off the attention.
“I don’t do what I do alone,” she said. “Whatever success I and my students have is due to the joint efforts of all the members of the learning community. That’s really important for me to say, because I really believe that. I could not be doing this by myself. There are a great number of people who are helping the students be successful.”
Struggling students
The South Austin campus of Austin Community College, one of the campuses where Fletcher taught courses in person before the pandemic. Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
In each of the last three semesters, Fletcher has lost more students than she did in any previous semester at the college. Typically only one or two drop her courses in a given semester, but she estimates she’s lost about 10 percent since last March. The academic careers of community college students are often tenuous, which is why Fletcher’s ability to retain them has been so important to her.
The pandemic hit community college enrollment the hardest, with preliminary numbers showing national enrollment down 11.3 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“It’s hard to overstate how dramatic the disruption was,” said Texas Higher Education Commissioner Harrison Keller.
The pandemic also took a toll on students’ mental health. Fletcher’s students began to communicate to her their increasing anxiety and depression over online learning, isolation and the pandemic at large, prompting her to shift how she started her classes.
Now, as students log in from separate locations across the city, they’re greeted by the soothing sounds of strings and woodwinds playing in the background and an inspirational quote on their shared screen. Sometimes the classical music gives way to a song like “Never Giving Up,” by Fearless Soul, “It’s a Beautiful Morning,” by the Rascals, or “Lean on Me,” by Bill Withers. The melodies are paired with lines from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” or an inspiring maxim.
She wants to fill her students with hope, she said, to keep them connected.
On a recent spring afternoon, after the music played, Fletcher, whose voice is steady and sure, reminded them of a tip she got from a friend who is a neuroscientist: “You can rewire your brain to be happy by simply recalling three things you’re grateful for every day for 21 days.”
Fletcher then launched into the day’s agenda, rattling off descriptions for the three rhetorical appeals — ethos, logos and pathos — and providing examples of each. Then she encouraged the students to seek help if they needed it in putting together their papers. “No one should feel badly if you’re struggling,” she said. “You’re here to learn to write an essay.”
Providing guidance outside classroom time is the norm for Fletcher. Living alone with her two dogs, she often spends nights and weekends reaching out to her students. She holds special online sessions to give personalized help to those struggling with their work. She also gives extra credit to those who turn in a biweekly confidential journal where they note how they’re doing, what’s going well and areas in which they’re struggling.
Fletcher is “available, for not just academics, but for whatever they may have needed,” she said. “I want to provide that help. I want them to be successful in college, not just in my class but in their other courses. I want them to have a better life.
“But I know there are some out there who I’m not reaching, that no one is reaching,” she added.
In instructor evaluations from last May, at the end of the first semester battered by the pandemic, students in Fletcher’s classes lauded her commitment to seeing them through the course.
“She provided a sense of reassurance that I wasn’t alone, and she was always so willing to help,” wrote one student, adding that Fletcher was encouraging and understanding of the student’s learning disabilities. “She didn’t add to my stress of school and online learning; she helped and made the chaos manageable.”
Another wrote: “I learned a lot of new things, especially for it being online. That’s how amazing she is!”
Carmen Garcia Hernandez, an 18-year-old from Kyle, Texas, who is the first in her family to go to college, started at Austin Community College last fall. But in the isolation of learning remotely, she said, some days it doesn’t feel like she’s attending college, and the routine of sitting at her desk all the time can feel overwhelming. Fletcher seems to understand, she said.
“She’s very approachable and makes me feel more confident to ask her questions if I need to,” Garcia Hernandez said. “She does her most to give us the most information she can, whether it’s in class or outside school resources.”
Facing another crisis, taking action
Fletcher sits with Maggie, one of her two dogs. Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
Despite the pandemic, Fletcher felt most of her students had fallen into a healthy rhythm as the spring semester began. But just a few weeks into it, a winter storm pummeled Texas in mid-February, leaving her and many of her students without power, heat or water — and in some cases, even food — for days.
Without electricity, Fletcher couldn’t open the garage door to get her car out. And even if she could have, her driveway and the roads were thick with ice. She was able to light her gas stove but hadn’t gone grocery shopping before the storm, so she cooked what she had left, a handful of frozen chicken breasts. And even when she was concerned that her own life might be in danger, Fletcher worried about her students. But her phone had died and she had no internet.
“I couldn’t contact anybody,” she said. “I couldn’t reach them to let them know what was happening. And I knew they were probably going through the same.”
When the winter storm first blew in, her son, who lives 25 miles away, wanted her to come stay with his family. But Fletcher felt it was too much of a hassle to pack up her dogs, including one that was severely ill, and she expected the power to come back within hours.
On the fourth day without heat or power, she charged her phone in her car long enough to call 911, and a police officer came to her home and was able to open her garage. She backed out her car so she could start it to charge her phone more, and contacted people at the college, asking them to let students know why she wasn’t responding to their messages.
Coursework sits on Fletcher’s coffee table. In the early days of the pandemic, she helped her students keep up by taking paper coursework to them at a local library that had not yet closed. Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
In all, at least 111 Texans died as a result of the winter storm. Some Austin-area housing complexes, including a few where her students lived, still haven’t had water or gas restored or damage repaired. One of her students with a newborn briefly connected online to tell Fletcher the pipes in her house had burst and everything she had was destroyed. Fletcher offered to give her baby items that her grandchildren had outgrown, then wrote a letter to enable the student to apply for the college’s emergency relief fund.
Before the storm, Fletcher had routinely provided students with information about resources like local food banks and COVID-19 testing. In the storm crisis, she then began giving them information about preventing eviction, since some apartment managers, citing the need for repairs, tried to force tenants out.
“It is really alarming,” she said. “We are in a crisis, there’s no doubt about it. Even though many have recovered, there are many who have not. It’s not really over, because people are living with the aftermath of it.”
Fletcher worries the combined impact of the pandemic and the storm will stop some of her students from finishing the semester, but she’s determined to see them through. She’s offered special sessions to walk them step-by-step through writing their college papers.
“My goal is to do everything possible to keep everyone, and to have them be successful,” Fletcher said. “I owe it to the college and I owe it to the students. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything possible.”
The net of this ongoing case out of Florida at the moment is that local communities should have the leeway to make decisions that are appropriate to them, while also acknowledging that the state's order—of requiring schools to open by a set date or risk losing funding—as unconstitutional. The Florida Department of Education has appealed the decision, blocking the order from taking effect until the matter is resolved. The teachers union is, of course, urging the judge to reinstate his order.
Here is a hashtag out of Arkansas that folks are using on Twitter in the wake of such deliberative and now judicial struggles throughout the country: #WeReopenSchoolsWhen.
Another hashtag, in response to the disregard demonstrated by Donald Trump and Besty DeVos, is #NotTheirChildren.
At this point, we must all stay tuned to see what plays out in Florida.
Layer Elementary School in Winter Springs, Fla., opened with enhanced safety precautions due to COVID-19. An emergency order initially required school districts statewide to open for in-person learning by Aug. 31, but was temporarily struck down by a judge on Monday.
Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A Florida judge on Monday ruled against the state's order requiring schools to open for in-person instruction by the end of August, calling parts of it "unconstitutional." He granted a temporary injunction, putting the decision-making power in the hands of individual districts.
The emergency order was issued by Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran in early July as the state's coronavirus cases surged, and mandated that all districts open "brick and mortar schools" at least five days a week for families who want to send their students back, or else risk losing already-allocated funding.
Along with teachers and parents, the Florida Education Association — the state's largest teachers' union — quickly filed a lawsuit, alleging the order violated a provision in Florida's constitution requiring the state to ensure schools operate safely. They were joined by the NAACP and the NAACP Florida State Conference last week.
In a 16-page decision, Circuit Judge Charles Dodson said the order is "unconstitutional to the extent that it arbitrarily disregards safety, denies local school boards' decision making with respect to reopening brick and mortar schools, and conditions funding on an approved reopening plan with a start date in August."
"Schools should reopen when the local decision makers determine upon advice of medical experts that it is safe to do so," he wrote.
On Monday evening, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education told NPR that the department had appealed the decision. This automatically placed a stay on the judge's order, blocking it from taking effect until the appeal is over or unless the court rules otherwise. An FEA spokesperson said the union will return to court on Tuesday to ask the judge to reinstate his order.
In a statement shared with NPR, Corcoran said he is "100% confident" the state will win the lawsuit.
"This fight has been, and will continue to be, about giving every parent, every teacher and every student a choice, regardless of what educational option they choose," Corcoran said. "If you are one of the 1.6 million students who have chosen to return to the classroom, a parent, or a classroom teacher that wanted to educate their student in person, we strongly encourage you to call the Florida Education Association and tell them to drop this frivolous lawsuit."
Corcoran defended the state's aggressive approach to reopening schools in an interview on All Things Consideredlast week, saying transmission rates had dropped significantly and that the educational and developmental consequences of keeping kids home outweigh the risk posed to them by the virus.
Dodson wrote that while it is not entirely clear to what extent children transmit the virus to adults, "what has been clearly established is there is no easy decision and opening schools will most likely increase COVID-19 cases in Florida." He added that the order did not take into consideration community transmission rates, the varying ages of students or proper precautions.
Dodson pointed to the case of Hillsborough County earlier this month, where the local school board voted to delay the start of in-person learning by three weeks based on the advice of medical experts, but walked that decision back after getting a letter from Corcoran that said they would not otherwise receive financial flexibility.
"Defendants arbitrarily prioritized reopening schools statewide in August over safety and the advice of health experts," Dodson wrote. "And all school districts complied in order to avoid a drastic loss of state funding."
In an exception to the order, the state did allow three South Florida counties hard-hit by COVID-19 — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — to begin the year with distance learning.
Andrew Spar, vice president of the FEA, said at a press conference that the "overwhelming majority" of districts have already started school, and more are set to open on Monday.
Before the appeal was announced, educators and legal experts said at the FEA press conference that the injunction would allow schools to make their own decisions about remaining open, moving to virtual learning or further delaying opening based on local conditions without having to submit a plan for state approval.
According to the FEA, several counties are struggling with confirmed cases and quarantines soon after reopening for in-person instruction. It said Martin County, the most populous county to open in the first half of August, has had to quarantine nearly 300 students and several educators.
Dodson also acknowledged that teachers overwhelmingly want to be back in school, but many may not be able to stay in the classroom or even in the profession due to unsafe conditions in school buildings that have opened.
For example, he said, some classrooms may not provide enough space for proper social distancing, and teachers may lack adequate personal protective equipment or time to thoroughly sanitize their classrooms. Those safety concerns are exacerbated if teachers or members of their household have pre-existing conditions that could make them more vulnerable to the virus.
"They chose to teach because they have a passion for teaching our children," Dodson wrote. "They want to be in the classroom interacting with their students. But the evidence was clear that there are teachers falling hard through the cracks because of this order."
The FEA praised the court's ruling on Monday.
"This is only a temporary injunction, but we plan to press ahead in court," President Fedrick Ingram said in a statement. "Local communities should have the freedom to make the best decisions for reopening or keeping open local schools. Our districts should not be ruled by reckless edicts from on high. Safety must come before politics."
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the injunction a relief and said "safety has to come first." She also said an appeal was expected.
Earlier on Monday, DeSantis said that Florida had just reported its lowest number of COVID-19 cases since June 14.
