Pedestrian safety dangers exist at the local community level, and it is local community leaders who have to address them and fund their solutions. To make meaningful progress, those leaders need to first understand the problems better.
This legislation, now being calmly pushed by political leaders who may appear reasonable, should be called out now for what it is — an insidious effort to intimidate voters, suppress voter participation and intentionally discriminate against Texas minority citizens.
Fellow Texans, your access to ER coverage is under attack by Big Insurance. Now is the time to take a stand for your patient rights.
How far will the Texas education bureaucracy go to protect the status quo? That’s the question I’m asking this session as the Texas Legislature races toward the finish line to overhaul our school funding system.
This one change will solve numerous problems that plague our school and tax system that literally cause billions of dollars to be misallocated every year. We can and should be using precious tax dollars more wisely for students’ needs.
The best way to protect immigrant children with disabilities to keep them with their guardians. Family separation is a cruel policy with particularly harsh consequences for children with disabilities.
How we spend the first few years of our lives has dramatic implications for how we will spend our adult years. Early childhood is a time of learning and growth: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Universal Pre-K would ensure that all young children have access to spaces where their brains can grow in developmentally appropriate ways.
Walmart is giving associates the opportunity to earn a college degree for $1 per day.
Everyone likes a good comeback story, and Starr County’s is one I am happy to tell. As a rural border community, we have seen our share of difficult times, and the budget is always one of our biggest challenges. Finding the funds to meet the needs of our residents can be difficult, and just two years ago, we were forced to take out loans to keep the county running. Jobs were lost and critical government departments, including the sheriff's office, saw severe budget cuts. Our situation was dire.
Rather than dwelling on unproven, unpopular funding approaches based on a possibly flawed high-stakes test, the state should fund programs that use tools to benchmark and track student needs and growth.
A majority of all regional, generational, ethnic/racial and partisan groups support legislation placing more stringent limitations on the ability of cities, counties, school districts and other local taxing authorities to indirectly increase their revenue from property taxes without explicit voter approval.
Creating a Texas Tech veterinary school is a no-brainer, and should be a cut-and-dried funding issue. It has been debated long enough and, in that time, the need for the veterinary school has only grown greater. The Legislature should approve the funding, with no strings attached.
A program that sticks kids in a gym to learn about everything except sex is not a program that can last. If Texas schools continue to push abstinence-only programs instead of listening to the research, our children will continue to suffer from a lack of information.
We have the power to create a bright future, while still sustaining the past by regulating development through affordable housing — so neighborhoods like mine can continue to exist.
We hope for the day when elections, and the laws governing who can vote in Texas, are more reflective of the people who have to live with the consequences of tomorrow. That’s why we advocate for lowering the voting age in this state to 16 and cutting off voting rights at 70.
UT Southwestern Medical Center is uniquely poised to move gene therapy discovery into clinical trials with a world-renowned gene therapy team, state-of-the-art facilities, and a partner pediatric hospital in Dallas.
There is nothing to be gained by switching to current-year property values for school finance, other than giving the state an extra $1.8 billion — and shorting local schools by the same amount. It would be far better to provide local education leaders with the predictability and the consistency needed to budget responsibly. It would be far better to stick with prior-year values.
Public education cannot be what our state requires if we don’t provide the resources our children need. We must also address head on the many systemic challenges that hinder its success. The question we raise is simply whether the first step in transforming our public education outcomes should focus primarily on our teachers or our students. We believe that our report represented an appropriate balance that focused on both.
Voters clearly telegraphed their distaste for increasing sales taxes in the February 2019 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. Those attitudes weren’t very surprising then, and it shouldn’t be surprising now that state legislators, whatever the mixture of carrots and sticks being deployed by their leadership, are not keen to follow.
Texas’ current bail system relies on the luck of the draw instead of objective decision-making. Lawmakers must act to avoid more costly federal litigation and stop gambling with our safety and liberty.
