The Board of Education voted Thursday to remove dozens of uniformed police officers from 39 high schools that still have them and, in a separate vote, to drop janitorial giant Aramark as the district’s cleaning provider.
Community and technical colleges have helped shorten the time to obtain a degree for hundreds of thousands of secondary school students. The importance of these programs in terms of time to degree for the possibility of preparing baccalaureate degree teachers is paramount.
Chronic absenteeism has eased some from post-pandemic highs but it remains more severe in districts that, even pre-COVID, had been struggling most to keep kids in school. School leaders will need "both carrots and sticks to address the problem," one researcher contends.
Chronic absenteeism — which the state defines as missing more than 10% of scheduled school days — increased significantly at schools across the country in the years following pandemic-related classroom closures that in some cases lasted more than a year.
Some community members in Austin say they want to keep their school resource officers and they believe safety decisions should rest with their own local school councils.
Criticisms of DEI programming as antisemitic are mounting in the months after Hamas' Oct. 7 assault on Israel. Many parents believe Jewish students aren't safe amid rising antisemitic harassment in the schools, and others claim DEI programs foster anti-Israel extremism.
California, Texas and New York are among the states with the highest number of high school dropouts, according to data from the United States Census Bureau.
The 31-page report focused on ways HISD operates, including overtime, teacher absences, contractor work, consultants, and staff tracking. Miles said they learned the district spends too much on each item.
