“When he tried out for percussion in band, he actually made it on his own.
They took Kingstan out of band and then a writing class. TCLAS program grants cover some accelerated learning courses during regular school hours.īut Owens said her nephew’s school district had trouble fitting those courses in without taking away from the existing curriculum. After the COVID impact in 2021, we were at 43% in reading and only 35% in math,” Kelvey Oeser, TEA’s deputy commissioner of educator support, explained. “Prior to COVID, in 2019, on average we were at close to 50% proficiency in both reading and math across the state. The Texas Education Agency studied just how much COVID-19 impacted Texas students. “Because he processes things slowly, doing work on the computer for him is like doing double the work, because he can’t just do it on the computer, he has to do it on paper first,” Owens explained. Kingston is now in sixth grade, with special needs, and struggled when his classes went virtual last year. “We can’t afford for this child to fail and for the system to fail him,” Lisa Ownes said, talking about her nephew Kingstan. The Texas COVID Learning Acceleration Supports program, or TCLAS, offers school district grants to help pay for extra tools to catch students up. Texas program helps students fight the ‘COVID Slide’Įarlier this year, Texas lawmakers allocated more than $16 billion to combat the “COVID slide” - learning loss due to the pandemic. “We estimate that the Texas Heartbeat Act saves between 50 to 100 lives every single day,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz with Texas Right to Life. Those who support Texas’ abortion law argue it’s protecting lives. “So if California passes a law that’s hard to enjoin but bans gun ownership, are we going to just allow that?” Kaplan asked.
“They’ve basically greenlighted legislatures across the country to write laws to do away with any constitutional protections they don’t like,” Kaplan said. If the Court’s majority determines the DOJ cannot sue Texas to block the law, things will remain the same for now.Īnd if the Court favors Texas, Austin Kaplan, a civil rights attorney, warns the decision could have implications on much more than abortion laws. Harold Miller, a retired OB/GYN in Houston. The kind of unsafe, risky abortions that killed my patient nearly 50 years ago,” said Dr. “Senate Bill 8 will only lead to more unsafe abortions. Some fear if the Supreme Court allows the law to stay in place, it will further limit access and cause harm to women. However, the law has already had a ripple effect on abortion access in Texas. “Texas argued, as it has before, that these are not proper suits, that the way to test the constitutionality of SB8 is to actually perform the abortion and wait to be sued and see what the courts say,” said Blackman. While the DOJ argued the state of Texas is trying to prevent the High Court from reviewing SB8, Texas argued the only way to argue against the constitutionality of SB8 is to wait for a lawsuit against someone who performed an abortion. There are two key questions: does the United States have the right to sue Texas and can Texas pass a law that effectively bans an otherwise constitutional right when enforcing the law is up to private citizens, not the state. “The Texas case will focus on a very narrow question, a procedural question: ‘how can this unique law be challenged in court?’” “The Texas case will not focus on the difficult issue of when states can ban abortion,” Blackman said. Justice Department and abortion providers. Instead, it will hear arguments in two cases challenging whether Texas’ restrictive abortion law can stay in place while lower courts consider legal challenges. This time around, however, the court won’t be considering the substance of the law and whether it violates Roe v. Texas’ abortion law is unique, because it’s enforced by private citizens, not the state. Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments on Texas’ abortion law, which bans abortions once cardiac activity is detected, without exceptions for rape or incest.