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DALLAS (AP) – Verizon is buying Frontier Communications in a $20 billion deal to strengthen its fiber network.

AUSTIN (AP) – When Texas lawmakers passed legislation in 2015 that created a pathway for public schools to hire more teachers without formal classroom training, one goal was to make the profession more attractive to individuals from different paths who could offer hands-on learning to students.

Some school administrators made it clear they intended to place these so-called uncertified teachers in positions where they could leverage their fields of expertise and keep them away from core areas like math, reading and special education, which would remain under the care of their most seasoned educators.

That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which left many longtime educators worried about their health and feeling underappreciated, underresourced and burnt out. They walked out of the classroom in droves, accelerating teacher shortages at a time when students were returning to in-person learning and schools needed them the most.

Now some school districts are hiring uncertified teachers — some to provide instruction in core subjects — at an extraordinary pace.

In almost a decade since the law was passed, the number of uncertified teachers in the state’s public schools ballooned by 29%, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data. Uncertified teachers, many of whom are located in rural school districts, accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year.

Some academic experts are dubbing the state’s growing reliance on uncertified teachers a crisis. A recent Texas Tech University study highlighted that kids lose three to four months of learning when they have a new teacher who is both uncertified and lacks experience working in a public school.

But with fewer people entering the profession through traditional pipelines, school districts are trying to give uncertified instructors the training and support they need to succeed in the classroom. School officials and education advocates are encouraging them to participate in teacher certification programs — and they hope lawmakers will set aside funds next year to help cover the costs.

The ask comes at a time when schools are already starved for a cash infusion. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they are earning, largely because of the state’s rising cost of living and a half-decade of no increases to their base-level funding. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant base funding increases despite the state having a record $32 billion surplus.

“When you have a state where their coffers are full and local school districts where their coffers are empty, or in the process of being empty, you’re going to have to have some state help to make sure that we’re funding these types of programs,” said Mark Henry, who served as Cy-Fair ISD’s superintendent for more than a decade until his retirement last year.
A tool to deal with teacher shortages

Prior to the passage of the 2015 law, known as District of Innovation, teachers would normally enter the profession through traditional college or university routes or via alternative certification programs, which are geared toward people who have a bachelor’s degree in a different field and need classroom training. Both pathways have seen enrollment declines in recent years.

The District of Innovation law was meant to give traditional public schools some of the flexibility that charter schools had long enjoyed, granting them exemptions from mandates on class sizes, school start dates and certification requirements. Before, uncertified educators in Texas could teach core classes only after obtaining waivers and permits approved by the state education agency on a case-by-case basis.

With a District of Innovation plan, districts can now create a comprehensive educational program that identifies provisions under Texas law that make it difficult for them to reach their goals and offers ways to address those challenges. The plan must receive public input and gain local school board approval before districts can proceed with any exemptions.

Many districts have sought an exemption from the state’s teacher certification requirements to help combat their teacher shortages.

Texas has no statewide definition for what constitutes a teacher shortage, but one major indicator that points to a significant need for more teachers is the state’s teacher attrition rate, which tracks the percentage of educators who leave the field in any given year.

Since the start of the pandemic, the attrition rate has increased from roughly 9% to 12%, according to the Texas Education Agency. A historic 13.4% of teachers left the profession between fall 2021 and fall 2022.

The state commissioned a task force two years ago to look into the teacher shortage and make policy recommendations for legislators to address the problem, though not much of the group’s advice has been adopted into state law. The panel of educators and school administrators recommended that the state commit to respecting teachers’ time, improving training and increasing salaries. Texas ranks 30th in the nation for average teacher pay, $8,828 less than the national average, according to the National Education Association.

The Texas House of Representatives’ Public Education Committee held a hearing in August to ask questions and gather information on the causes for the rising number of uncertified teachers and the effect on student outcomes. Lawmakers also discussed what many public education advocates see as a growing lack of respect for teachers, which the advocates say is fueling both the teacher shortage and the rise of uncertified teachers.

In recent years, Texas Republican leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have routinely criticized public schools and instructors, accusing them of teaching children “woke” lessons on America’s history of systemic racism and keeping in their libraries reading materials that make inappropriate references to gender and sexuality. All the while, Abbott has been pushing for a program that would allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for their children’s private education, which public education advocates fear will plummet enrollment in public schools and ultimately result in less funding. School districts receive funding based on their average daily attendance.

“No one wants to go into something where they feel like they’re just going to be beat down day to day,” said David Vroonland, former superintendent of Mesquite ISD who now works as executive director of the educational research organization LEARN. “And I think the political commentary out there right now is doing a lot of harm to bringing more people into the space. Obviously, the other is we need to pay better.”
Getting new teachers ready for the classroom

Educators who testified at last month’s legislative hearing also called on lawmakers to direct more financial resources to help teaching candidates go through high-quality preparation programs.

One such program in Brazosport ISD helped Amanda Garza McIntyre transition from being an administrative assistant at a construction company to becoming an eighth grade science teacher at Freeport Intermediate School.

McIntyre, who has a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, knew what Brazosport ISD does for children: the district helped her first-grade daughter learn how to read at grade level over the course of a semester. But starting a new career while raising her five kids seemed overwhelming, and she needed help.

The Brazosport ISD program allows aspiring teachers to earn a bachelor’s degree, teacher certification or both — at no cost. In return, program participants have to work in the district for at least three years. The program includes a paid residency that pairs candidates with a teacher mentor who works with them in a classroom for a full school year. Brazosport ISD pays for the program using funds from its own budget, grants and local partnerships.

Thanks to the hands-on training and guidance she received over the last year, which included working with some of the same children in her classroom now, McIntyre started as a full-time teacher earlier this month.

“I don’t know that I would have fully committed to going into teaching without knowing that I had that training and that preparedness to walk into a classroom and feel confident,” McIntyre said.

The task force formed to study the root causes of Texas’ teacher shortage included in its recommendations that the state fund certification programs like the one Brazosport ISD is running.

Sam Cofer, chief operating officer of Jubilee Academies, a San Antonio-based charter school district, said it makes sense for the Legislature to help fund programs like Brazosport ISD’s but argued that certification is not the only way to increase the number of capable teachers in Texas classrooms.

Jubilee Academies filled many of its teacher vacancies in the last decade with substitute instructors. The district knew it would be difficult to compete for more experienced teachers with traditional districts that could offer more competitive salaries, Cofer said, so it expanded its pool of applicants to include people with a bachelor’s degree and work experience in other fields but without teaching certification.

Since 2015, Jubilee Academies’ percentage of uncertified teachers has risen from roughly 17% to 66%. During the 2023-24 school year, 60% of new hires at all Texas charter schools were people without formal classroom training.

Cofer said the district relies on instructional coaches to provide their new hires with the support they need to adapt to their new profession. He also said the district encourages certification but doesn’t require it.

Teacher certification does prepare new hires “better in a lot of ways to be a teacher in a public school,” Cofer said. “But I also can’t be dismissive of the skill sets that may come along with people that don’t go through those programs that could also end up being effective teachers with the right amount of coaching and mentoring and guidance.”

Public education advocates are hoping the state and school districts invest in quality teacher preparation, regardless of what avenue they take to get there.

“It’s not serving students to put people in those positions that don’t have the experience they need to be successful,” said Priscilla Aquino-Garza, a former teacher who works as senior director of programs for Educate Texas, an organization focused on increasing academic achievement and educational equity for underserved children.

Shalona McCray, Longview ISD’s assistant superintendent of Human Resources and Community Relations, is grateful for the flexibility the District of Innovation law has granted schools. She said it allowed them to recruit from a more diverse talent pool as veteran educators left the profession in droves at the height of the pandemic. Since the law was passed, the district’s percentage of uncertified hires has skyrocketed from roughly 3% to 67%.

Longview ISD is committed to working with teachers to get them licensed through an alternative certification program or the district’s apprenticeship program, preferably within three years, McCray said. The District of Innovation law is a stepping stone, she said, to getting more people who care about education into the profession.

“I’m gonna have to rely on District of Innovation to go out and find some teachers who are not certified but qualified,” McCray said. “They have a bachelor’s degree, they have a passion, and then we’ll do everything we can to help them.”

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Data reporting by Elijah Nicholson-Messmer

DALLAS (AP) — Newly emerged film footage of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade speeding down a Dallas freeway toward a hospital after he was fatally wounded will go up for auction later this month.

Experts say the find isn’t necessarily surprising even over 60 years after the assassination.

“These images, these films and photographs, a lot of times they are still out there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

RR Auction will offer up the 8 mm home film in Boston on Sept. 28. It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. just missing the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy but capturing other vehicles in the motorcade as it traveled down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown. The film then picks up after Kennedy has been shot, with Carpenter rolling as the motorcade roars down Interstate 35.

“This is remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.

The footage from I-35 — which lasts about 10 seconds — shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill — who famously jumped onto the back of the limousine as the shots rang out — hovering in a standing position over the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.

“I did not know that there were not any more shots coming,” Hill said. “I had a vision that, yes, there probably were going to be more shots when I got up there as I did.”

The shots had fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where it was later found that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. The assassination itself was famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder.

After the shots, the motorcade turned onto I-35 and sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy would be pronounced dead. It was the same route the motorcade would have taken to deliver Kennedy to his next stop, a speech at the Trade Mart.

Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while it was known in his family that his grandfather had film from that day, it wasn’t talked about often. So Gates said that when the film, stored along with other family films in a milk crate, was eventually passed on to him, he wasn’t sure exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.

Projecting it onto his bedroom wall around 2010, he was at first underwhelmed by the footage from Lemmon Avenue. But then, the footage from I-35 played out before his eyes. “That was shocking,” he said.

He was especially struck by Hill’s precarious position on the back of the limousine, so around the time that Hill’s book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” was published in 2012, Gates got in touch with Hill and his co-author, Lisa McCubbin, who became Lisa McCubbin Hill when she and Hill married in 2021.

McCubbin Hill said it was admirable that Gates was sensitive enough to want Hill to see the footage before he did anything else with it. She said that while she was familiar with Hill’s description of being perched on the limousine as it sped down the interstate, “to see the footage of it actually happen … just kind of makes your heart stop.”

The auction house has released still photos from the portion of the film showing the race down I-35 but is not publicly releasing video of that part.

Farris Rookstool III, a historian, documentary filmmaker and former FBI analyst who has seen the film, said it shows the rush to Parkland in a more complete way than other, more fragmented film footage he’s seen. He said the footage gives “a fresh look at the race to Parkland,” and he hopes that after the auction, it ends up somewhere where it can be used by filmmakers.

Fagin said the assassination was such a shocking event that it was instinctive for people to keep material related to it, so there’s always the possibility of new material surfacing.

He said historians had wondered for years about a man who can be seen taking photos in one of the photos from that day.

“For years we had no idea who that photographer was, where his camera was, where these images were,” Fagin said.

Then, in 2002, Jay Skaggs walked into the museum with a shoebox under his arm. He was the photographer captured in the photo, and in that shoebox were 20 images from Dealey Plaza before and after the assassination, including the only known color photographs of the rifle being removed from the Texas School Book Depository building, Fagin said.

“He just handed that box to us,” Fagin said.

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News is reporting that Bexar County commissioners on Tuesday approved spending nearly $400,000 to blanket the county with voter registration forms to increase participation in the Nov. 5 election — flouting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who threatened to sue over the measure. Jacque Callanen, the county’s elections administrator, also opposed the planned mailout, and scores of Republican opponents turned up at commissioners’ court to try to derail the effort. The commissioners court voted 3-1 to hire a third-party firm to mail about 210,000 voter registration forms to Bexar County residents. Precinct 3 Commissioner Grant Moody, the lone Republican on the five-member court, voted no, and Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert abstained. Harris County commissioners tabled discussion of a similar proposal last week — a possible, $200,000 pilot program to send registration forms to non-commercial addresses where no voters are currently registered, among other voter registration initiatives.

In letters to Bexar and Harris counties on Sunday, Paxton cautioned that the distribution of forms could include people who are ineligible to vote in November. “At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” Paxton wrote. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.” Paxton added that the counties lack the legal authority to print and mail forms that haven’t been requested by voters. In 2020, the state sued Harris County over a similar effort, when officials there wanted to mail ballot applications to all of its registered voters. The Texas Supreme Court ruled in that case that the counties were only allowed by state law to mail applications requested by voters. The following year, as part of a sweeping election law overhaul bill, Senate Bill 1, the Republican-dominated state Legislature codified that ruling by making it a state jail felony for local election officials to send unsolicited mail ballot applications.

AUSTIN – The San Antonio Express-News reports the state grid operator says that increasingly strict pollution controls are operational “handcuffs” putting the stability of the Texas grid at risk. Federal emissions standards also are sending CPS Energy outside Bexar County to find a home for its next gas-powered plants because of concerns the rules could hinder their operation in the city-owned utility’s home county. “It’s going to constrain the potential out there to meet this demand we’re talking about,” grid boss Pablo Vegas said during a panel discussion last week in San Antonio, referring to the state’s increasing need for electricity supply. “We can’t just solve this problem by lodging two hands behind our backs.”

It wasn’t the first time the head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has taken shots at regulations coming from the Environmental Protection Agency limiting emissions that can be harmful to human health and cause climate change. But this time he did it while seated alongside CPS President and CEO Rudy Garza, whose utility has made it a priority to reach net neutral carbon emissions by 2050. By the end of this decade, it plans to cut back harmful emissions by 41% from where they stood in 2016. Despite CPS’ stance on pollution, Garza told the crowd gathered Thursday for a panel discussion on energy that planning new generation capacity the state needs to maintain reliability around regulations is an increasing challenge. Those challenges are top of mind as San Antonio stares down the possibility of having its status with the EPA of ozone pollution upped to “serious” if emissions don’t drop by Sept. 24. The change could affect how often CPS is allowed to run its natural gas-powered plants as federal regulations are likely to put in stricter emission controls. That’s why Garza says CPS is looking outside Bexar County to build up to 444 megawatts of new natural gas generation.

HOUSTON – Attorney General Ken Paxton is warning Bexar and Harris counties that he will sue if they move forward with proposals to mail out voter registration forms en masse to residents according to the Houston Chronicle. Despite the threat, Bexar County commissioners voted on Tuesday to move forward with the effort, saying they disagreed with Paxton’s legal assessment. In letters addressed to county commissioners on Sunday, Paxton cautioned that the distribution of forms could include people who are ineligible to vote, which would confuse residents about whether they can legally vote in November. “At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” the third-term Republican wrote. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”

In 2020, the state sued Harris County over a similar effort, when officials there wanted to mail ballot applications to all of its registered voters. The Texas Supreme Court ruled in that case that the counties were only allowed by state law to mail applications specifically requested by voters. “Because the same can be said for mass mailings of voter registration applications, I am confident the courts will agree with me that your proposal exceeds your authority,” Paxton wrote in the letters. Texas is one of just seven states that do not offer online voter registration, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The one exception is that Texas was forced to begin offering limited online registration in 2020 after a judge ruled it must allow residents to sign up or update their registration when receiving a new driver’s license or updating that ID card.