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HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Halliburton, the Houston-based oilfield services giant, disclosed a few more details about the computer hack it suffered in late August. In a Sept. 3 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Halliburton confirmed that some corporate information had been taken from its computer systems, though it did not go into detail about the nature or subject of the purloined data. “The incident has caused disruptions and limitation of access to portions of the Company’s business applications supporting aspects of the Company’s operations and corporate functions,” it said in the filing. “The Company believes the unauthorized third party accessed and exfiltrated information from the Company’s systems. The Company is evaluating the nature and scope of the information, and what notifications are required.”

The company confirmed earlier reporting of the attack in a Aug. 21 SEC filing and said it had notified authorities of the breach. “When the Company learned of the issue, the Company activated its cybersecurity response plan and launched an investigation internally with the support of external advisors to assess and remediate the unauthorized activity,” it said. “The Company’s response efforts included proactively taking certain systems offline to help protect them and notifying law enforcement. The Company’s ongoing investigation and response include restoration of its systems and assessment of materiality.” A source of the breach has not been identified. While the company said it had incurred expenses related to the attack, it said in the most recent filing that the incident “has not had, and is not reasonably likely to have, a material impact on the Company’s financial condition or results of operations.”

Texas would have to spend tens of billions of dollars to get rid of the state’s property taxes, state budget officials said Wednesday — a reality check on some conservatives who want to end them once and for all.

Republican lawmakers have been on a yearslong push to bring down the state’s property taxes, among the highest in the nation. Some Texas conservatives have long dreamt of getting rid of at least some property taxes altogether — an idea others have criticized as unrealistic given the gargantuan cost of doing so. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a skeptic of doing away with property taxes, tasked lawmakers earlier this year with tallying the cost.

Now, lawmakers have those figures in hand. Getting rid of all property taxes collected by school districts would have cost the state $39.5 billion in tax year 2023, figures presented to the Texas Senate Finance Committee by the Legislative Budget Board show. School property taxes, which pay for costs like teacher salaries and new facilities, represent the largest chunk of a property owner’s tax bill.

AUSTIN (AP) – In addition, the state would have had to shell out another $42 billion to cover the property taxes collected by cities, counties and special taxing districts last year. All told, the state would have had to spend $81.5 billion to completely eliminate all local property taxes. That’s more than half of the $144 billion that lawmakers allocated for Texas’ current two-year budget.

Spending that much money on tax cuts would significantly hamper the state’s ability to pay for other costs and would likely require a significant sales tax hike, lawmakers said Wednesday. There appeared to be little appetite among committee members to do so.

“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.

Texas doesn’t levy its own property tax. Instead, cities, counties, school districts and special taxing entities collect property taxes. Property tax bills have climbed over much of the last decade as the state’s economy boomed and property values and tax rates rose.

To try to rein in rising property tax bills, state lawmakers have spent billions of dollars and put tighter limits on how much more in property taxes school districts and local governments can collect. Last year, legislators approved a $12.7 billion package consisting of targeted tax breaks for homeowners and money for school districts to drive down how much they collect from property owners. For homeowners, those efforts appear to be working.

The amount of property taxes school districts collected fell by nearly 10% between 2022 and 2023, according to figures provided by the Texas Comptroller’s office. Total property tax collections, however, fell less than 1% in that time frame, driven by a 10.3% increase in the amount of property taxes collected by cities, counties and special taxing districts.

The state’s top Republicans have signaled they’re not done slashing property taxes. Patrick, the leader of the Texas Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan each tasked legislators in their chambers with exploring more cuts before they reconvene in Austin for next year’s legislative session. Gov. Greg Abbott said earlier this year that the Legislature should continue to hammer away at property taxes “until we get rid of the school property tax rate here in the state of Texas.”

Doing away with the property tax rate that pays for school districts’ maintenance and operations has long been a dream among some Texas conservatives, but proposals to do so have been dead on arrival in the Legislature. Still, some conservative thinkers contend the state should chip away at property taxes over time until they’re eliminated.

“Property taxes are not just a financial burden,” said Vance Ginn, a conservative economist who runs his own economic consulting firm. “They are fundamentally immoral.”

Even if lawmakers had an appetite for doing away with property taxes, finding the money to make up for that revenue would be difficult.

Texas doesn’t have an income tax, and outside of the property tax, the state relies heavily on sales taxes to pay for government services. Thus, getting rid of the property tax would likely require a significant hike in the sales tax — an idea that has proven highly unpopular in the past. Texas would have to more than double its sales tax rate to eliminate all property taxes, a recent analysis by the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found.

Sales taxes are also a more volatile way to fund the government because they’re more vulnerable to economic downturns and shifts in consumer spending. The burden of paying sales tax falls harder on lower-income households because sales taxes make up a higher share of their income than they do for households higher up the income ladder.

“Hitting low- and middle-income Texas families with this dramatically higher rate would seriously damage both their household budgets and the state economy as a whole,” Shannon Halbrook, a fiscal analyst at the left-leaning Every Texan, told lawmakers Wednesday.

AUSTIN – The publication Inside Higher Ed reports the University of Austin, a new higher ed institution founded by high-profile conservative figures, officially welcomed its inaugural class on Monday. The university, sometimes referred to as UATX, markets itself as an institution born out of alarm over the “rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities” and says it is committed to “the pursuit of truth.” In his speech at convocation, President Pano Kanelos, who formerly served as president of St. John’s College, described the university’s 92-student cohort as “pioneers.”

“As I look across this room, I do not see students or faculty or staff or loved ones,” Kanelos said. “I see a room filled with the courageous, the bold, with pioneers, with heroes. I see a room filled with those who have said, emphatically, ‘We will not accept passively what we have been handed, the givens are not good enough, we will create anew.’” “We have come together, all of us, as founders,” he added. Provost Jacob Howland told students in his opening remarks that launching the university involved trekking through “rough terrain.” The university is not accredited but received approval from the state of Texas to grant degrees, which allowed it to begin accepting applications last November. Students can earn a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies with a concentration in one of the fields offered by the university’s “centers of academic inquiry,” which include STEM, arts and letters, and economics, politics and history. The university currently employs about 20 faculty members, with no tenure system. Tuition is $32,000 per year. On convocation day, students met with Governor Greg Abbott at the Texas state capitol. Then, in a hotel ballroom near campus, students decked out in dark-blue robes each signed the register to officially enroll, receiving a copy of The Odyssey, Kanelos told Inside Higher Ed. He said the incoming class comes from at least two dozen states. And some of the students are familiar faces from high school programs UATX ran in various cities—including Austin, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami and Washington—before the university’s launch, according to the website.

AUSTIN – KXAN reports voters went to the polls last November and overwhelmingly supported creation of the Texas Water Fund, a pot of money totaling $1 billion meant for water infrastructure improvements across the state. In the months since then, the state’s water agency has worked to narrow down who could dip into it first. Last month the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) agreed on a shortlist of 66 projects in smaller, more rural systems that could get the initial awards for projects aimed at shoring up water conservation and cutting down water loss. Jeremy Mazur, a senior policy advisor on infrastructure and natural resources for the nonprofit Texas 2036, said it’s especially important for the state to focus on those efforts.

“When we look at the data about water loss from our water and wastewater systems in Texas, it’s astounding,” Mazur said. “Texas loses about 570,000 acre feet per year due to leaking pipes. Now, for comparison, this is about enough water to fill up Lake Buchanan here in Central Texas once every year, so we know if we want to solve the water supply solution in the long run, we really need to focus on fixing those leaks and stopping that water loss.” One proposal on that initial shortlist is located about an hour east of Austin in the small community of Lexington in Lee County. According to state records, the town is seeking more than $1.3 million for a smart metering system. The TWDB reported in August that top-ranked projects would get invitations to submit full applications for funding, so it’s unclear right now whether the state would award Lexington either a grant or loans to help. Mazur said the billion allocated to the Texas Water Fund is a “drop in the bucket” of what state lawmakers need to invest moving forward, estimating that Texas has a long-term water infrastructure funding need exceeding $150 billion over the next 50 years.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports while U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz insists he will keep fighting for jobs and economic growth in Texas if reelected in November, Democratic rival Colin Allred keeps hammering him over one key vote that he says proves otherwise. In 2022, Cruz voted against fellow Texas Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s microchip manufacturing legislation that is set to inject more than $60 billion in funding into Texas to build new plants and potentially make the state home to a national research center for semiconductors. “We have a Senator in Ted Cruz who opposed that,” Allred, a Dallas congressman, said last week during a campaign stop in Austin. “He thinks it is more important to play politics than to do what is good for our state.”

During a campaign stop in San Antonio on Tuesday touting his job creation record, Cruz acknowledged he voted against the bill but explained it was because it was structured to give billions of dollars in incentives to giant corporations to build in Texas — something he philosophically believes is bad politics. In April, Samsung received $6.4 billion from the program to build an advanced manufacturing center in Taylor just outside of Austin that is expected to create 17,000 construction jobs and 4,500 manufacturing jobs. Cruz didn’t criticize that project or other recent awards in North Texas directly, but said generally subsidy programs are dangerous. He pointed to 2009, when President Barack Obama’s administration awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to a California-based solar panel construction company that went bankrupt just three years later.

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.