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HOUSTON (AP) — Since her birth 10 years ago, Mackenzie Holmes has rarely called one place home for long.

There was the house in Houston owned by her grandmother, Crystal Holmes. Then, after Holmes lost her Southwest Airlines job and the house, there was the trio of apartments in the suburbs — and three evictions. Then another rental, and another eviction. Then motels and her uncle’s one-bedroom apartment, where Mackenzie and her grandmother slept on an inflatable mattress. Finally, Crystal Holmes secured a spot in a women’s shelter, so the two would no longer have to sleep on the floor.

With nearly every move came a new school, a new set of classmates, and new lessons to catch up on. Mackenzie only has one friend she’s known longer than a year, and she didn’t receive testing or a diagnosis for dyslexia until this year. She would often miss long stretches of class in between schools.

Schoolchildren threatened with eviction are more likely to end up in another district or transfer to another school, often one with less funding, more poverty and lower test scores. They’re more likely to miss school, and those who end up transferring are suspended more often. That’s according to an analysis from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, published in Sociology of Education, a peer-reviewed journal, and shared exclusively with The Associated Press’ Education Reporting Network.

Pairing court filings and student records from the Houston Independent School District, where Mackenzie started kindergarten, researchers identified more than 18,000 times between 2002 and 2016 when students lived in homes threatened with eviction filings. They found students facing eviction were absent more often. Even when they didn’t have to change schools, students threatened with eviction missed four more days in the following school year than their peers.

In all, researchers counted 13,197 children between 2002 and 2016 whose parents faced an eviction filing. A quarter of those children faced repeated evictions.

As eviction rates in Houston continue to worsen, there might be more children like Mackenzie.
Falling behind on rent — and finding a way to finish the school year

Neveah Barahona, a 17-year-old big sister to seven siblings, started kindergarten in Houston, but has moved schools half a dozen times. Her mother, Roxanne Abarca, knew moving can be disruptive. So whenever she fell behind on rent and the family was forced to move, she tried to let them finish the school year – even if it meant driving them great distances.

Neveah, a strong student who hopes to join the military, said the moves took a toll.

“It is kind of draining, meeting new people, meeting new teachers, getting on track with … what they want to teach you and what you used to know,” Neveah said. Then there’s finding her way with new classmates. A spate of bullying this year left her despondent until she got counseling.

Households with children are about twice as likely to face eviction than those without children, Eviction Lab research has shown. That’s 1.5 million children getting evicted every year — and one in 20 children under 5 living in a rental home. Still, much of the discourse focuses on adults — the landlords and grown-up tenants — rather than the kids caught in the middle, said Peter Hepburn, the study’s lead author.

“It’s … worth reminding people that 40% of the people at risk of losing their homes through the eviction process are kids,” said Hepburn, a sociology professor at Rutgers University-Newark and associate director at the Eviction Lab.

Households often become more vulnerable to eviction because they fall behind when they have children. Only 5% of low-wage earners, who are especially vulnerable to housing instability, have access to paid parental leave.

Under a federal law that protects homeless students, districts are supposed to try to keep children in the same school if they lose their housing midyear, providing daily transportation. But children who are evicted don’t always qualify for those services. Even those who do often fall through the cracks, because schools don’t know why children are leaving or where they’re headed.
Evicted families navigate invisible school boundaries

In the sprawl of Houston, it can be especially challenging for transient students to stay on track. The metropolis bleeds seamlessly from the city limits to unincorporated parts of Harris County, which is divided into 24 other districts. It’s easy to leave Houston’s school district without realizing it. And despite the best efforts of parents and caretakers, kids can miss a lot of school in transition.

That’s what happened in January, when Mackenzie’s grandmother, then staying in her son’s one-bedroom apartment with her granddaughter, got desperate. Fearful her son would get evicted for having family stay with him, Crystal Holmes — who had no home, no car and no cell phone service — walked miles to a women’s shelter.

The shelter, where she and Mackenzie now share a room, is in another district’s enrollment zone. She worried about Mackenzie being forced to move schools again — the fifth grader had already missed the first three weeks of the school year, when her grandmother struggled to get her enrolled.

Thankfully, the federal law kicked in, and Mackenzie’s school, Thornwood Elementary, now sends a car to fetch her and other students from the shelter.

Houston Independent School District did not respond to interview requests.

Millicent Brown lives in a public housing project in Houston, alongside an elevated highway so noisy she had to buy a louder doorbell. She and her daughter, Nova, 5, were forced to move last year when Nova’s father threatened to hurt Brown.

Nova had attended a charter school. But when she moved, the school said it could only bus Nova from her new home if she waited on a street that Brown said was too dangerous. Instead, Nova missed a month of school before enrolling in a nearby public school.

Brown grew up bouncing between schools and wants better for Nova. But she may have to move again: The state has plans to widen the highway. It would wipe out her housing project — and Nova’s new school.

Nearly three years ago, Neveah and her family settled into a ranch-style home down a country road in Aldine. It’s brightly lit, with four bedrooms and a renovated kitchen. Neaveah adopted a neighborhood cat she named Bella. Her sister Aaliyah painted a portrait of the home that’s displayed in the living room.

“When we were little, we always kept moving,” Aaliyah said. “I don’t want to move. I already got comfortable here.”

Then, last year, her mother once again began to fall behind on rent. Ultimately, Abarca received an eviction notice.

The mother was lucky. At the courthouse, she met an employee tasked with helping families stay in their homes. The employee connected her with a nonprofit that agreed to pay six months of her rent while Abarca got back on her feet.

And she did, working from home as a call operator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But the siblings’ dream of a “forever home” may still come to an end. Abarca learned this month the home’s owner hopes to sell to an investor, displacing them once again.

AUSTIN (AP) — When Austin police responded to a 911 call in a downtown high rise in 2019, they confronted Mauris DeSilva a few feet away from the elevator, in a mental health crisis holding a knife.

Christopher Taylor, an on-duty officer, shot and killed DeSilva that night. DeSilva’s father has said his son was not a threat to the police, only to himself. Prosecutors agreed.

Taylor last year was sentenced to two years in a prison for deadly conduct, a charge only a handful of officers have been convicted of in recent history. Lawyers for Taylor after the sentencing have called the prosecution an abuse of power.

Texas lawmakers are now working to make that kind of sentence impossible. House Bill 2436 would exempt law enforcement officers from being charged with deadly conduct for actions taken in the line of duty. The lower chamber is expected to vote on the bill Monday. The Senate approved a nearly identical bill, Senate Bill 1637, earlier this month.

The bill aims to strengthen protections for law enforcement officers. But critics say the bill gives officers unfettered authority to act recklessly and use an unjustifiable amount of force while on duty.

It’s one of several pieces of legislation this session that aim to increase protections for police officers five years after Texans took to the streets to protest police violence. The legislation aligns with the priorities of Gov. Greg Abbott and other GOP leaders who have been firm in maintaining local police budgets and have pushed Texas political candidates to sign pledges to “back the blue.”

Texas created the deadly conduct charge to help prosecutors around the state combat the rise of gang violence such as drive-by shootings in Texas. In recent years, a handful of police officers around the state like Taylor have been on trial for deadly conduct. Officers in Dallas were indicted on deadly conduct charges over how they launched rubber bullets against demonstrators in 2020. An ongoing case in Austin, where officer Daniel Sanchez shot Rajan Moonesinghe in his home while responding to a 911 call, hinges on the statute.

“It wasn’t intended for that at all,” Rep. Cole Hefner, the Mount Pleasant Republican who authored the bill, said in a committee hearing this month. “We want to protect (police officers) in doing the official duties of their job from these prosecutors that may be a little bit politically motivated sometimes.”

Republican lawmakers have clashed with local left-leaning prosecutors in recent years over their interpretations of the law and how they have used their discretion over which cases to pursue.

Jerry Staton was an Austin police officer for 25 years and now trains police officers in how and when to use firearms. Law enforcement officers regularly have to point and fire guns as part of the job. Staton said that means that officers are at risk of violating the deadly conduct statute everytime they go out and do their job.

Staton sat through much of Taylor’s trial, during which a grand jury went through 30 hours of deliberations before sentencing.

“I was in awe that this particular charge could be brought to a police officer … who did exactly what he was trained to do in a situation that he had very little flexibility in how to deal with it,” said Staton in committee testimony. “This has got to be fixed.”

Earlier versions of the House and Senate bills were written to be applied retroactively to cases like Taylor’s but that provision has since been removed.

Critics of HB 2436 argue an exemption like this shields police officers from accountability for recklessly discharging firearms. They worry the bill removes a mechanism for holding law enforcement accountable for misconduct or excessive use of force.

“Allowing police to shoot at people without justification will make our community and our law enforcement officers less safe,” said Travis County District Attorney José Garza.

“Bad actors and mistakes do happen in every profession and our police officers, our police force, is not an exception to that,” said Yasmine Smith, a vice president of justice and advocacy for the nonprofit Austin Area Urban League. “We must hold those bad actors accountable.”

Multiple critics raised concerns the legislation may have unintended consequences: Prosecutors may end up pursuing more severe charges against police officers, which come with harsher penalties.

The range of punishment is five to 99 years for murder, and two to 20 years for aggravated assault, compared to two to 10 years for deadly conduct. Taylor, the Austin officer, was initially indicted for murder over DeSilva’s death but that charge was later downgraded to deadly misconduct.

“If a police officer gets charged with murder now because he or she is a police officer, they don’t get the benefit of that very lesser offense because of this statute,” said John Creuzot, the Dallas County district attorney and a former judge. “That doesn’t make sense.”

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Employees of ConocoPhillips face more layoffs after the oil company’s merger with Marathon Oil, which triggered sweeping job cuts in Houston last year. A spokesman for the Houston oil giant confirmed Friday that the company had informed employees about additional layoffs, but declined to specify how many or when the layoffs would take place. “We are working through the process carefully and won’t speculate on timing or numbers while our evaluation is ongoing,” he said in a statement.

Reuters reported Tuesday that ConocoPhillips hired Boston Consulting Group to guide its restructuring and layoff program. The layoffs come as the company works to operate more efficiently after the $22.5 billion merger that closed in November. Marathon Oil notified the Texas Workforce Commission last year that it would cut more than 500 people at its CityCentre offices as a result of the union. The company said last year that it expected the merged company to save $500 million annually in costs, including $250 million in general and administrative costs related to salaries, benefits and facilities. However, ConocoPhillips’ CEO, Ryan Lance, sent a letter to employees implying that the cost savings would not result in workforce reductions. Marathon did not receive the same letter before its layoffs, according to a report in the Houston Business Journal.