The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.
Texas education officials have ordered public school districts not to use any state funds to educate immigrant children held in federal detention centers. Friday, administrators sent a letter to Texas school districts with guidance that goes against some current practices. Houston Public Media’s Laura Isensee has more:
The Texas Education Agency sent a strong message to districts that want to educate immigrant children in federal custody who’ve been separated from their parents. TEA says districts have to charge tuition if they teach these children, and they can’t count them as students for state funding purposes. Michael Olivas teaches law at the University of Houston. He says the state still has some responsibility.
“State law says these kids have to be educated – they have to be educated in what is better and more adequate, more comprehensive settings than these cages, which are not working, and no one can concede or stipulate that that is somehow adequate,” Olivas said.
Several Texas school districts already have education agreements with federal contractors that manage these migrant shelters. The Harlingen district says it provides a teacher and assistant to teach 50 children at a Southwest Key facility, and counts those students in its enrollment numbers.
A Plano doctor has apologized after saying that female doctors earn less pay because they don’t work as hard.
In the Dallas Medical Journal’s Women In Medicine issue out this month, Dr. Gary Tiggis is quoted in a piece about the pay gap between the sexes.
In it, he says that the discrepancy exists because female physicians choose to see fewer patients, or work fewer hours than their male counterparts.
He concludes nothing needs to be done about the pay gap unless female physicians want to work harder.
Those comments drew a widespread backlash on social media.
Yesterday Tigges issued a statement on his practice’s website, apologizing to “all female physicians” and his partners and staff at Plano Internal Medicine.
He says after hearing from female colleagues, he quote “understands more clearly how intricate this issue is.”
A semi-truck carrying a shipment of Axe body spray erupted into a fireball on Interstate 35 in Belton late last week.
The Temple Daily Telegram reports that the fire began around 4 a.m. Friday morning, when the truck’s driver reported seeing flames in his rearview mirror.
The fire shot highly-flammable aerosol cans onto nearby streets.
No one was injured, but a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Transportation said a section of the interstate need to be repaved.
