The Austin school board early Tuesday morning approved a $1.65 million budget, which dips heavily into district reserves to cover a $47.6 million shortfall. The 2020-21 budget sets aside spending $33 million in coronavirus-related expenses, including technology for remote learning, training materials and personal protective equipment.
Read the rest of this article from the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.
As the school board finalizes its FY2021 budget, racial justice advocates are calling on the Austin Independent School District to move money away from policing. The Austin Justice Coalition and other groups are asking the board to divest from what they consider "excessive funding" for school police departments – that includes not filling vacancies or increasing the number of school resource officers.
Cities around the country including Austin, Atlanta and Oklahoma City, have released body camera videos of controversial police encounters in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody as there
Calls throughout the nation to defund the police have reverberated in one of San Antonio’s largest school districts, as several social justice groups called on San Antonio Independent School District to divert resources from its police force and hire more mental health professionals and social workers.
Activists are demanding that Austin Police Chief Brian Manley be terminated, and Mayor Steve Adler on Monday called for an investigation in the wake of a police officer’s fatal shooting of a man. Michael Ramos, 42, was killed Friday evening after an officer shot at him as he slowly drove away from police outside an apartment complex on South Pleasant Valley Road, video taken by witnesses shows.
With the novel coronavirus upending society, Rachel Schuyler felt like a sitting duck. At the Bexar County lockup in downtown San Antonio, she lacked supplies like hand sanitizer and cringed each time a dormmate coughed. On April 3, she was finally released—one day after county officials announced a deputy at the jail had tested positive for the virus, the first of at least 23 cases among staff and inmates at the facility.
Today, a group of advocates, community leaders, and justice system experts sent a list of urgent recommendations regarding COVID-19 and incarcerated populations to Governor Abbott.
![HPD policy changes are not enough. More needs to be done. [Editorial]](/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/articles/2021-08/HPD%25203820.jpg?itok=8oaw-O00)
More than a year after the botched Harding Street raid, which left two people dead and five officers wounded, we still don’t know the full extent of the rot in the Houston Police Department. Chief Art Acevedo is convinced that it’s a case of a bad apple infecting an otherwise air-tight department. But as Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg’s review of cases tainted by former Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines expands, that’s increasingly difficult to accept.
When Michael Bryant was found with illegal drugs last year, it landed him in jail for about a month, exacerbating his problems with addiction. Bryant, who is now 33, had been struggling with drug addiction for much of his life, and the problems got worse in 2015, when he moved to Austin from New York after a difficult breakup.
A coalition of criminal justice reform groups has found significant racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates for people in possession of a gram or less of controlled substances in Travis County, Texas. A new report on the findings comes as the county’s largest police department, in Austin, faces accusations of institutional racism and overzealous policing of people for drug use, even in cases where both the City Council and the county prosecutor have said they will not prosecute.
