Home > Postcards > Archives > 2007 > February > 07
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Teachers skip school
Four Austin teachers participated in the Association of Texas Professional Educators’ lobbying day at the Capitol Jan. 29, which was a teacher in-service day in the Austin school district. The district doesn’t hold classes on in-service days.
State rules require students to receive 180 days of instruction each semester, with teachers allowed to take off up to six days per year for staff development. The exact number varies from district to district. On those days, educators most often attend training programs, seminars or conferences.
In 2005, some lawmakers expressed their disapproval when 400 educators visited the Capitol on an in-service day, saying that it seemed unprofessional.
The four Austin association members used personal leave time to visit the Capitol last month. On its Web site the group lists standardized testing, school finance, teacher retirement, vouchers and charter schools among the issues it will watch this session. The Austin teachers could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Education
Gov. Perry reappoints Hawkins as HHSC chief
Gov. Rick Perry today reappointed Albert Hawkins as executive commissioner of the Health and Human Services Commission, the agency that oversees the state health department and the departments in charge of programs for low-income Texans, the elderly and people with disabilities.
Hawkins, a former official in the George W. Bush White House who has served as commissioner since January 2003, was reappointed to a term that expires Feb. 1, 2009.
As commissioner, Hawkins has overseen the consolidation of the health and human services agencies mandated by the Legislature in 2003. He has also been in the hot seat during the past year as a new system using call centers to enroll Texans in public assistance programs hit problems.
Hawkins received a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin, where he also received his bachelor’s degree.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Health & human services
Buses on MoPac’s shoulders? Could happen.
When traffic grinds to a halt on the freeway, who hasn’t been tempted to pull onto the right-hand shoulder and zip past all the other cars?
Capital Metro has, apparently, and would like the Legislature to give it permission to do so. The Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee today unanimously passed SB 132, by Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, which would allow creation of bus-only shoulder lanes. Buses could not be allowed to use the shoulder, under the bill in its amended form, unless traffic on the highway fell below 35 miles per hour, and could go no faster than 55 miles per hour on the shoulder.
Senators on the committee raised several concerns about safety. What about disabled vehicles on the shoulder? Might the buses slam into cars that, illegally, pull into the shoulder? Could simply seeing the buses using the shoulder encourage drivers of passenger vehicles to believe that it was, in fact, legal for them to do so?
“That would be a matter of enforcement,” said Dwight Ferrell, Capital Metro’s chief operations officer.
Wentworth and other senators said transit agencies in San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas support the bill, which would not mandate such lanes for local communities but instead give them the option — along with the Texas Department of Transportation — of allowing the buses access to shoulders on a city-by-city, road-by-road basis.
The legislation now goes to the full Senate for consideration.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Transportation
Senate panel passes booster seat bill
Legislation to require car booster seats for older kids, making its second run in the Legislature, sped through the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee today. Similar legislation in 2005 stalled in that same committee.
The bill, SB 60, sponsored by Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, would require parents of children who are both under 8 years old and less than 4-feet-9-inches tall to have their small children sit on a booster seat, along with the current requirement that they wear a seat belt. Currently, parents are free to put away the car seats once a child reaches age 5 or 36 inches in height.
The problem, child safety advocates told the committee, is that seat belt harnesses are not made for human beings so small. So in a violent car accident, a typical two-piece seat belt hits the child too high in the abdomen and also in the neck area, causing severe injuries in many cases, including paralysis or death. Dr. Todd Maxson, a pediatric trauma surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Austin, told the committee that he has talked to many parents of children hurt in this manner who say they did what they were supposed to and feel betrayed that their children were injured so badly.
“People look to the law for best practices,” he said.
Booster seats, essentially just a cloth-covered platform to elevate the seat-belt wearer, can be bought for about $15, advocates say. Those few extra inches, Maxson and others said, can make all the difference in a bad wreck.
The committee voted 8-0 for the bill, sending it to the Senate’s local and uncontested calendar. That means the bill, which has an identical House twin, HB 118, will almost surely make it out of the Senate.
The state, according to legislative aides, is just one of 11 states that hasn’t changed their law to require the booster seats for kids between age 5 and 7. The state stands to get $25 million in federal money if it passes such a law.
Permalink | | Categories: Transportation
Perry urges end to tricks that flourished on his watch
Gov. Rick Perry implored lawmakers in his State of the State address to stop the practice of collecting fees for one purpose, allocating only some of those fees for the stated purpose, and then using the rest to balance the state budget. Perry wants some of the balances spent on their purposes, such as some clean-air programs, and in other cases he wants the state to stop collecting the fee.
His plan addresses an issue that lawmakers have tried to sweep under the rug, but that the American-Statesman wrote about at length in the summer of 2006. The newspaper reported at that time that, between 2002 and 2007, the amount of unspent balances in dedicated accounts grew from $1.7 billion to a projected $2.7 billion.
Guess who was governor during that time.
In the last budget written under the previous governor, less than $500 million built up in those balances. In fairness, Perry was lieutenant governor then and probably had more of a direct hand in the budget than he does now.
Permalink | | Categories: State budget
