Dallas Morning News. February 4, 2023.
Editorial: No more moldy bread: This pilot program can improve Texas prison food
A vocational initiative will train inmates to prepare meals.
Prison conditions in Texas are far from ideal, as it has been well documented. Past reports have described contaminated water, deficient medical care and dangerous situations from the lack of air conditioning during the summer. Another common complaint is food.
In recent years, smuggled cellphone photos sent to journalists and advocates have shown “delicacies” such as sausage combined with a tortilla, moldy bread with a blob of oily peanut butter and other unpalatable items.
This is why we support a new plan by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice that would improve the food served during prison lockdowns, which happen regularly and can last for weeks, as reported by The Marshall Project.
One notable aspect of this plan is that it would create a vocational program. The prisoners themselves will be trained to prepare food, and the costs will be paid for by TDCJ’s school system.
Under this pilot initiative, the prison agency will be partnering with the Windham School District to establish a meal program for the inmate population. The school district provides educational services for state prisons, and it will be in charge of training about 20 culinary art students at the beginning of the pilot.
The program will create shelf-stable meals that will replace the “johnny sacks” or bagged meals that inmates currently get when a hot meal is not available.
“Upon completion of the course, students will receive certificates in shelf-stable meal equipment and be assigned to facilities across Texas to assist in the shelf-stable meal program,” said Amanda Hernandez, director of communications at TDCJ.
There is an added benefit from this program. State officials have set a goal to have 95% of inmates leave prison with a job by 2030.
“This program not only increases the quality of food but will provide inmates with the education and job skills needed to join the food service and warehouse industries, assisting in their reintegration into society,” Hernandez said.
There is no menu set yet, but prisoners will be served a meat or casserole, a vegetable serving and a starch. Meals will be “flash” frozen and placed in a freezer until they are needed.
The pilot program will start this spring at the Wallace and Ware units in West Texas and at Stringfellow, near Houston. TDCJ will assess the program for efficiency, effectiveness, cost and quality control, Hernandez said.
“The goal is to expand the program to multiple facilities statewide,” she added.
The agency has asked the state for a modest increase to its current budget, from $95.3 million to $98.8 million. It anticipates spending about $4.2 million in food for the inmate population.
The well-being of the inmate population may not be top of mind in the Texas Legislature, but lawmakers must ensure humane conditions in prisons, including air conditioning in the summer and edible food all year long.
___
Houston Chronicle. January 30, 2023.
Editorial: Is bill banning Asian landownership about hate — or national security?
In 1920, word spread across South Texas that Japanese businessmen and farmers in California were setting their sights on Texas for “colonization.” The rumor circulated in a San Benito newspaper that stoked the growing anti-Japanese sentiment across the state. While California was contemplating its own law barring aliens from landownership, historian Brent M.S. Campney notes in the Journal of Southern History that xenophobic fears in Texas were growing.
What was once “curiosity” grew to hostility. By 1921, Texas lawmakers were arguing that Japanese immigrants, legally unable to become citizens, could never assimilate. They posed, as one legionnaire told the lawmakers in support of a landownership ban, a security threat “in event of a war with Japan.” Legion men at the time searched for evidence that Japanese immigrants were behind “a well developed plot that assumed alarming international proportions.”
These scenes from Texas history are just a few from a long national past of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant policy and action that was in the spotlight in protests last week in response to a proposed Texas law that would restrict not only businesses and state entities from China from purchasing land in Texas, but individual citizens from China, too.
There is already a law, thanks to Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) who co-authored it in the last session, that prevents businesses from China as well as Iran, North Korea, Russia, or any other country the governor deems as a threat, from doing business that gives them access to critical infrastructure, including water treatment, communications, electricity, waste treatment and more.
The new bill, SB 147, goes a step beyond. And a step too far, in our estimation, targeting individual immigrants and their families in a sweeping ban that sacrifices our values regarding equity, opportunity and economic growth to address a concern that’s still ill-defined.
Kolkhorst is a respected veteran lawmaker who isn’t known for instigating racist, mean-spirited legislation or gratuitously paratrooping into culture war battles, but she is a Republican team player who has shown herself willing to carry the water of more unsavory fringes of the GOP, as when she sponsored Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s “bathroom bill” targeting transgender Texans.
It seems likely that legitimate national security concerns are motivating Kolkhorst but the current proposal goes too far and, instead, fuels partisan fighting. The bill has strong support from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who tweeted about his eagerness to sign it into law. Just as quickly, it was met with quick condemnation from other lawmakers, including Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston).
These scenes from Texas history are just a few from a long national past of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant policy and action that was in the spotlight in protests last week in response to a proposed Texas law that would restrict not only businesses and state entities from China from purchasing land in Texas, but individual citizens from China, too.
There is already a law, thanks to Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) who co-authored it in the last session, that prevents businesses from China as well as Iran, North Korea, Russia, or any other country the governor deems as a threat, from doing business that gives them access to critical infrastructure, including water treatment, communications, electricity, waste treatment and more.
The new bill, SB 147, goes a step beyond. And a step too far, in our estimation, targeting individual immigrants and their families in a sweeping ban that sacrifices our values regarding equity, opportunity and economic growth to address a concern that’s still ill-defined.
Kolkhorst is a respected veteran lawmaker who isn’t known for instigating racist, mean-spirited legislation or gratuitously paratrooping into culture war battles, but she is a Republican team player who has shown herself willing to carry the water of more unsavory fringes of the GOP, as when she sponsored Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s “bathroom bill” targeting transgender Texans.
It seems likely that legitimate national security concerns are motivating Kolkhorst but the current proposal goes too far and, instead, fuels partisan fighting. The bill has strong support from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who tweeted about his eagerness to sign it into law. Just as quickly, it was met with quick condemnation from other lawmakers, including Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston).
___
San Antonio Express-News. February 3, 2023.
Editorial: Voucher plan would decimate public schools
In a session that should be focused on school safety after the Uvalde massacre, teacher pay and retention, and permanent and equitable school funding, the top education priority for our state’s GOP leaders is vouchers.
It would be a seismic change in policy that would defund public schools, shift tax dollars to private schools and, research suggests, assist wealthy families.
Funneling funds to private schools via various school choice vouchers programs is wrought with moral and logistical pitfalls.
But school choice is a promise Gov. Greg Abbott has made, couching vouchers as a way to empower parents who are fed up with public schools and so-called liberal agendas.
“Parents should not be helpless,” Abbott said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Parent Empowerment Coalition at Annapolis Christian Academy in Corpus Christi. “They should be able to choose the education option that is best for their child. The way to do that is with ESAs — education savings accounts.”
But Texas parents already have rights in the state’s education code, and they have plenty of choices for their children’s schooling. They can choose to send their children to traditional public schools, sometimes even outside of their district. They can also opt for public specialized magnet schools or independently run public charter schools, or they can home-school.
Clay Robison, Texas State Teachers Association spokesperson, told our Editorial Board, “School vouchers, education savings accounts, scholarship funds, whatever they want to call them, are a bad idea. They’ve always been a bad idea. Our public schools are underfunded. Let’s not take money from them to give them to private schools.”
One proposed bill, Senate Bill 176, authored by state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, aims to create an education savings account to give parents state funds to pay for their children’s private school, online schooling or private tutors.
Under Middleton’s bill, families who opt out of the state’s public education system would receive the average amount of money it costs Texas public schools to educate a child, which is currently about $10,000 a year.
However, there’s no guarantee students would get a better education. Unlike traditional public and charter schools, there is no oversight on private schools’ curriculum, accountability, teacher requirements or spending.
Public schools are inequitable and underfunded. Subsidizing private schools would exacerbate these inequities. Texas, second only to California in the size of its K-12 student population, ranks 44th in spending and 39th in funding. Why not invest in better funding public education?
Even if private schools did accept every student who applied, they don’t have the capacity for every Texas child. But private schools, which choose their students, are also often out of reach for students who are low-income, special education or at-risk.
Private schools also are often inaccessible to rural communities, where public schools are not only the main option for education but often the largest employer.
Is it true school choice if not all students would benefit from private schools, and if many — likely the majority — would be stuck in underfunded public schools? Our Legislature is required by the Texas Constitution to “establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.”
Historically, opposition from Democrats and rural Republicans has obstructed passing vouchers. But Abbott has made clear this is a priority this session, the GOP had a strong election year, and there is pressure to keep up with other Republican-dominated states like Arizona, where this past summer, despite a rejection from voters, the Legislature approved the nation’s largest school voucher program, which education experts oppose.
The message this effort to defund public schools sends to teachers, students and families is that Texas’ elected leaders prioritize funding our state’s wealthiest parents, those who already can afford the average $9,000 to $11,000 in tuition at private schools. They’d do it at a cost of undermining the public school system. And they’ll fan the flames of culture wars to get it passed.
In Corpus Christi, Abbott said: “Parents are angry today about social agendas being pushed on our kids in our schools in Texas and that is unacceptable. Schools are for education, not indoctrination.”
But a recent poll from the Charles Butt Foundation found 89 percent of parents were satisfied with their child’s public school education, so public schools must be doing something right.
Diverting funds from our state’s public schools, which should be safe places where all Texas children can access a quality, equitable education, would be irresponsible and immoral.
Abbott gets an F for championing vouchers.
END