Results tagged “hisdsuperintendentabelardosaavedra”

Good morning, Houston. We admit that we have a thing for interview shows, so we thought we'd take a second to note that NBC's Meet the Press, the king of Sunday morning TV news, made its television debut 60 years ago today. Meet the Press began life as a radio show in 1945 and moved to TV a couple of years later, and it hasn't stopped since. Now, MtP is the longest-running show on...

Good morning, Houston. We suppose Tex-Mex is finally official: The New York Times wrote about it yesterday in an article that looked at famed Mexican joints in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. "Neon signs flicker above pastel storefronts promising excellent Mexican food in virtually every block of the city," the Times' Joe Drape writes of Houston. "The trick is to figure out which places will deliver on that promise." Indeed. Drape visited El Jardin...

Good morning, Houston. We've run into some, uh, active parents of student athletes in our day, but we can't remember remember hearing about one who was actually banned from his kid's sporting events — until now, that is. Meet Joe Dalton, who has been barred from his son's Stafford High home football games because school district officials allege he assaulted a student. It happened at the last home game Dalton attended, where he said...

Good morning, Houston. We just don't understand the entertainment juggernaut (or is it "juggernette?") that is Hannah Montana: Tickets to her Nov. 11 Toyota Center show sold out in five minutes Saturday, and now they're going for as much as $1,275 on eBay — granted, that's for a set of four tickets, but still, wow. The markup through eBay and ticket brokers has left some parents shelling out big bucks to give their kids...

Good morning, Houston. These days, when everyone and their dog has a computer, it's getting harder to remember the days when all "official" writing was done on typewriters. The practical modern typewriter was invented in 1868 by an engineer named Christopher Latham Sholes, but it wasn't until 121 years ago today — Sept. 14, 1886 — that George K. Anderson of Memphis got a patent for the typewriter ribbon. They were originally made of...

HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra announced Thursday that the district needs an $805 million bond issue this November to repair and replace aging schools — but the HISD trustees are expected to vote next Thursday on whether to put the issue on the ballot. Think that isn't much time to learn the details of a pretty big amount of money? You're not the only one: "I'm concerned about the timeline," school board member Greg Meyers told...

The HISD board is expected to consider a resolution this week asking the state Legislature to scrap the TAKS test in favor of year-end exams in core subjects. Legislators have been discussing the testing change for weeks, and we're sure the support of the state's largest school district wouldn't exactly hurt the push for a TAKS-free state. Teachers and parents have criticized the TAKS for years, saying too much rides on the test and that...

Big news in Houston this weekend: the Blessed Virgin Mary, that holy trickster known for showing up in all sorts of unexpected places, chose to make an appearance on a pizza pan in a local elementary school kitchen. It happened on Ash Wednesday when Guadalupe Rodriguez, a cafeteria worker at Pugh Elementary, was washing the pizza pan in question and noticed a stubborn stain. "On the third rinse I started watching it, trying to discover...

An HISD bus driver is being hailed as a hero after she kept a gunman from boarding a bus carrying the Madison High School girls' basketball teams on Wednesday — by chunking her radio microphone at him. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

HISD trustees voted 8-1 yesterday to shut down three of the district's worst-performing schools next summer if the schools don't improve test scores and keep students from dropping out. The three schools — Kashmere High, Sam Houston High and McReynolds Middle School — are three of the lowest-performing in the state; according to state accountability ratings released last week, Kashmere and Sam Houston were the only schools in Texas to earn "academically unacceptable" ratings for...

Kids, if you're fans of questionable scrambled eggs, cafeteria-style biscuits, hash-brown sticks and those tiny cartons of milk, have we got some good news for you: All HISD students could get free school breakfasts every day under a proposal expected to be approved by the district's trustees next week. Breakfasts now cost 10 cents for students who qualify for reduced-priced meals and 90 cents for everyone else. Last year, nearly 70,000 HISD students ate breakfast at school, 14,000 of whom paid $1 million over the couse of the year for the meals. The others qualified for free meals because their families live below the poverty line.