Results tagged “terryabbott”

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. It's no secret that Texans like fried food — so it's no wonder that the Big Tex Choice Awards, the taste-test contest at the State Fair of Texas, focuses on fried concoctions. But this year's Big Tex winner for the best-tasting new food might surprise even the most jaded connoisseur of fried delicacies: It's fried cookie dough, created by Abel Gonzales Jr. The fried cookie dough is a cookie base with...

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...

Good morning, Houston. Another day, another ranking: This time, Houston is the second most dangerous place in the U.S. for letter carriers — at least in terms of dog bites. According to the U.S. Postal Service, 94 mail carriers were bitten by dogs in Houston last year, putting us slightly behind Santa Ana, Calif., which logged 96 bites. The safest city in the country: New York City, of all places. Who knew? The USPS...

We're sure HISD officials are feeling like they've had enough problems with the district's merit bonus system — but here's one more they're having to deal with: Because of a computer glitch, teachers were overpaid an average of $745 in bonuses. And now district officials are asking them to give the money back. Oops! The computer error led 99 part-time teachers and instructional personnel to be paid as though they were full-time employees, meaning they...

Thousands of people have gotten citations from the city's red-light camera system since it went online back in September — so you'd expect that some of them would be public employees driving public vehicles, right? Right. According to the Chronicle, more than 100 government and school vehicles have been tagged running red lights, resulting in some $8,000 in fines. The Chronicle got the information under the Texas Public Information Act; though the 100 citations are a very tiny fraction of the 34,000 issued so far, they're kind of troublesome. "Anytime anyone runs a red light, we have a concern about that," HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said (the school district has gotten five camera citations). "It's the same as speeding or anything else. We have policies in place to discipline drivers who don't follow the law."

It looks like the story of Our Lady of the Pizza Pan isn't turning out like we expected. Over the weekend, the Chronicle reported that officials at Pugh Elementary — where cafeteria worker Guadalupe Rodriguez discovered the silhouette of the Virgin Mary on a pizza pan on Ash Wednesday — worked out a deal so Rodriguez could keep the pan. But today, when Rodriguez was supposed to pick up the pan, HISD ordered that it...

Houstonist has never been a substitute teacher, but we're pretty sure it could be a boring job at times. From what we can remember, the regular teacher would often leave the substitute some kind of busy-work assignment for the students, so all the sub would have to do is set the kids to work on whatever it was — writing a paper on sexual diffidence in Victorian literature, for example, or making turkeys from the outline of their hands — and then he or she could enjoy a cup of hot coffee or the next chapter of the new Danielle Steel book. Or, you know, they could also use a school computer to look at Internet porn like one HISD sub did last week.

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?

OK, so this is weird: A 12-year-old girl has been suspended for making up a hit list containing a bunch of made-up names (and one real one, but we'll get to that in a minute). The whole thing started when a fellow Pin Oak Middle School student reported seeing the girl with the list on a school bus Friday. The girl was immediately suspended, and then officials started checking the list out.

A 16 year old Westbury High School student was gunned down in a reportedly gang-related drive by shooting this morning, between 8:35 and 8:40 a.m. in the 5400 block of Dryad, adjacent to the Westbury campus, reports the Chronicle. The student was transported to Ben Taub Hospital, where "he died on arrival,'' said Evelyn Flouri, of the homicide division of the Houston Police Department. Police were not releasing the victim's name. Police told HISD superintendent...

Next time you're out looking for a quick lunch, we recommend you don't swing by your local HISD school cafeteria: A couple of district food-service employees tell KHOU that food might not be all that safe in schools. We always thought there was something odd about Salisbury steak.

If there's one thing Houstonist has learned in all our years of sweet life, it's this: When you've done something wrong, it's better to 'fess up to it than to cause more trouble and get yourself in an even bigger mess. But obviously not everyone has figured that out — take, for example, the Waltrip High School student who reportedly assaulted a deputy who was trying to give her a ticket for truancy yesterday.

HISD will get about $5 million in federal money to cover the cost of educating hurricane evacuees — that's the full $6,000 per student the district was initially promised, but it was a long time coming.

Welcome to hurricane season! The AP is reporting that HISD trustees will vote next week on a $600,000 emergency notification system that would call the parents of the district's more than 200,000 students in case a hurricane heads toward Houston. The system, which would be paid for with state technology funds, would let parents know about school closings or early releases — something most people have to find out from TV or radio stations now.

Houstonist remembers high school dances as half-empty bastions of freshman awkwardness featuring acne and glittery eyeshadow. Apparently, things have changed since Houstonist left the hallowed halls of secondary education--at least at Madison High, where HPD's vice unit is investigating allegations of improper conduct at a school sponsored event. KHOU reported on Monday that students on the tape were having sex, but don’t get your hopes up: They declined to buy a copy of the DVD.