byKeaton Peters
Travis High School was built in 1953, making it the oldest high school in South Austin, and a broken heating system is hardly the first issue to arise in the aging facilities. The school will soon get a major renovation to fix much more than the heating. The Austin Independent School District is set to receive $252 million to construct a modern facility completely replacing the old Travis High.
The renovation of Travis High is part of $2.44 billion in bonds that Austin voters approved in November, when they also elected five former teachers to the district’s board of trustees. With the district facing stagnant state funding, a teacher shortage and decreased enrollment, AISD leaders see the election results as setting a new course for Austin public schools.
“The community said they are willing to pay to improve our schools, but simultaneously they said they want new leadership on the board to guide this money,” said Ken Zarifis, president of Education Austin, the labor union for Austin school employees.
byAna Paola Davila Chalita
The smell of spices and chicken had people lining up at an Austin food festival to get Shirley Newell’s Dominican food. The U.S. Army veteran was rapidly taking orders, flipping her marinated chicken and packing food to-go. “Food is my comfort, my passion and how I express myself,” Newell said. “When I was in the military is when I actually started cooking.”
Now, cooking is her livelihood. She started Phatty Boy food truck nine years after she left the Army as an automated logistics specialist. For some Texas veterans, opening food-service businesses feels like a natural step after their military career.
byPamela Hall Vance
Restoration of the only slave quarters still intact in Austin can lead to an “expanded narrative” of the city’s past that aids in understanding and racial equity, historic preservation experts said Saturday at the Neill-Cochran House Museum.
“We tell these stories, we preserve these sites, because if the sites aren’t there, you can easily say that never happened,” said Joe McGill, founder of the South Carolina-based Slave Dwelling Project. “It’s necessary for those slave dwellings to stay, because it tells the whole story. We want to know about all this.”
A 12-month restoration of the slave quarters behind the Neill-Cochran House at 2310 San Gabriel St. in the West Campus neighborhood is set to begin this month. The project, called “Reckoning with the Past: Telling the Untold Story of Race in Austin,” will include new interpretive programming for visitors and prompted Saturday’s panel discussion at the museum.
byEniola Longe
At UT-Austin, women make up 45% of the total faculty, but a much smaller percentage in STEM majors. The departments of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, electrical and computer engineering, geosciences, mechanical engineering and physics all have less than 20% female faculty.