I completely forgot about it until coming back from a walk and noticed it. Luckily the clouds cleared by the time I got home!

The plight in the South is routinely ignored. The South is usually seen as being filled with backwards conservatives while ignoring the huge swaths of Black people and other minorities that live here, not to mention that most people - at least in “dense” (in Texas terms) urban areas - aren’t raging MAGA-ers.

Houston itself is probably the most diverse of the major Texas cities: the only “blue” city (not that that’s good but it’s a stark difference compared to the rest of the state’s voting patterns), situated east enough to mix elements of the deep south along with the rest of Texas and southwest culture, and is nearly majority non-white. It’s also why we’ve had such large showings for Palestine in a city that historically hasn’t had that strong of a “protest culture” and where events in the past were always fairly small and unattended; Houston has one of the largest Palestinian and Arab populations in the country.

In short, the state of Texas has taken over Houston’s school district, citing “underperformance” as the reason, when in reality its due to pushing families away from public school and into charter schools that the state government is heavily promoting. The man put in charge, Mike Miles, has a history of coming into school districts and gutting them, creating unproductive environments for children to learn in. Teachers have been fired and are leaving en masse due to these conditions as well

Here are two good liberation news articles on the takeover as well as a texas tribune article that gives a decent breakdown of the whole situation

• https://www.liberationnews.org/across-texas-communities-fight-to-defend-public-education/
• https://www.liberationnews.org/texas-is-replacing-houstons-school-libraries-with-discipline-centers-but-the-community-is-fighting-back/
• https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/16/tea-hisd-takeover-texas-houston-schools/