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THIS WEEK: As you might have guessed, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is not very hard to get around. Border Patrol itself has called the wall a mere “speed bump in the desert” — a minor inconvenience to give agents slightly better odds of catching up to illegal entrants. Joseph Jarvis, a 71-year-old contractor who helped build it, knows it's shortcomings more intimately than most. Jarvis oversaw the fabrication and installation of a short stretch of border wall near Brownsville in 2011, along with a number of electronic access gates. He’s not for or against it on moral grounds — he just thinks the damn thing doesn’t work. “The wall is a joke,” Jarvis said. “It does nothing to preclude ingress of narcotics and people.”
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The Lede
‘Do Something with This Grief’: Mom of Santa Fe Shooting Victim Turns to Politics
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- Rhonda Hart drove a school bus for Santa Fe ISD for four years until her daughter Kimberly was killed in the shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas last May. Now, she feels like an outsider.
- Santa Fe is gun country. The rural town about 35 miles southeast of Houston went for Trump by 80 percent in 2016. When it comes to calls for gun law reform, the response from many in the area has been muted, even oppositional.
- A U.S. Army veteran, Hart has become a vocal advocate for gun violence prevention, traveling to Washington, D.C., with Moms Demand Action to support red flag laws, responsible gun storage and other measures. Former Congressman and 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has given her shout-outs at rallies and carries a photo of Kimberly in his wallet. Just after Kimberly died, she and her 12-year-old son Tyler moved to the next city over; they rarely return to Santa Fe.
- Early this year, Hart decided to channel her pain into a run for school board at Dickinson ISD, where Tyler is enrolled. It’s her first campaign for office. “She wouldn’t want me to just sit here and wallow,” Hart says of her daughter. The memory of Kimberly — a Girl Scout who loved books, Harry Potter and cats — keeps Hart going: “I think she’d kick my butt if I didn’t do anything. … She wouldn’t want me to just sit here and wallow.”
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From the archives
Race to the Bottom
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- When Carrol Thomas arrived in 1996, Beaumont was struggling and divided. The civil rights movement, which seemed to take hold in Beaumont long after it did in the rest of the South, had an uneasy effect on the schools. Racial unease on the school board led to such dysfunction that two state monitors were dispatched from Austin to oversee the district.
- And then Carrol Thomas came to town promising to rescue the schools. After more than a century on the sidelines, African-American Beaumonters finally had a meaningful say in how their schools were run. Thomas was the man they picked to be Beaumont’s first black superintendent. He was a young school-turnaround artist who’d just saved Houston’s North Forest ISD from school board infighting and financial questions that prompted a federal investigation.
- From the 2014 feature by Patrick Michels: After just a few years, city leaders agreed that Thomas had delivered on his promise. Little of that goodwill remains today. The district’s growth, test performance and financial stability once so celebrated now appear to have been, to varying degrees, illusions. Texas is growing, but neither Beaumont nor its schools are getting much bigger. Carrol Thomas spent 16 years as the city’s school superintendent—an almost unheard-of tenure for urban school leaders—and the multimillion-dollar surplus estimated when he left the district in 2012 has evaporated. Gone, too, are a $389 million bond package, much of it spent on projects that ran over budget, and millions in hurricane recovery funds. In their place, auditors discovered a $40 million budget shortfall, and federal investigators have found millions in embezzled public funds. The state has returned, this time to take over the district to save it from financial collapse.
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Now Available in the Texas Observer Store
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Inspired by the ladder card from Lotería, our newest shirt design references the small upward steps that Latinx communities must take to overcome the obstacles placed before them.
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What’s Happening at the Observer
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- The Observer’s spring membership drive is set to kick off on May 1. With it, we’re looking to add 200 new sustaining members to our roster. Our sustainers — who contribute between 99 cents and $8.34 per month — offer critical, predictable monthly support that ensures Observer reporters’ ability to pursue critical investigations. Want to help us jump start the campaign? You can join here.
- Each year, the Texas Observer honors the best in U.S. journalism at our annual MOLLY gala and fundraiser. This year, we are honored to have Rebecca Traister speak at the event. Individual tickets are on sale now. More information here.
- We'll be at the Austin Bookstore Crawl party today at Big Medium in Austin. Stop by to check out Texas Observer merch, our latest mags, and ways to support our work. See you there!
- Some of you may have noticed a lag in delivery of your magazine, or a delay in customer service — perhaps you’ve received multiple magazines in the mail. We’re aware of these issues and are making a change in the vendor that provides some of our mailing services this month. We’ve also created a customer service form on our web site that’ll take you directly to us, should you run into any issues about… well, anything. That’s here. Thanks so much for bearing with us as we move to build y’all a better customer service experience.
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