“Teachers should be a priority because we have to go to school, and kids have to go to school,” he said. “We’re on the frontlines. We’re in crowded schools. Every time we get quarantined, our instruction gets weaker, and other people have to pick up the slack.”
When the pandemic first hit last year, schools around the state shut down. But Texas’ lockdown was short-lived, and a phased statewide reopening began last May.
“Our feeling is that these people are running risks, and many of them are getting infected and getting sick. – Clay Robinson, Texas State Teachers Association
Vanishing act
Getting them back requires ingenuity
C
HILDREN ARE vanishing from public schools. New York City has lost 30,000 pupils this school year compared with the previous one, a 3% decline. Los Angeles Unified’s roster decreased by 19,233 (4%), and Boston’s by 5% (2,368 pupils). For a variety of reasons, children from pre-kindergarten to high school are disappearing from the rolls.
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How worrying is this? Analyses are limited, but a deep dive into preliminary data from Massachusetts’ public schools by Thomas Dee of Stanford University and Mark Murphy of the University of Hawaii at Manoa shows that most traditional public districts in the state 274 out of 289 had enrolment declines this year in comparison with last year. Massachusetts experienced a 4% statewide loss in this academic year (37,363 pupils) compared with the year before. Not all districts lost pupils, however; charter, vocational and virtua
Merrilee Kick is Creating a Big Buzz
How an ex-Plano high school teacher built a quirky libations brand into a $70 million global enterprise.
By Brandon J. Call
Published in
D CEO
December
2020
Photography by Sean Berry | The Nest Images Courtesy of BuzzBallz/Southern Champion
On a hot Texas afternoon in the mid-2000s, then-Plano West Senior High School teacher Merrilee Kick was sitting by her pool grading papers when she had a hankering for an alcoholic beverage. How cool would it be, she thought, to sip a cocktail out of a plastic container so she wouldn’t have to worry about breaking a glass bottle? Kick didn’t want to miss out on any pool time, either, so the concoction needed to come pre-mixed and ready-to-drink. She also wanted a beverage that wouldn’t fill her up or make her feel bloated and, most important, it needed to be strong enough to get her buzzed.