De Zavala Elementary School librarian Teresa Guardiola is worried about children’s reading abilities, based on what she has seen in the first few weeks of school in Fort Worth. Students are disengaged and lagging behind in basic reading skills, she said. “Out of a dozen kids or so, maybe three were somewhat engaged in looking for sight words,” she said of one class. “The rest of them were totally oblivious, which tells me they’re not used to listening to stories, they haven’t been accustomed t

Students in Southeast Texas’ Beaumont ISD, one of the state’s longest-struggling school districts, were suspended at a rate more than six times the state average and far exceeding any other district with at least 1,000 kids last school year, a Houston Chronicle and Beaumont Enterprise analysis of state discipline data shows. As districts across Texas have scaled back on suspensions and “zero tolerance” approaches to discipline in recent years, Beaumont has gone in the other direction, administe

Inspirational notes adorn the walls of Kandice Kennedy’s home. “The thought of losing you was terrifying,” reads one, handwritten on a paper heart. “ … I won’t know what to do.” It was from her daughter, Zaria, who had agonized as she watched Kennedy undergo treatment for breast cancer. The girl also hosted a “Think Pink”-themed party for her mom’s birthday two years ago, and invited friends to leave their own messages of support and encouragement. “I thought she was preparing for me to depart,” Kennedy says. “But now it almost looks like she was preparing me in an odd way for her to depart.”

Communities devastated by smaller disasters receive a fraction of the national attention and the funding. Explore News21's four-part documentary series throughout this story. Each was a disaster of shattering magnitude, battering America’s shores over the past two decades. But between these pivotal storms lie hundreds of smaller disasters that garner a fraction of the national attention and the billions of federal dollars that accompany them. A News21 analysis of Federal Emergency Management A

Rick Thomas is in it for the laughs. Or at least that’s what he claims. He’s the president of College Republicans United and a self-avowed “politically incorrect” Trump-supporting paleoconservative with a history of being inflammatory and at times insensitive on social media. College Republicans United is a Trump-flavored splinter organization that broke off from the existing College Republicans club in January of this year. At some events around the Tempe campus, the ASU-chartered organization