Covington Middle School student dies after end-of-year celebration: Austin school district
An Austin eighth grade student died Thursday morning after complications related to an incident at a school-related celebration, according to the Austin school district.
Vadir Gonzalez-Arias, who was a student at Covington Middle School, died after an undisclosed incident at an eighth grade celebration at Dick Nichols Park in Southwest Austin, according to the district. The park is less than three miles from Covington.
"Vadir was kind, caring, and approached each day with a positive attitude and a willingness to do what was asked of him," Principal Cedric Maddox said in a letter to families. "He treated his peers and teachers with genuine respect and made those around him feel seen and appreciated.
"We know that this news may be difficult for students to understand and process, and we are here to support them," Maddox said.
Covington's campus was open Friday as a counseling center from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for students to talk to English and Spanish-speaking counselors and licensed mental health professionals, Maddox said.
The Austin district suggested the following community resources for those who need help:
The Christi Center – free information and support groups for youth and adults regarding grief and loss: 512-467-2600
Integral Care – 24 hours support for mental health crises or by appointment: 512-472-4357
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
Austin ISD Employee Assistance Program resources.
This story was updated to add a video.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Covington Middle School student dies after end-of-year celebration
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Los Angeles Times
10 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
The California story we keep erasing
A few months ago, while visiting the rooftop bar at a Residence Inn in Berkeley, I picked up the city's glossy 'official visitors' guide' and searched it for the historical nuggets that these kinds of publications invariably include. 'For thousands of years before the local arrival of Europeans,' I read, 'Berkeley, and the entire East Bay, was the home of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone. The specific area of present-day Berkeley was known as Huchiun.' Not too bad for a public-relations freebie, except it then skipped a few millennia in a speed rush to the appearance of the Spanish in the late 1700s, the discovery of gold (1848), the founding of the University of California in Berkeley (1873) and the free speech movement and Summer of Love in the 1960s, which, according to the guide, endowed the city with 'a bias for original thinking' and an 'off-beat college town vibe.' I've spent most of the last five years digging into California's past to expose UC's role on the wrong side of history, in particular Native American history. Beginning in the early 20th century, scholars at Berkeley (and at USC and the Huntington Library) played a central role in shaping the state's public, cultural identity. They wrote textbooks and popular histories, consulted with journalists and amateur historians, and generated a semiofficial narrative that depicted Indigenous peoples as frozen in time and irresponsible stewards of the land. Their version of California's story reimagined land grabs and massacres as progress and popularized the fiction that Native people quietly vanished into the premodern past. Today, prodded by new research and persistent Indigenous organizing, tribal groups and a later generation of historians have worked to set the record straight. For thousands of years, California tribes and the land they lived on thrived, the result of creative adaptation to changing circumstances. When Spanish and American colonizers conquered the West, tribal groups resisted. In fact, the state was one of the country's bloodiest regions in the 19th century, deserving of a vocabulary that we usually associate with other countries and other times: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. Despite this devastation, California's population today includes more than 100 tribes and rancherias. Very few details from authentic pre-California history filter into our public spaces, our cultural common knowledge. I've become a collector of the retrospective fantasies we consume instead — those few sentences in the Berkeley visitors' guide, Google, whitewashed facts on menus, snippets on maps and in park brochures, what's engraved on a million wall plaques and enshrined on roadside markers. These are the places where most people encounter historical narratives, and where history acquires the patina of veracity. One Sunday, while waiting for an order of the ethereal lemon-ricotta pancakes at the Oceanside Diner on Fourth Street in Berkeley, I read a bit of history on the menu. The neighborhood, it said, was created in the early 1850s when workers and farmers developed a commercial hub — a grist mill, soap factory, blacksmith and an inn. There was no mention that the restaurant occupied an Ohlone site that flourished for 2,000 to 3,000 years, part of a network of interrelated communities that stretched from the San Francisco Bay, crossing what is now the Berkeley campus, and following a canyon and a fresh-flowing stream into the hills. A friend who knows I like rye whiskey recently gave me a bottle of Redwood Empire. The wordy label explains that the whiskey is named after 'a sparsely populated area' in Northern California characterized by an 'often inaccessible coastline drenched in fog, rocky cliffs, and steep mountains' and 'home to majestic coastal redwoods.' It's a place 'where you can connect with Nature' but apparently not with the tribes who make it their home now and have done since time immemorial. Traditional travel guides skip the most troubling information and emphasize California as an exemplar of diversity and prosperity. The bad old days are blamed on Franciscan missionaries who, according to the 1997 Eyewitness Travel Guide for the state, 'used natives as cheap labor' and on 'European colonists who committed a more serious crime by spreading diseases that would reduce the native population to about 16,000 by 1900.' This shaky history leapfrogs the crimes of Americans and lands in the mid-20th century when Native Americans, they may be surprised to learn, 'opted for integration throughout the state.' Guides have become more hip, though they're still mostly ahistorical. The Wildsam 'Field Guide to California,' for example, includes 'There There,' by Tommy Orange (Oakland-born, Arapaho and Cheyenne) on its list of must-read fiction, provides a detailed LGBTQ+ chronology, covers Chez Panisse and the Black Panther Party but also reduces Indigenous history to the '1400s [when] diverse native tribes flourish.' UC Berkeley's botanical garden, with 'one of the largest collections of California native plants in the world,' is located in Strawberry Canyon, the route followed by generations of Ohlone to hunting grounds in the hills. No plaques in the 34-acre park acknowledge the site's pre-California past and no books in the gift store educate visitors about what contemporary environmentalists are learning from Indigenous land management practices, such as prescribed burns and selective harvesting. The gaps created by the tendency to present California's origins sunny-side-up dampen curiosity and contaminate a basic understanding of American history. For example, the Lawrence Hall of Science, a teaching lab for Berkeley students and a public science center, has initiated a project to 'promote a clear understanding of the lived experiences of the Ohlone people.' Unfortunately, it dodges the university's role in systematically plundering Indigenous graves in California and appropriating ancestral burial grounds in Los Alamos, N.M., where UC Berkeley had a role in the creation of the atomic bomb. Similarly, just about everybody on campus knows the story of the free speech demonstrations, but almost nobody knows about the longest, continuous protest movement in the state, and one still being vigorously waged against the university: the struggle to repatriate ancestral remains and cultural objects that began in the 1900s when the Yokayo Rancheria, according to local media accounts, successfully hired lawyers to stop 'grave-robbing operations by [Cal] scientists in the vicinity of Ukiah.' Even activists in the Bay Area are not immune to this amnesia. In April, I participated in a rally on the Berkeley campus to protest the Trump administration's devastating attacks on academia. The main speakers, who represented a variety of departments — ethnic studies, African American studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies and the humanities — defended the importance of anti-racism education and testified to the long history of student protests on the Berkeley campus. 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Buzz Feed
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29 Unforgettable Quotes From Teachers
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Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Chicago Tribune
Sisters of St. Joseph lauded for ESL program in La Grange Park
A century and a quarter after arriving in the Chicago area with the intent to expand educational offerings, the La Grange Park based Sisters of St. Joseph recently had an opportunity to look back on a job well done. Actually, there were lots of jobs in those 125 years, including founding Nazareth Academy in La Grange Park. But the group was congratulated June 10 on its English as a Second Language program by Plymouth Place Senior Living, a retirement complex in La Grange Park, which presented the Sisters with its Monarch Award. Sr. Carol Crepeau, who began the teaching program 47 years ago with Sr. Mary Beth McDermott, said their involvement with the Teaching English to Advance Change program was coming to an end as Morton College and DuPage Literacy will be taking it over. That, she said, 'is very good for all of us.' 'My position now is to watch and make sure that what we dreamed continues to happen,' she said. Crepeau said the program started in 1978 as the 'School on Wheels,' after the sisters bought a bus from the Arlington Heights Public Library. Before long, the bus had become too small for the program. 'We had too many teachers, so what we did then is we began to go and work in various libraries and Catholic schools,' she said. 'I am so proud and happy and delighted, and the thing that is so wonderful is that now we have this partnership with Plymouth Place. … When you create something that is good for people, not only for people that want to learn English, but those who want to teach it — when it's good and it's mutual, it lasts.' More than 50 people crowded into Plymouth Place's 30 North restaurant for the celebration. Paddy Homan, Plymouth Place vice president of philanthropy and community affairs, said the ESL program at Plymouth Place was founded by the Sisters along with 15 residents who wanted to be able to communicate with staff members. 'We just want to thank them,' Homan said. 'They stepped in here and saw a need through our residents. And our job here is to support our residents to reimagine what our mission is all about.' Janet Matheny, a resident at Plymouth Place and retired teacher, was instrumental in bringing the ESL program to Plymouth Place. 'One of our residents said to me 'I have trouble communicating with the housekeeper because she doesn't speak English well,' she said. 'So what can we do about it?' Matheny called a friend who put her in touch with the Sisters of St. Joseph. 'From that point on, Teach came in and trained our residents to be tutors,' she said. 'It's an organization that is funded through grants. When COVID hit, they spaced us six feet apart, we wore our masks and in the Fall of '21 we started tutoring our employees who wanted to improve their English skills.' Many of the Plymouth Place staff that were in the Teach program were in attendance at the ceremony, including the first graduate of the school, Carlos Felix, who along with Jan Matheny presented the Monarch Award to Sr. Kathy Brazda of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The Sisters of St. Joseph were originally based in New York state, had set up several schools there, and had come to the La Grange area with the intention of doing the same here. But another group had already filled that role, so the Sisters were invited to join the St. Francis Xavier Parish in La Grange. After noticing that Lyons Township High School had been doing an excellent job educating young men, the Sisters turned their attention to the young women of the area and in 1899 established Nazareth Academy.
