Author: Ginger Stampley

Last week’s news – week ending 2025 05 25

Let’s jump in with some news from Dallas …

… and then on to Fort Worth …

… and then to Dallas and Tarrant Counties …

… and the suburbs and suburban counties

… and the region at large …

… and other interesting things I read about the area or the state.

School District Sunday – 2025 05 25

This week we start with news from the Legislature and then move into the area districts, with a lot from Fort Worth ISD.

Closing my tabs – 2025 05 25

Last week’s news – week ending 2025 05 18

This is my first shot at something I’ve wanted to do for a while: a weekly catch-up on interesting local news. I’ve done this kind of thing for a friend for several years now, but what interests his readers isn’t always what I think would interest someone from Dallas or Fort Worth. Bear with me as I get my hands around what local news looks like to local readers.

Dallas news:

Fort Worth news:

Dallas County news:

Tarrant County news:

News from the suburbs and suburban counties:

Regional news (including some stories from the Lege):

School District Sunday – 2025 05 18

Two weeks’ worth of school news this time, covering the Lege, the outcome of the May elections, and the state’s proposed takeover of Fort Worth ISD as well as the usual roundup of district news.

Closing my tabs – 2025 05 18

Nottaway, or how the South won the Civil War

So Nottaway Plantation has burned to the ground.

I have some feelings about this. My paternal ancestors came to Texas from Mississippi; there’s a plantation house that had their name on it in downtown Natchez. There’s also a town, by which I mean a collection of mobile homes, 20 minutes away by car, where the working plantation, more correctly known as the farm labor camp of enslaved persons, was. No guesses as to the nominal race of most of the modern residents. Also no guesses about whether they’re my distant cousins. Possibly not all of them, but definitely some of them.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to Natchez for the Natchez Pilgrimage, which is still a thing, though apparently far less of one than it was when I was a kid and my school still used Johnny Reb as a mascot. I went to Natchez again as an adult, about twenty years ago, still interested in the history but noticing much more strongly that the only history told was that of the white enslavers. And I’ve also done some touring around New Orleans, where I have in-laws, though more of the houses there at later dates talk about enslavement in more detail.

I don’t remember going to Nottaway, but I might have. Or I might not have; it’s more about the rental business for events and weddings. I’ve only ever been interested in the historic homes where the history, even the sanitized versions I learned early in life, is emphasized, and not the commercial uses of the homes. Even the houses people are still living in are more interesting than the ones that are primarily wedding venues.

For the record, I got married the first time on my college campus and the second time at a bed and breakfast in Houston. It never occurred to me to get married at a plantation.

But I was raised in the (white) generation where that was an aspiration. There was a lot of history I didn’t learn until adulthood: the “Memorial Park Riot” of 1917, where Black soldiers mutinied after racist abuse and were court-martialed, and 19 were executed; the Tulsa Massacre of 1921; and, as you can imagine from a student at a school still using the “Confederate flag” and Johnny Reb into the 1980s and beyond, a lot about slavery. In other words, our teachers and the adults around us all lied to us, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by omission. Sometimes because they’d also been lied to, and hadn’t listened to Black voices around them, or hadn’t heard them.

So there’s a dual vision there for me: what a beautiful building Nottaway was. And it was built by enslaved persons as part of a labor camp: not a death camp proper but certainly one where people were worked to death. And people still want to get married there! I can’t clap my hands for the burning of it, but I sure can’t be upset about the people who are clapping.

And I hope it’s not rebuilt, but left in ruins. Rebuilding Nottaway as a wedding venue not only continues to sanitize the history of enslavement and white supremacy, it vindicates that history. Black kids learn early about what slavery means. Let’s not lie to another generation of white kids about it.

Sources:

Measles – 2025 05 15

We’re not quite four months into the measles outbreak here in Texas, and according to the state Department of Health and Human Services, we’ve had 717 cases, with 93 hospitalized and two school-aged children dead. Of the 717 people who’ve had measles, 13 have had one dose of measles vaccine and 17 have had two doses, leaving 687 measles patients who failed to take appropriate precautions. If you told me there were people among that 687 who couldn’t take the vaccine, I’d only be madder at the rest who could have and didn’t.

While the bulk of the outbreak is in west Texas and extending into New Mexico, it’s starting to spread. People are contagious up to four days before they get the rash and it’s not like feeling bad ever stopped people from going to work or the store or church or wherever, giving them plenty of ways to spread measles. We have occasional cases in other places, like the recent cases in Tarrant and Denton Counties that aren’t counted as part of the Texas outbreak. But Collin and Rockwall County are on the state’s board, which means they’ve linked those cases back to the west Texas epidemic. It’s only a matter of time until measles is all over the place in the Metroplex.

What kills me is that it didn’t have to be this way. We know there are folks out there who don’t want to vaccinate for religious reasons; we know that’s how the outbreak began. But because we’re now a post-truth society in America, we’re also a post-science and post-vaccine society. My late mother, who would be turning 90 in July if she were still with us, talked to me in the years before her death in 2018 about her experience getting the polio vaccine when it first came out and how grateful she was to have the option of taking the vaccine instead of getting polio (and risking post-polio syndrome). This was because she and her peers knew what it was like to have kids die from childhood diseases. I never thought that Generation X, who lost so many bright lights to AIDS, might turn out to be the lucky ones because most of our parents decided they’d rather we not die of preventable childhood diseases.

(The real problem here isn’t religious exemption; it’s eugenics. People are willing to risk their kids dying instead of risking the theoretical damage–probably imagined to be autism–a vaccine reaction might cause, never considering that childhood diseases don’t just kill but leave permanent, actual damage: blindness, deafness, brain damage, etc.)

It used to be you had to be vaccinated to go to school. I went to private schools as a child, but there was no question of my vaccinations status. Now one of the reasons kids go to private schools is so their parents can avoid vaccination requirements along with everything else about public schools they don’t like, whether it’s naughty books in the library or the presence of people the parents don’t like. The result is a the biggest measles outbreak in a quarter-century and becoming a post-herd immunity society where measles, and other diseases, are endemic. A society where we start seeing those graves with short lifespans again. It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. All we have to do is follow the science and vaccinate ourselves and our kids.

(I don’t want to talk about RFK, Jr. That’s another rant about eugenics.)

Meanwhile, here in Texas, this week the House voted in favor of a bill to allow parents who want vaccine exemptions for their kids to download them from the internet instead of having the state mail the forms. This is because we’re both far behind the times in helping citizens interact with the state and far ahead in enabling parents to ignore public health.

Sources:

Closing my tabs – 2025 05 14

A bunch of things I read while on vacation.

Review: Billy Idol & Joan Jett

Billy Idol with Joan Jett opening. Dickies Arena, May 7, 2025.

If you have to go to a big arena to see a show, Dickies isn’t a bad one. It’s fairly new and the seats are big and comfortable. Plus even at the back end of the house, where we usually sit, the view of both the stage and the screens is good.

Joan Jett opened, doing a good job, though the covers and hits were clearly what the early-arriving fans wanted. She’s still engaged with the music, but the Blackhearts are a bar band, which limits what they can do for an arena show. The Dallas Observer review of her part of the show was a little unkind, but for all that she got the crowd warmed up and told some great stories, she was clearly the lesser of the two, which pains my feminist heart. I loved her songs back in the day, and she’s still putting out good music, but it’s very similar to the old stuff.

Billy is pushing 70, but he’s still stomping and snarling and waving his chains and tearing off his shirt just like he did when he was in his 20s. His voice was a little rough in places but he really held the audience with both his stories and his songs. Steve Stevens, his guitarist, did a fantastic job with the guitar on Flesh for Fantasy, which happens to be my favorite Billy Idol song. I was delighted to hear some brand new music; I haven’t followed him closely but I knew he was still releasing EPs and collaborating with other artists. His set was broad, with all the hits, and deep, with some new, some old, and some covers: he did a great Gimme Shelter with one of his singers, which is almost tailor-made for his snarl. By the end he had us really riled up for Rebel Yell, and then went into a four-song encore that included Hot in the City, Dancing With Myself, a new song, and White Wedding.

We danced out of the arena and went back to our hotel, still singing.