Investing more on mental health!

 

On Monday, Feb. 18, 2013 Austin American Statesman posted an article titled “Raymond: Invest more in mental health.” It talks about the massive amount of murders in Texas; the author is giving two important examples that happened not too long ago; “Aug. 1, Charles Whiteman had climbed the University of Texas’ iconic tower and set his rifle’s sights on 46 innocent victims, killing 14 after murdered his wife and mother “and “Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 20 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., just two months ago.”

The author says if people would ask him what he thinks about all of this murders going on he would say that it surely involves some sort of mental illness or treatable condition. He says that “Texas’ budget is not in the financial bind it was two years ago” so they can and must do more to come up with something more beneficial in this critical area. Raymond want Texas to take care of our children, it is not okay to let”crazy” people go into the schools and just kill them.

The author seems to be very serious and he really wants our state to spend more of their money in mental health. I totally agree with him because every day we’re seeing more and more deaths around Texas. The local news just shows crimes and violence, video games are full of guns, blood and they’re about killing people. Our children are growing up so fast and the population is getting bigger and bigger in our state but, what’s the point if they’re surrounded by things they’re not supposed to know or see at their age.

The article does mention an interesting point but not in detail, every single person should do a mental check up regularly and doctors should definitely keep a record, if they find something different on someone they should arrange a treatment session, that way we can avoid crimes and murders.

Now in days, a lot of states react late, they want to fix things once the crimes had been made.

Single-sex school in Texas?

An article called "Plan for single sex schools in East Austin is another pricey experiment" was posted on Feb. 2, 2013 and talked about a plan for single-sex schools just like the title says. Many of the Austin trustees voted to approve this plan, and many parents are not quite sure about this plan, "we all appreciate good intensions, as well as the trustees' desire to offer parents more choices, but students at those academically troubled schools deserve more than expensive experiments."

Five of nine trustees voted for single-sex schools at Pearce and Garcia, one of them was Bradley, whose district includes Pearce and Garcia middle schools. Results of the Academic development of Texas shows that grades 3rd, 4th and 5th scored a high score on the Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams, 6th, 7th and 8th did a good job in the rate of STAAR exams in the math portion but not on the other subjects, in the other hand, "Pearce and Garcia middle schools have been rated academically unacceptable by the state in three of the past four years. according to records."

I think Bradley wants to approve with this plan because he has no other choice, Pearce and Garcia are not doing good academically at all so there's no other way to solve this problem but to approve the plan for a single sex-school. I'm not really sure how it will help reaching the Texas academic goal though. I think this article is worth reading because you can see that this plan is not well developed.

This "new" plan was actually more of a "vote of good intensions than a vote based on solid research", however, if this plan is approved, the schools are scheduled to open in the 2014-15 school year.