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Cedar Hill ISD is a bright spot in Texas’ mixed STAAR results

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Cedar Hill ISD is a bright spot in Texas’ mixed STAAR results


It is easy to feel discouraged after the mixed results in the latest STAAR data set. Last month, the Texas Education Agency released scores showing that progress has slowed and the percentage of students meeting standards declined by one percentage point in Dallas County and across the state.

While this stagnation in reading and math scores in state academic assessments signals that pandemic learning losses linger, a closer look at Dallas County school districts shows that some are defying the trend.

One such outlier is Cedar Hill ISD, and its above-average performance is worth examining. In this district, the number of students meeting state standards in fourth-grade reading and math grew by more than five percentage points year to year. In sixth grade, the number of students who met reading and math standards grew by over 10 percentage points, the Commit Partnership reported. The district has consistently improved its academic performance over the years.

What is Cedar Hill ISD doing? The answer points to a mix of practical academic strategies, consistency in school leadership, parental involvement and accountability. The old saying rings true: It takes a village. The progress is remarkable for a school district where two-thirds of the student body are economically disadvantaged.

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Amber Shields, managing director from Early Matters Dallas in Commit, underscored several strategies implemented by the district of about 7,000 students. This includes early intervention for students at risk of failing a subject, professional development for a younger teacher workforce and high-quality instructional materials. The district has also enhanced how it engages with parents. Cedar Hill ISD conducts workshops to keep families informed and provide them with resources and materials for at-home support.

“This means that these students are on a path to living wage attainment. … It begins with our students meeting these important benchmarks in school,” Shields told us.

Most important, the district has had consistent leadership. Gerald Hudson in Cedar Hill is one of three superintendents in Dallas County with a tenure of five years or more. The other two are Ricardo López in Garland ISD and Magda Hernandez in Irving ISD.

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Cedar Hill is not the only bright spot: DeSoto, Irving, Lancaster and Mesquite school districts are also exceeding the average statewide growth in performance, according to Commit.

Across Texas, the overall picture is grim, with only 40% of eighth-grade students scoring at grade level or above in math. There is an urgency to change this picture. The state’s economic momentum and innovation need a strong local talent pipeline.

While parents in other Dallas County districts may be disappointed in those districts’ results, there is a silver lining: Many districts are employing the right strategies to raise student scores, Shields said. But results take time.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com



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US immigration officer shoots and kills man in Texas

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US immigration officer shoots and kills man in Texas


Man, identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, is latest to be killed by ICE officers since President Trump took power.

A United States immigration agent fatally shot a man in Houston, Texas, while officers were attempting to stop his vehicle, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.

The man killed on Tuesday was identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, described by ICE as a Mexican national and “illegal alien” who attempted to evade arrest during a “targeted enforcement operation” by federal immigration officers.

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Ronaldo Salgado, who identified himself as Salgado Araujo’s son, told the Spanish-language television station Telemundo Houston that his father was shot while he was looking for workers to hire in the area.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, said Salgado Araujo ignored commands to stop his vehicle, saying he “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer”. ⁠

In past shooting incidents, including the January killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, immigration officials had said that their officers were being attacked when the two were shot, claims vigorously disputed in both incidents.

Video footage captured on Tuesday by a surveillance camera from a nearby business and reviewed by the Reuters news agency showed a person lying on the ground beside a white van and surrounded by officers, in what appeared to be the aftermath of the shooting.

Salgado Araujo was targeted in an operation because he was living in the country without legal permission, according to DHS.

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Democratic US Representative Sylvia Garcia called for an independent and thorough investigation of ICE’s claims about the fatal shooting.

“All available footage, communications, and other evidence should be preserved and reviewed as part of a full and impartial investigation,” Garcia posted on social media.

Juan Proano, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, echoed Garcia’s calls for a transparent investigation into ICE’s actions.

“We don’t take DHS at their word at all,” Proano told The Associated Press news agency. “There should be an independent investigation, and they should release all the videos.”

There have been at least six fatal shootings by federal immigration officers since the start of President Donald Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement crackdown.

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Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, was shot in the head by a federal immigration agent during a crackdown in Minneapolis. DHS also said Good was trying to hit the agent with her vehicle, which local officials and witnesses disputed, saying she was only trying to drive away.

The backlash from Good’s killing and other similar incidents led ICE to step back from some of its more controversial operations.

However, Tuesday’s deadly ⁠confrontation in Houston came amid a recent increase in the number of ICE arrests nationwide, with immigration officers picking up about 2,000 migrants a day last week, Reuters reported.



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Trump takes credit for Toyota moving some truck production from Mexico to Texas: ‘That’s what tariffs do’

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Trump takes credit for Toyota moving some truck production from Mexico to Texas: ‘That’s what tariffs do’


Toyota is planning a $3.6 billion expansion of its Texas truck assembly plant. President Donald Trump took credit for the investment.

On Monday, the automaker announced the multibillion-dollar investment to add a second vehicle assembly line at its San Antonio manufacturing campus to support production of the Tacoma pickup. Toyota said the expansion project would shift some of the midsize truck’s production from its Mexico plants to San Antonio over roughly 4 years. Toyota will still build some Tacoma models and the Corolla in Mexico.

While Toyota did not attribute the expansion to tariffs in its announcement and the company is not fully exiting production in Mexico, Trump said the fresh investment was a sign that his tariffs were working.

“It came over the wires that Toyota is moving out of Mexico into the United States, and building one of the biggest truck and car plants ever built,” Trump said on Tuesday during a visit to Ankara, Turkey. “It’s amazing. That’s what tariffs do, properly used.”

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Toyota said the investment will create 2,000 jobs and add 2.5 million square feet to the site, doubling the company’s Texas footprint by 2030.


Toyota's Texas plant on a sunny day.

Toyota says its plant will hire 2,000 new workers to support the assembly line. 

Toyota



On Monday, Ted Ogawa, president and CEO of Toyota Motor North America, said the investment reflected the company’s “confidence in the region’s workforce, innovation, and long-term growth potential.”

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The move gives Trump a high-profile example of a well-recognized company creating manufacturing jobs. His administration has argued that tariffs incentivize companies — particularly automakers — to reshore manufacturing in America and reduce reliance on foreign production.

Toyota’s announcement also comes amid major uncertainty for automakers with plants in North America. The USMCA — the trilateral free trade pact between the US, Canada, and Mexico struck during Trump’s first term — is under review after the US declined to renew the treaty in its current form on July 1. The Trump administration is reportedly pushing to change the agreement so 50% of all automotive parts and manufacturing would happen in the US.

Toyota also nodded to that trade uncertainty in its release, saying it remained committed to operations in all three countries while encouraging “a quick resolution to USMCA” to keep North America globally competitive.





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Supreme Court won’t block Texas from enforcing a law requiring age verification for app downloads

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Supreme Court won’t block Texas from enforcing a law requiring age verification for app downloads


WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to block Texas from enforcing a state law that requires apps stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors seeking to download apps or make in-app purchases on mobile phones.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a pair of one-sentence orders, denied petitions by plaintiffs who claim that the Texas App Store Accountability Act violates users’ constitutional rights to free speech.

Last month, a three-judge panel from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law can take effect. The panel suspended a district court’s ruling last December that the law is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs suing to block the law include the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a defendant in both cases.

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Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the law impermissibly seeks to limit access to content protected by the First Amendment, including news and educational material.

“Equity and the public interest support relief because protecting First Amendment rights — and parents’ rights to supervise their children as they see fit, not as the government tells them they should — is always in the public interest,” wrote attorneys for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.

Attorneys from Paxton’s office argued that the law protects children from “dangerous modern products.”

“A child with access to an app store and a mobile device (such as a tablet or smartphone) can potentially download any number of software applications, potentially agreeing to invasions of the child’s privacy and sale of the child’s data and be exposed to any conceivable content without parental consent or even parental knowledge,” they wrote.

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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