Tacoma slows Sugar Land in series loss - Page 3
Second Street Brass will be featured in a performance at Fort Bend County Libraries - See on page 5
WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 9, 2023 JEANNE GREGORY REALTOR®, CRS, GRI, ABR
Fort Bend / Southwest • Volume 48 • No. 37 • $1.00
Environmental advocates call for closure, conversion of NRG plant By Ken Fountain KFOUNTAIN@FORTBENDSTAR.COM
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Sugar Land woman receives 50 years in prison for injury to a child
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A capacity crowd filled a meeting room of the Sugar Land branch of Fort Bend County Libraries on Saturday to hear environmental advocates call for the closure or conversion of NRG’s WA Parish power plant in order to eliminate what they say are the plant’s harmful health effects and reduce its impact on climate change. The event served as the official release of a report titled
“Close Parish Coal: How the Dirtiest Coal Plant in Texas Harms Public Health and the Environment; and Alternatives in Fort Bend County” put out by the Houston-based advocacy group Air Alliance Houston. Representatives from the Texas office of Public Citizen and the grassroots organization Fort Bend Environmental also spoke at the event. Sophia Zimmerman, Air Alliance Houston’s outgoing climate intern and the 20-page report’s lead author, outlined its findings in a pre-
sentation at the outset of the event. “The W.A. Parish power plant has four coal and four natural gas units and ... is owned and operated by NRG Energy, Inc. (NRG). It began operations in 1958 and has a total Megawatt (MW) capacity of 2,737. The plant is responsible for approximately 178 premature deaths a year in the region. In 2021 alone, the Parish plant emitted
SEE CLOSURE PAGE 2
NRG, operator of the WA Parish coal-fired plant in Fort Bend County, says the plant is critical to meeting Texas’s energy needs. Photo by Ken Fountain
Fort Bend superintendents discuss school safety
Staff Reports A Sugar Land woman pleaded guilty to injury of a child by causing serious bodily injury and was sentenced to 50 years in state prison last month, according to the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s office. The child died from her injuries. Khierra Sada Walker, 36, had elected to have her punishment assessed by 400th District Court Judge Tameika Carter. By waiving her right to a jury trial and entering a plea of guilty, Walker was eligible to ask the court for deferred adjudication, a form of probation, according to a news release. Law enforcement and emergency personnel were contacted alerted to a 12-yeard-old girl who was non-responsive. Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office Detective Jeffrey Brownson saw that the child had numerous severe burns on her body that clearly required medical Lamar CISD Superintendnet Roosevelt Nivens, left, Stafford MSD Superintendent Robert Bostic, and Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Christie Whitbeck discuss school attention. The child later died. safety a Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce event moderated by Jim Rice. Photo by Ken Fountain By Ken Fountain During the investigation, KFOUNTAIN@FORTBENDSTAR.COM law enforcement learned that Walker was the mother of the child. She claimed that she had With tragic shooting events been attempting to treat the at Texas schools in recent child’s burns for several days years, including at Santa Fe with various home remedies High School in 2018 and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in 2022, school safety has been SEE INJURY PAGE 2 top-of-mind for educators and parents. Last week, three Fort Bend school district superintendents spoke to a packed audience at the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce on the state of school safety.
Khierra Sada Walker, 36, of Sugar Land, received 50 years in prison for injury of a child.. Courtesy Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office
The August 4 event, moderated by Jim Rice, chair of the chamber’s education division and a former Fort Bend Independent School District trustee, featured FBISD’s Dr. Christie Whitbeck of Fort Bend ISD, Dr. Roosevelt Nivens of Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, and Dr. Robert Bostic of Stafford Municipal School District
The three superintendents agreed that student and staff safety is their top priority. “Our number one priority is to make sure they’re safe,” Nivens said. They stressed that they collaborate on many matters, including school safety. “We are not an island,” Whitbeck said. “We as colleagues have to collaborate, and our communities have to collaborate, not only with our school district police, but with the Sheriff ’s Department, with Sugar Land Police and Missouri City.” Bostic agreed, noting that representatives from the three districts several years ago had met with officials from the U.S. Secret Service to discuss school safety. One of Bostic’s brothers is an agent with the Secret
Service, which helped in facilitating the meeting. Whitbeck noted that the Texas Legislature has not yet concluded its work for the year, but several bills that have already passed have included mandates for school districts, including ones relating to school safety like panic buttons and uniformed officers at every campus, that are not funded. School districts across the state will have to find ways to cover those costs, even as the appetite for increasing tax rates among voters remains low. “When we’re talking about safety for kids, we always think first about the hard target. But day in and day out, safety for kids involves the whole child. Looking at their emotional self, looking at whether they have the needs that they have,” she
said. “It is all about that entire child.” Nivens said that school safety now goes beyond mere systems and processes. “It should be a way of thinking at this point,” he said, not only for administrators and staff but for parents and other community members. He urged families to have “a little patience and grace” in their dealings with school staff. “Help us advocate to the lawmakers and decisionmakers about how important it is that we get fully funded for mandates, especially for things like school safety, so that we don’t have to sacrifice Tier 1 instruction in the classroom so that we can hire officers and make sure everyone is safe,” he said. “We want them to be safe, but we also want them to learn at a high level, because they have
compete globally.” Whitbeck noted that Fort Bend ISD, like other school districts, is in fierce competition with other jurisdictions to hire more police officers. “When we do have a pool (of applicants), we’re all fishing out of the same one,” she said. She urged community members to get involved community members to get involved with school districts through such means as mentoring. “Get in there and help. Let’s build up the desire to teach, and to live, and to work in this community,” she said. In a question-and-answer session that followed the main presentation, Fort Bend ISD Police Chief David Rider noted that the county’s school district police chiefs meet weekly to discuss school safety and other issues.