Madison's star shooting guard and Texas A&M commit Admon Gilder.

Dallas ISD has, for the moment at least, put last spring's athletic-recruiting scandal behind it. The 15 coaches and administrators Superintendent Mike Miles fired over the summer have exhausted their appeals. Madison High School's 2012-13 and 2013-14 basketball titles have been vacated. There's a new athletic director and, the district says, a renewed commitment to enforcing state rules ensuring that high school athletes are playing where their supposed to and not changing schools for athletic purposes.

On Tuesday, the UIL District 11-4A Executive Committee turned its attention to the future, namely figuring out if Madison High School's all-state shooting guard and Texas A&M commit Admon Gilder should be eligible to play at Madison during his senior season. Hang with us -- it's complicated.

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Mark Haslett

In January, before many people were aware that a little-known corporation with the powers of eminent wanted to build private toll road through the rural communities east of Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard, the Texas Department of Transportation was promising in a written agreement to help the company get approval for the tollway from the Texas Transportation Commission. "TxDOT agrees to support the Corporation in its efforts to perform activities required to be completed before applying for or obtaining approval from the Commission under the applicable provisions by reviewing and commenting on the preliminary Project studies and other documentation prepared by the Corporation..." the agreement says.

The agreement, called a memorandum of understanding, also discusses a potential route for the tollway that has never been publicly discussed before, a route that would have invaded downtown Dallas: "In addition, a potential Phase III could extend the project westward from the President George Bush Turnpike towards the Dallas central business district," the agreement says.

In public meetings, the Texas Turnpike Corporation and the North Central Texas Council of Governments have only discussed a route that starts at the Bush Turnpike and extends east to Greenville, but that safely leaves all of us urban Dallasites out of the equation.

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Despite reports on climate change denialism in social studies textbooks, publishers still refuse to correct the errors.

For the first time since 2002, the Texas State Board of Education is considering the adoption of new social studies textbooks. The books must incorporate 2010 state social studies standards, which have been criticized as right-wing biased and blatantly conservative.

See also: Proposed Texas Social Studies Textbooks Get Climate Change Wrong Too

Yet after the first round of public testimony and state board meetings, some textbook publishers still have not amended implications that climate change does not exist. Several books allude to supposed disagreements within the scientific community about the causes of climate change, and include academic citations from conservative, denialist groups such as the Heartland Institute.

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Dallas Observer

Vonciel Jones Hill and Carolyn Davis in happier times.

The issue at hand is a little wonky, but not too complicated. The Dallas City Council took bids for a contract to collect fines for the city's municipal courts. In the next fiscal year, the contract holder is expected to resolve more than 150,000 cases. MSB Government Services submitted the bid most favorable to the city by far, and was awarded the contract by an 8-7 vote Wednesday afternoon.

Right. Like it was that easy.

Since 2002, the law firm Linebarger, Goggan, Blair and Sampson has held the contract and submitted a bid for the new one, but it finished third under the city's scoring system this time. MSB had the highest-scoring bid, because it guarantees the city almost $21.9 million. Linebarger only guaranteed the city $300,000 -- not that they wouldn't have collected more for the city. That's just how much they were willing to guarantee in advance.

What MSB doesn't have is DeMetris Sampson as a former partner, or her firm's history of making generous political donations across Texas. Sampson is a longtime figure in southern Dallas politics and close associate of political consultant Kathy Nealy, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price's co-defendant in a pending corruption case in federal court. We're not saying the Nealy/Price case is in any way related to the city bid. It's just fun to note all the links that crop up in local politics.

Anyway, the point is that MSB submitted the best bid by the city's own rules, the well wired Linebarger et al came in third and several members of the City Council wanted to reconsider the bidding process for some reason.

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Dallas Cowboys

Master of social media.

Sometimes, things are delightful for their simplicity. Cowboys' receiver Cole Beasley's response to a Twitter heckler Sunday was definitely one of those times. Beasley made his first fumble of the year Sunday afternoon against the Jaguars. Twitter user @massot15 thought Beasley needed to know he should hold onto the ball better. Beasley disagreed.

@massot15 eat a dick

— Cole Beasley (@Bease11) November 9, 2014

We all know what happens most of the time, when a -- somewhat in Beasley's case -- famous person says something profane, no matter how deserved, on social media. The tweet or post gets taken down, then the inevitable hacking claims surface.

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Stonewall Jackson was a solid general, but is his the right name for a DISD school?

On Tuesday morning, right after an African-American principal and an African-American superintendent had finished predicting a great future for East Dallas' Lee Elementary and its new International Baccalaureate program, a woman buttonholed DISD trustee Mike Morath. After a few complimentary words about Morath's efforts on behalf of the campus, she gestured to the art deco "Robert E. Lee" nameplate etched into concrete above the front door. Same with Stonewall Jackson Elementary a mile to the north. Those name, she declared, are a black mark on the district and need to go.

She didn't have to elaborate, though she did say she sometimes imagines that Stonewall's name is a reference birth of the modern gay rights movement. The incongruity of a large urban school district with a stubborn history of racial segregation, a still-yawning achievement gap and a student body that is 95.3 percent non-white having schools honoring Confederate generals, was already clear to Morath. The Confederate names would also seem to be out of keeping with DISD's school-naming policy, which requires a school's eponym to have made a "significant contribution to society" and be a figure who can "lend prestige and status to an institution of learning." Lee and Jackson's fight to perpetuate slavery would seem to disqualify them under those criteria, regardless of their character or other accomplishments.

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KDFW

It was something that was inevitable once Thomas Eric Duncan was sent home from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital with antibiotics on September 26. There would be legal action against the hospital for its treatment of Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the Ebola virus in the United States. Wednesday morning, Duncan's family and its lawyer, Dallas personal injury attorney Les Weisbrod, announced that they have reached a settlement with the hospital.

"We want to raise awareness of the epidemic of preventable medical errors," Weisbrod said.

The care Duncan received upon his return to the hospital after his initial release was excellent, the attorney said, but the initial misdiagnosis likely changed the final outcome of Duncan's treatment.

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Illustration by Jeff Drew

Sellers of testosterone therapy play -- some say prey -- on men's insecurities.

Alex Truman didn't think something was wrong until he returned to the gym. Before fathering his two kids, he worked out regularly and even made an early career of exercise. He had two degrees in health and fitness and ran gyms on the East Coast before he moved to Dallas and got into sales. Lean and square-jawed, he knew his body. But in his late 30s, it was betraying him. At 37, he was taking cholesterol medicine. "I didn't have an awful diet," he says, "but I liked beer, I liked pizza." He yearned to feel better.

He headed back to the weights and machines where he'd spent much of his 20s. He'd lift and lift, but something was different. Back in the day, all his effort would produce tangible results: bigger, defined muscles in his arms and legs, more strength and less fat. Now, results like that eluded him. "I'd go five to six days a week," Truman says, "and not see any progress." He'd go running and wear out easily. "It was really pissing me off because I had it before."

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Dallas ISD Trustee Mike Morath is thrilled that Lee Elementary is becoming an IB school. He's also thrilled it now has a rock climbing wall, which he summited minutes later.

The neighborhoods surrounding Dallas ISD's Robert E. Lee Elementary are much like the neighborhoods surrounding nearby Stonewall Jackson and Lakewood Elementary. That is, they are predominately white and upper middle class, with just a touch of East Dallas crunchiness. But while Stonewall and Lakewood bulge with kids from the neighborhood, Lee has largely failed to attract kids from the single-family homes along Lower Greenville that feed into it.

For proof, look at the numbers: Lakewood has 853 students. Seventy-six percent are white, 17 percent economically disadvantaged. Stonewall has 602 kids. Fifty-eight percent are white, 23 percent economically disadvantaged. Lee, by contrast, is basically the reverse. It has just 362 kids, 17 percent of whom are white, 71 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged.

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woodleywonderworks

The two-generation system pushes at-home learning, parental education and early childhood education as a method to get families out of the cycle of poverty.

In Dallas ISD, early childhood education has been a major push in the last year. It's a move that administrators believe could one day in the future lower soaring poverty rates in a district where free and reduced lunch rates have steadily creeped toward 90 percent in recent years, and nearly 87 percent of students are classified as economically disadvantaged.

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