The agreement would help ensure that Mexico will honor its part of a 1944 agreement to deliver water to the South Rio Grande Valley. 
The International Boundary and Water Commission has announced that an agreement has been signed to help ensure consistent water deliveries from Mexico to the U.S.  “The newly amended water agreement between the United States and Mexico is a step in the right direction, but Texans know that promises don’t water our fields, sustain our livestock, or supply our cities. While we welcome progress to secure the state’s water supply, we need action—plain and simple,” explained Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.  “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in constant talks with U.S. and Mexican officials, turning up the heat on Mexico to finally make good on their commitments. On October 17, 2024, I issued an executive order allowing Texas farmers and ranchers to tap directly into the Rio Grande, and, sure enough, Mexico finally showed up at the table,” he added. view article

Houston Mayor John Whitmire announced a new program to create a city-sponsored homeless encampment in response to a citizen’s concern about the homeless population moving into neighborhoods they previously did not occupy. view article

Fort Worth Independent School District will pay former Superintendent Angélica Ramsey nearly $1 million total until she officially resigns as an employee on August 30, 2025. view article

Salaries for Houston's highest-paid public school principals during the 2023-2024 school year ranged from $153,000 to just over $200,000. Atop the list is Mark Smith, a former Houston Independent School District administrator who became an interim principal in Spring Branch ISD. Smith makes $201,086 in his current position, which he's occupied since July of 2022. He first came to Spring Branch ISD in the spring 2022 as the interim principal of Northbrook High School. Smith left HISD in 2018, earning $194,000 as one of that district’s longest-tenured administrators. view article

On Thursday, Odessans came together in honor of the survivors and victims of a 2019 mass shooting. The West Texas town commemorated the tragedy with a monument dedicated to the lives lost.   view article

An unusual invasive fish with chompers that bear an eerie resemblance to human teeth was reeled in from a Texas lake this week. Known as a pacu fish, the South American freshwater species are primarily herbivores and considered mostly harmless to people, although they are distantly related to piranhas. An angler caught the toothy fish at Lake Meredith in Sanford, Texas and it is currently being kept at the Lake Meredith Aquatic & Wildlife Museum. The museum shared video of the strange fish on Facebook, inviting visitors to come and see it for themselves.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021. “Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said. However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters. “Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. view article

   Talia Natterson is a sophomore at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a private school in Los Angeles, California. She writes for her school publication, Crossfire.