Summer Leadership Summit Open for Registration
Join Us for the TALAS & Central TALAS Summer Leadership Summit
TALAS and Central TALAS invite you to the annual Summer Leadership Summit, a powerful two-day gathering of superintendents, senior district leaders, and educational partners dedicated to advancing Latino leadership across Texas.
“Fuerza in Our Roots, Poder in Our People” celebrates the cultural heritage, collective strength, and shared commitment that unite Latino educational leaders. This summit honors the power of our history, values, and purpose in driving student success and shaping the future of education.
June 22–23, 2026 | Concordia University
June 22, 2026
Lunch and two breakout sessions
Evening Inaugural President’s Dinner (additional cost) recognizing outstanding chapter leadership and L3 Cohort 12 participants
June 23, 2026
Breakfast and lunch
Three breakout sessions
Featured breakout with Miguel Cardona, former U.S. Secretary of Education
Closing keynote and book signing with author Robert Alfaro, Baloney, Baloney, Baloney!
Together, we will explore how our roots ground us, our people uplift us, and our unity empowers the future of education.
Early Bird registration is available through March 30, 2026.Don’t miss this inspiring and impactful leadership experience!
Cancellation & Refund Policy
All registration and sponsorship fees are non-refundable. If you are unable to attend, your registration or sponsorship fee will be considered a donation to TALAS. Upon request, a donation acknowledgment letter will be provided for your records.
3-2-1: On the power of self-image, how luck travels, and the importance of solving mediocre problems
I.
“The best view of the game is probably from the stands. But that’s not where the action is. And so you have to decide, do you want a nice view or do you want to be in the thick of it and playing the game?”
II.
“Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find.
Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities.
If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.”
3rd-Grade Retention Isn’t Really About Kids — It’s About Adults Who Teach Them
Should kids be held back in third grade if they can’t read?
As of this year, 18 states say yes and impose some form of retention policy linked to a child’s reading scores, according to the advocacy group ExcelInEd. But the question of retention has been hotly debated as a tool to drive reading scores, with Ohio weakening its version in 2023 and Michigan dropping its requirement in 2024.
On one side, research suggests that third grade reading scores are predictive of a student’s likelihood of academic success through middle school and into high school. Children who fall behind in the early years struggle to ever get back on track.
How to prevent your team from re-opening the same decisions
There’s a meeting that happens in almost every organization, in some form or another. Someone brings up a decision that was supposedly made three weeks ago. A few people look confused. Someone else says they thought it was still being discussed. The original decision-maker — if there even was one — goes quiet.
Sound familiar?
This isn’t a communication problem. It isn’t a culture problem. It’s a structural problem, and it has a very specific cause: nobody was ever clearly named as the decision-maker.
U.S. schools face a crisis as the number of children drops
As American women have fewer babies each year, the number of young children in the United States is dwindling. The trend is now catching up to the nation’s public school districts.
There are simply fewer children to attend school in America today: The number of public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s.
Declining enrollment has hit many of the nation’s largest urban school districts, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, a New York Times analysis found. But smaller and suburban districts are shrinking at a similar rate.
How to cultivate a school board that sticks to its vision
Improving student outcomes trumps personal agendas in Tuscaloosa City Schools’ school board. Its superintendent attributes its success to a culture of trust and cohesion.
“They know their role is vision, mission, policy and budget,” says Dr. Mike Daria, the district’s superintendent. “If they ever kind of get out of that lane, they either individually push themselves back into the right lane or they’ll do it with each other.”
The board recently earned the world’s first certification recommendation from Cognia, a global accrediting organization. Cognia cited unification and strong collaboration among board members with a consistent focus on student success, equity and continuous improvement.