{"id":103535,"date":"2025-12-29T11:46:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/103535\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T11:46:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:46:07","slug":"top-stories-from-the-texas-tribunes-data-visuals-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/103535\/","title":{"rendered":"Top stories from the Texas Tribune\u2019s data visuals team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Texas Tribune\u2019s data visuals team contributed to roughly 100 impactful stories<\/a> that helped Texans understand the policy and political decisions affecting their lives. Our coverage spanned the legislative session, the state\u2019s water crisis, the July 4 floods and key education data releases. Here\u2019s some of our standout work from this year.<\/p>\n

Politics and redistricting tools<\/p>\n

The year started with a contentious legislative session. Senior developer Carla Astudillo<\/a> helped break down the much anticipated votes for House speaker <\/a>and the debate over major school voucher<\/a> legislation. As the session drew to a close, our team tracked the key proposals<\/a> lawmakers were considering and created a resource that lets readers see how their local representatives<\/a> voted on the session\u2019s most consequential proposals.<\/p>\n

By the summer, Texas politics was upended when state Republicans approved new U.S. House districts, a move that was designed to give the GOP an advantage in Congress. Astudillo built an interactive tool that allows readers to enter their address<\/a> and see how their congressional district would change, alongside a series<\/a> of maps<\/a> and graphics<\/a> that illustrated the impacts on both residents<\/a> and elected officials<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nSchool funding \u2014 alongside the proposed voucher program \u2014 emerged as one of the most hotly debated issues of the regular legislative session. To help readers understand the issues at hand, education data developer Rob Reid<\/a> helped produce a funding explainer<\/a> that used clear visualizations to break down complex terminology in easy-to-understand ways.<\/p>\n

Public education and data releases<\/p>\n

Reid and our summer fellow Edison Wu<\/a> also contributed to our coverage of several major education data releases this year, which parents and schools rely on to evaluate how well students and campuses are performing. In April, the state released A-F ratings for the first time<\/a> in five years, followed by updated figures<\/a> in August.<\/p>\n

This month, the state released new higher education outcomes data<\/a>, which tracks the long-term success of eighth grade students who enrolled in Texas public schools a decade ago. Designer\/developer Alex Ford<\/a> created an interactive visualization showing how socioeconomically disadvantaged students are more likely to drop out.<\/p>\n

Health data reporter Dan Keemahill<\/a> helped cover local school boards. He partnered with reporters on the Texas Tribune-ProPublica investigative unit<\/a> to examine how some conservative special interest groups<\/a> in Texas are leveraging at-large voting systems to influence what students learn.<\/p>\n

Public health and disease outbreaks<\/p>\n

Our team also devoted significant time to covering contagious diseases this year, including reporting on the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. Former designer\/developer Yuriko Schumacher visualized how Hispanic Texans embraced vaccines<\/a>, which helped save lives. She also helped track the spread of measles<\/a> across the state, and Keemahill analyzed longer-term vaccination trends<\/a> in Texas schools<\/a>. To close the year, Keemahill and the health team returned to West Texas<\/a> to report on how the measles outbreak affected local residents.<\/p>\n

Other major public health issues centered on federal policy. Keemahill visualized how millions of Texans<\/a> saw their SNAP benefits cut after the federal government shut down and how this disproportionately impacted<\/a> the Rio Grande Valley. He and Wu also showed that steep increases<\/a> in Affordable Care Act premiums hit rural areas<\/a> particularly hard.<\/p>\n

Water shortages <\/p>\n

As lawmakers debated whether to invest billions into the state\u2019s water system, Astudillo and Schumacher collaborated with reporters on the regions team to examine the state\u2019s looming water crisis. This included a visual explainer<\/a> and an interactive lookup tool that allows readers to see how severe shortages are expected to be, along with information on how to get involved. Schumacher also helped report on declining groundwater levels<\/a> and Astudillo visualized how desalination<\/a> could be used to combat the water crisis.<\/p>\n

A devastating flood<\/p>\n

Over the summer, tragedy hit when Kerrville and surrounding areas were hit by massive, unexpected flooding that killed at least 135 people. Wu illustrated the nearly 20 camps<\/a> clustered around the Guadalupe River near where the flooding occurred and also showed how historically extreme the July 4 floods were.\n<\/p>\n

Undocumented coverage and ICE arrests<\/p>\n

We also contributed to a range of immigration-focused stories this year. Early on, Schumacher created several charts that broke down who the nearly 2 million undocumented Texans are and how the population has remained largely stagnant<\/a> over time. In the summer, Ford and Wu supported a story about a Houston mother facing deportation by producing a diagram that illustrates how the case impacts her family.<\/p>\n

In November, Astudillo crunched federal data for a story documenting the sharp increase<\/a> in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests under President Donald Trump. She created multiple charts for the story, including one that shows an increasing number of people being arrested have no criminal convictions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11323,10300,6466,21382,7288,2830,4380,27,29,293,28,2646,6748],"class_list":["post-103535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-affordable-care-act","tag-coronavirus","tag-higher-education-coordinating-board","tag-illegal-immigration-in-texas","tag-measles","tag-redistricting","tag-school-vouchers","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-legislature","tag-texas-news","tag-water-supply","tag-well-b-homepage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}