A Public Servant Year: TEXAS (teachers)

2025 Teachers Retirement System

I’m a former public employee that did not want to put an experimental drug into my body just to keep my job. That experience has probably scarred me for life. I am now looking at public institutions, state by state, to see if there is any potential (official) evidence of harm caused by those coerced covid vaccinations.

Well so much for the streamlining … this one is going to be pretty dense and long.

Sorry.

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Texas is a big place and just this look at the teachers of that state is going to have a lot of parts. I am going to combine several of my recent approaches into this one post, along with some new stuff:

• I am going to show you my normal members removed numbers and graph,

• Along with the new proportional analysis of that against total member numbers.

• As I did for the Georgia teachers, I am going to look at the strange investment returns for this pension system that happened in 2021.

• There are some corroborating graphs that show interesting member levels (drops) in the health care enrollments.

• There are some astonishing numbers in the death benefits that correlate with something big that happened in 2021 and 2022.

• As I explored with the Georgia teachers, I will look at the reports of working teachers deaths for 2021.

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR)

of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS or System)

for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2025

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page 15 (Membership Information - TRS Health Care Membership by Year)

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I do not normally find tidbits like this one early on in any of these documents, but these graphs are very illuminating. The one on the left is for retirees and other non-working members. The one on the right is for the active members. These are showing the membership numbers in this system’s health care coverage. 2021 saw an increase of members for the non-working folks, but it was a different story for the active (working) group. By my reckoning looking at that graph for the working people, over 25,000 members disappeared from 2021 to 2022. And then another 20,000 seems to have gone away from 2022 to 2023.

Why would you give up a government subsidized health plan while you were still working? I am sure there may be a few reasons … but did a significant number of those people die?

*(Also note the big drop for the non-working members from 2022 to 2023. That graph uses a different number spacing, so that looks to be about a 7,000 member removal in that year).

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page 145 (Retirees, Beneficiaries, and Disabled Participants Added to and Removed from Membership)

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Proportional Analysis of members removed as a % of total members on the rolls.

… my table with percentages:

… and the graph:

2021 and 2022 are noticeably above the expected removal percentage. But a fair look at this graph would say that all years post 2020 are higher than one would expect in a fixed ratio.

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page 146 (Analysis of Financial Experience (Dollars in Billions)*)

So here we again see the outlier number for investment gains in 2021, as we noticed in Georgia and Michigan. That is 5.3 billion dollars gained on the asset sheet. Almost every year prior or after were losses. The two that were not (2017 and 2018) were modest gains in comparison.

As I examined previously, 2021 saw a big investment windfall for many pension systems, but I do not fully understand why.

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page 156 (Net Position Pension Trust Fund Last Ten Years)

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Warning, this next one is a shocker.

I did not know what I was looking at when I came across this statistic.

There is something under death benefits that is referred to as “annual salary”.

You will see my screenshot below from my query to Google on just what that means. But it really is mostly a benefit given to survivors when a working active member dies.

What the hell happened in 2022?

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page 162 (Benefit and Refund Deductions from Net Position by Type)

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*but don’t forget to also notice the ordinary death refund line on that same table above. If it wasn’t for that mind-boggling graph for the “annual salary” numbers, this one would have been the one to talk about:

… again, what the hell happened in 2022?

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KERA

February 10, 2021

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“Teachers have been labeled essential workers. But in Texas, despite being a vulnerable population, they haven’t been prioritized for a COVID-19 vaccine. And they’re not happy about it, either.

When Texas began distributing the COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 14, most people knew essential workers were going to be first in line.

But after doctors, nurses and other frontline health care workers, many people figured educators might be next. They were wrong.”

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NPR

September 1, 2021

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“… Chansler’s death came days after David McCormick, 59, a seventh grade social studies teacher at Connally Junior High, died of COVID-19, Bottelberghe said.

It was not immediately known if either teacher was vaccinated.

Connally High School football coach Terry Gerik says the Cadets will play La Vega as scheduled Friday night.

The school has had 51 confirmed COVID-19 cases since classes began Aug. 18, Bottelberghe said Monday. She added that more cases had been confirmed in the last few days, but she did not know if any have been directly traced back to Chansler.”

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Like we saw in the Georgia teacher examination, there was a great deal of momentum for teachers to get vaccinated as soon as possible. And then when educators were perceived to be dropping in numbers, can you imagine that there were any holdouts left? One has to believe that the vast majority of teachers in Texas were very vaccinated at the dawn of 2022.

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This may be an appropriate time to go and look at the memorial for teacher deaths that Education Week put together …

Here is the 2021 list for Texas:

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I am sorry to do that to you again.

There are 73 people on that list, one of the largest state 2021 totals in the Education Week archive. As we found out in Georgia, the dates that vaccines were available for teachers varied from state to state. Texas did not officially let the educators line up for their shots until March 3, 2021. But like in Georgia, anxious Texas teachers could have crossed state lines to nearby locations with earlier vaccine availability:

Education Week

January 15, 2021 | Updated: April 05, 2021

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Arkansas shares a border with the lone star state. And they got the teachers jabbed on January 18, 2021. Just saying.

With that in mind, what can we tell about the timing of the deaths on the Education Week list?

8 of the 73 died before January 18th.

Here again there is a large percentage of the list happening in August and September. Need I say one more time what the date was for the Pfizer full FDA approval?

August 23rd, 2021.

16 of the 73 happened in the 30 day period after that date, and 21 of the 73 happened in the 60 days after 8/23/21.

I personally believe that most teachers wanted the shots as soon as possible and were not waiting for the EUA versions to be fully approved. But some may have been waiting for that to happen and this could explain the cluster on the list around that approval date.

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KERA

January 11, 2022

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School districts and educators across the region say there are higher rates of teachers calling in sick.

“School districts in North Texas are seeing a shortage of teachers as many are calling in sick due to the uptick in omicron cases.

Ovidia Molina, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, said the shortage is a pattern across the state and isn’t limited to teachers.

“We are seeing school districts try to pick up and encourage people — parents even — to volunteer to substitute. We have seen some school districts around the state that are not able to have bus routes for their students for a whole week, because they don’t have enough bus drivers,” Molina said.

Molina said the current shortage is comparable to the beginning of the pandemic.”

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Texas 2036

May 17, 2022

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“The risk of a teacher shortage in Texas has drawn significant media and political attention recently, and with student assessments indicating significant learning loss due to the COVID pandemic, state leaders are right to pay close attention to factors that can impact student outcomes. We commend the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for bringing together educators to evaluate the staffing issues Texas schools are facing and find a data-driven approach to the varying needs across the state.

To better understand the scope of Texas’ teacher shortage, we looked closely at the publicly available data. What we found is ambiguous, at best. That said, it’s May. The full scope of the issue may not be clear until contracts for the next school year are signed this summer, and there is certainly some early data that shows a credible basis for future concern.”

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*in case you have forgotten …

Pandemic Milestones:

January 20, 2020

-First covid case in the U.S.

December 11, 2020

-Pfizer Emergency Use Authorization

December 18, 2020

-Moderna Emergency Use Authorization

August 23, 2021

-Pfizer full FDA approval

December 2021 / January 2022

-CDC and FDA revise booster recommendations

-Rapid booster uptake

January 31, 2022

-Moderna full FDA approval

August 31, 2022

-FDA authorized Pfizer and Moderna’s new bivalent COVID booster vaccines

April 10, 2023

-Biden declares the end of the pandemic

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