Baolicious Asian Kitchen recently held a soft opening along I-35 in Austin, serving a menu of handcrafted dumplings and noodles.

What’s on the menu: The restaurant, which opened within The Linc retail center, offers steamed dumplings that come with pork, crab, pork and shrimp, or rice and mushrooms; bao buns with barbecue pork, pork chashu and soft-shell crab; and appetizers such as spring rolls, pork lumpia, popcorn chicken, sautéed garlic green beans and more.

Customers will also find orange chicken, honey walnut shrimp, fried rice, chow mein, ramen, Taiwanese beef rolls and pork pot stickers.

• Opened Oct. 3

Air-conditioning upgrades funded by Austin ISD's $2.44 billion 2022 bond did not start as scheduled this year at four schools, district officials said. Three of them have reported problems with those systems as temperatures topped 100 degrees.

Officials blamed the delays on long equipment delivery times, design requirements and coordination with other campus construction.

What's happening: Bond HVAC work did not start as scheduled at Kealing Middle School, Kiker and Baranoff elementary schools, and the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, or LASA, Executive Director of Facilities David Simon and Executive Director of Construction Management Michael Mann told Community Impact. Kealing, Baranoff and LASA are among 11 AISD campuses that have reported HVAC problems this school year, the officials said.

What's next: The district's September 2025 and January 2026 bond schedules show more than a dozen bond-funded HVAC projects pushed back, 10 of them by a year or more. The officials did not say which campuses' issues remain unresolved, and the district did not respond by press time on whether a revised targeted schedule exists.

Texas school districts using the state-developed Bluebonnet Learning curriculum saw slightly better year-over-year achievement last school year than other districts, according to Texas Education Agency data released Sept. 30.

What's happening: During the 2025-26 school year, 619 of Texas' 1,200 public school districts opted in to implement at least one of the three Bluebonnet curriculum programs—elementary math, secondary math and elementary language arts.

On this spring's State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exam, districts using the state-developed math materials saw student improvement that was 0.6 percentage points higher than students in other districts, while districts that implemented the reading materials performed 0.2 percentage points higher on the STAAR than other schools.

What they're saying: The TEA said the gains in student achievement are an "encouraging sign of early progress."

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, a statewide educator union, disagreed, calling the results "rather paltry."

"It may take a few more years to determine if this is a valid trend or simply an anomaly," Capo said in a statement.