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HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- The drama and confusion continue in Houston ISD less than two weeks from the start of the school year.

On Tuesday, teacher training at NRG stadium was chaos as people were turned away from sessions and packed into hallways.

ABC13 talked to a handful of teachers who told us Monday and Tuesday were unacceptable. But when asked to go on record, they told us they feared being fired by the district for speaking up.

At the training, hundreds of HISD teachers packed into hallways, turned away from overcrowded classes, and one person was wheeled away from the stadium by EMS after a panic attack.

"I have never, in my career, seen something like this," Michelle Williams, an HISD teacher, said.

Williams works with the teachers' advocacy group, the Houston Teachers Association. She said she had been at training all day and hadn't been able to make it into a single seminar or session.

RELATED: HISD seeks waiver from TEA to hire uncertified people to teach in classrooms

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Houston ISD says it will seek a waiver from the TEA to allow the district to hire people for teaching positions, even though they aren't certified.

"I was trying to keep a positive outlook, as well as for our members, but (Tuesday) it has just been chaos," Williams said.

Teachers off camera told ABC13 they found this unacceptable and fear children won't get the education they deserve under the new HISD administration if this is the greeting staff is getting.

"My confidence probably was at a five, but now it's a three because they are not listening to the people that were here in HISD," Williams said.

And those in attendance worry, if teacher confidence is low before the school year has begun, what will teacher turnover look like once it does?

"The reality is, it takes a lot of people to steer this ship," Williams said.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- We hope you enjoyed the brief break in the humidity because it's gone by Thursday.

Temperatures Thursday afternoon will soar to a record-tying high of 104-degrees. This time there will be a fair amount of humidity, too, and an Excessive Heat Warning will be in effect for most of Southeast Texas through 9 p.m. Friday.

We are also going to be keeping a close eye on the Gulf this weekend as a tropical wave approaches Florida. The path it takes across the Gulf is still uncertain, but because the heat ridge should generally steer it westward toward Texas, we need to keep a watchful eye on it.

How close are we getting to the August 2011 record of 24 consecutive triple-digit days?

It's going to be really close. We are now at 18 days in a row of 100-degree heat, and we are predicting to tack on 5 more, which would get us to 23 straight days. We are cautiously optimistic that a tropical wave next week could bring us widespread clouds and rain and keep our temperatures below 100 for a day or two starting on Tuesday, August 22nd.

A tropical wave with rain?! Tell me more!

Again, we don't want to get hopes too high at this time, but we now have rain chances at 40% for Tuesday and 30% for Wednesday next week. We are still trying to get a handle on if it tracks more toward us or more toward South Texas. If it tracks toward us, our rain chances will go much higher. If it tracks more toward South Texas, then we may miss out on the rain all together.

Could this tropical wave develop into a named storm?

That is possible given the projected wind patterns of lower shear over the Gulf next week. It's only a small chance at this time, but we will be watching things very carefully since we are approaching the peak of hurricane season.

What else are you monitoring in the tropics right now?

The Atlantic is definitely starting to awaken. There are now two tropical waves with a medium chance for development over the central and eastern Atlantic. For a full overview of what's happening in the tropics, head to our Tropical Update page.

RADAR MAPS:

Southeast Texas

Houston

Harris County

Galveston County

Montgomery/Walker/San Jacinto/Polk/Grimes Counties

Fort Bend/Wharton/Colorado Counties

Brazoria/Matagorda Counties

Have weather tips, videos, and photos?

Send it to ABC13 using the form below. If you have a video or photo to send, terms of use apply. If you don't, just hit 'skip upload' and send the details.

If this NBA offseason has taught us anything, it’s that teams are changing the way they rebuild. Just over a month ago, the league and the players association ratified a new collective bargaining agreement—one noticeably more hostile to the highest-spending teams and quietly more punitive for those spending the least. It has long been common practice for clubs with younger, lottery-bound rosters to pinch pennies for as long as possible, in part because it’s easier for a club with low expectations to get away with it. Before this new CBA, there was no real incentive for a team to spend before it was ready to win, creating an environment where a handful of organizations would roll into the season well below the salary cap in hopes of farming out that space to desperate teams at the trade deadline—while also picking up some draft picks for their trouble.

No more. The Pistons are currently slated to have the most cap space of any team in the field when the 2023-24 season begins: a sultan’s ransom of $315,000. In NBA terms, that’s a rounding error. A performance bonus. A far cry from the tens of millions in cap space that teams have operated under in recent seasons—because with this new CBA, not spending isn’t really an option.

Just look at the Rockets, who went from having the youngest roster in the league and tying the Spurs for the second-worst record last season to flexing as one of the biggest spenders in free agency. There are some organic reasons Houston would push to accelerate its timeline: The Rockets’ young talent could certainly use the structure and guidance that playing with real pros provides; the team already owes its 2024 first-round pick to Oklahoma City (albeit with some protections) as a remnant of the Russell Westbrook–Chris Paul trade; and the lack of a steady point guard, in particular, started to have real developmental costs for the most exciting prospects on the roster. Yet under this new collective bargaining agreement, it also just wasn’t viable for a team like Houston—which entered into the summer with almost $60 million in cap space—to do anything but spend.

It generally takes NBA front offices a few seasons to fully adapt to the marketplace brought on by a new CBA, but the Rockets are the first team through the wall—working it all out on the fly and throwing around hundreds of millions for Fred VanVleet, Dillon Brooks, Jock Landale, and Jeff Green in the process. The rest of the league is watching—especially those in organizations on the verge of a rebuild. Houston has done well to balance out its splurge with a safety net, seeing as all of those deals come with a catch: team options for VanVleet and Green, declining salary over the contract term for Brooks, and a four-year deal for Landale (in name only) with the last three years unguaranteed.

These are the measures taken by a front office that can no longer afford to sit on its cap space as rebuilding clubs traditionally have. Under the previous CBA, teams were gently encouraged to spend up to 90 percent of the cap (a line known as the salary floor) by the very last day of the regular season, without any meaningful repercussions if they failed to. The new CBA moves that deadline to the first day of the season and gives it real teeth—erasing any unused cap space up to the salary floor, withholding luxury tax payouts for teams that fall short, and preventing them from making any transactions throughout the season that would decrease their total team salary. There’s no longer a point to those sorts of austerity measures. Not only will every organization have to spend up to the salary floor one way or another, but those that fail to reach that ledge will cost themselves more money and real team-building opportunities in the process.

So far, the result is a league in which lesser teams play more active roles in free agency or take on veterans through offseason trades, like Detroit did with Joe Harris or San Antonio did with Cam Payne and Cedi Osman. Last year, the Spurs entered the season with a subterranean payroll well under the salary floor and almost $30 million under the cap. They’re currently projected to start the 2023-24 season (and the Victor Wembanyama era) over it, as is virtually every other team in the field. Stockpiling cap space just doesn’t do much good anymore. Had any of these teams opted to spend up to only the floor, they would have just $13.6 million in room to absorb salary over the course of the season—not even enough to take on the likes of D’Angelo Russell or Marcus Morris. The fact that lower-spending teams won’t have as much cap space to rent out (or, at present, virtually no cap space to rent out) will make it that much more challenging for contenders to shed salary when the need arises.

All sorts of league business will be complicated by not having a few lottery teams with cap wiggle room just waiting around every year. Those would-be facilitators will behave much like these Rockets or these Spurs or these Pistons, which is to say something more closely approximating an actual NBA team. With that comes a chemistry experiment. Houston unquestionably has a better, more complete roster than it did last season. It also just introduced a bunch of veterans—including an All-Star lead guard and a presumptuous chucker on the wing—who are expecting to play significant roles into an ecosystem with young players still coming into their own. There’s a certain irony in the fact that Houston had all this cap space to use because it hadn’t yet shelled out for extensions for players like Jalen Green and Alperen Sengun—and yet, in using that cap space, they’ve brought in vets who will siphon off the minutes and touches and shots that factor into those extension negotiations.

The younger and cheaper a team is now, the more it will have to add—and the messier things might become. There’s a reason lottery teams don’t often spend like contenders on the cusp. With spending comes competing motivations. Brooks will make about as much next season as Green, Sengun, and Jabari Smith Jr. combined. How will that sit in the locker room when he goes 3-for-18 from the field while looking off his younger, extension-eligible teammates? And with spending, too, comes some measure of expectation. VanVleet is now the 14th-highest-paid player in the league. That just might become a talking point if he has another down shooting season or otherwise underwhelms as the steward of a developing team. The Rockets very much need a proven guard like VanVleet, and, as controversial as he may be, they need hard-nosed defenders like Brooks, too. But getting what you need could result in bringing Amen Thompson off the bench right after picking him fourth in the draft. It could mean permanently displacing Kevin Porter Jr. or not having the space to give Cam Whitmore a more consistent role out of the gate.

Zoom out, and you can see how the ripple effects of all this extend well beyond the rebuilding set. The fact that teams like Houston, Detroit, and San Antonio are stocking up on veteran role players could squeeze the market for those players’ services over time and reshape the NBA’s middle class. It was already difficult for teams with a single young superstar to decide when to ramp up their winning efforts, but effectively putting a spending requirement on those teams could shift their priorities—not to mention their timelines. The overwhelming majority of NBA contracts are fully guaranteed (or are at the players’ discretion), but increasing the need for teams to spend while giving them fewer places to dump salary could result in more of the noncommittal, non-guaranteed deals that Houston relied on this summer. Expiring contracts have dwindled in value since teams stopped using outright cap space to chase stars in free agency, but their value could bounce back in a league with fewer teams that are able to take on salary.

Every new CBA comes rife with unintended consequences, and we can’t yet know the full impact of an agreement that’s just 14 days old. Yet, at minimum, this new financial environment has the potential to completely change the internal dynamics of rebuilding clubs. Young teams still spend less. But in the NBA as we knew it, those teams were also encouraged by the system itself to be risk-averse—to hoard cap space by scraping their rosters bare, in the hope of parlaying that space into some last-chance deal right at the trade deadline buzzer. Operating that way, prudent as it was, made those teams materially worse and less interesting. It made the league less interesting. Now we get to see another way through the Rockets and their test-case roster in a market that no one fully understands.

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The building boom for Texas roads will continue for the next decade, after approval Wednesday of a record $100.6 billion plan for state transportation spending.

The Texas Transportation Commission approved the state’s unified transportation program during an Austin meeting. The program, which outlines plans for the next 10 fiscal years, crossed the $100 billion mark for construction for the first time, and totals $142.3 billion when spending for maintenance and development of projects is considered. The record spending is driven largely by increased funding from both the state – via money approved by voters in 2014 and 2015 – and additional money from the federal infrastructure bill passed in 2021.

“In an unprecedented year of record contract lettings and construction payouts, this UTP represents a historic level of investment,” said Brandye Hendrickson, deputy executive director for planning and administration for the Texas Department of Transportation.

IN THE THICKET OF IT: A Texas highway expansion that would cut through forest is angering residents

For projects to ever get to construction using state money, they need to be in the 10-year plan, though being in the plan is not a guarantee they will be built. Timing of projects also often changes as work approaches.

For the Houston area, the plan keeps many projects on pace, including the first $4.38 billion worth of work to rebuild the downtown Houston freeway system as part of the planned Interstate 45 rebuild within Loop 610. As part of updated the estimated costs, the price for the six segments listed increased $379.4 million from the current 10-year plan, updated a year ago.

With additional money expected because of state and federal funds, a number of projects along Interstate 10 received funding that – at least on paper – inches them closer to construction, including:

• A $555 million plan to rebuild the bridges along I-10 spanning the San Jacinto River, which are often struck by passing barges.

• Widening I-10 through Katy, at a cost of $221 million, from the Harris County line to Snake Creek.

• Adding managed lanes along I-10 from Loop 610 West to downtown Houston, expected to cost $1.13 billion, including through the Loop 610 interchange.

UNTYING A KNOT: Overpass at Griggs-Long-Mykawa offers relief from one rail line, a path for another

Officials also continued to support plans for the next segments of the Grand Parkway, despite plans for the roadway to be paid for by tolls. Southern segments, including a portion from I-45 to Alvin poised to start work within three years, total $4.2 billion.

Supporters of the road applauded officials keeping it in the state’s plans.

“The completion of the Grand Parkway … will not only facilitate more efficient travel but also serve as a lifeline during emergencies, allowing our communities to swiftly respond and evacuate when disaster strikes,” said Amy Skicki, executive director of the Bay Area Houston Transportation Partnership, often called Baytran.

Approval of the 2024 UTP was calm compared to the prior two versions, when opponents to various freeway projects – notably the I-45 widening and plans to widen Interstate 35 in Austin – organized against the freeway-centric plan. Wednesday, less than a dozen speakers, mostly positive, spoke before the commission.

Overall, the record spending plan drew 1,696 responses over the month-long public comment process, TxDOT officials said. Unlike past approvals, when hundreds of Houstonians weighed in specific to projects in the area, 63 comments were received from the region, according to the TxDOT tally.

For several years after the Thunder traded James Harden to Houston in October 2013, a debate flowed in NBA circles. Did the Thunder trade the wrong Kevin Durant sidekick? Should Sam Presti have traded Russell Westbrook instead?

We have our answer, don’t you think?

The twilight of Westbrook’s career has not gone great, as his athletic ability has slowly eroded and he’s not the electric player he was for so many Oklahoma City seasons. Westbrook was a scapegoat with the Lakers, though he played well for the Clippers down the stretch of last season.

But the twilight of Harden’s career has gone worse. He remains capable of eye-popping games, but his overall contribution to his team can be in constant question.

And now he’s launching missiles at the Philadelphia 76ers, for whom he’s under contract.

Harden could have become a free agent this summer. He decided instead to exercise the $35.6 million option on his contract. And now Harden wants to be traded and is calling 76er executive Daryl Morey “a liar” after ESPN reported that the Sixers are ending trade talks for Harden.

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“Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he’s a part of,” Harden said. “Let me say that again. Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he’s a part of.”

Harden is the ultimate example of the NBA’s recent superstar trend: having it both ways. Embracing security, but also demanding freedom. Getting as much money as possible, but also directing where they want to go.

We’ve seen it with Damian Lillard and the Miami Heat trade talks, we saw it with Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Netropolitans, we saw it with Paul George and the Thunder four summers ago.

The ploy doesn’t have to be acrimonious – George did the Thunder a franchise-altering favor – but it often is.

Harden has forced a trade twice in the last three years – from Houston to Brooklyn in January 2021, from Brooklyn to Philadelphia in February 2022 – and now wants another, ostensibly to the Clippers.

Harden has threatened to not report to training camp, but the collective bargaining agreement has a clause that says any player who withholds his services for more than 30 days, while in the last year of his contract, “shall be deemed not to have completed” his contract. In other words, Harden would not be a free agent next summer, under that scenario.

The 76er conundrum is that Harden just isn’t worth it anymore – he's not worth the $35.6 million Philly owes him this season, he’s not worth obtaining for any real assets, he’s not worth a big contract going forward.

Harden still is capable of a monster game – he produced a 42-point, 9-assist, 7-miss Game 4 against Boston in the Eastern Conference semifinals – and led the NBA in assists per game, 10.7, last season.

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But Harden’s defense is a detriment, he turns 34 next week, he rarely is in shape and he torpedoes team chemistry. The 76ers are the third team he has turned upside down with a trade request/demand in the last 31 months.

Harden’s trade value has shrunk.

The only place that Harden has been seemingly happy in the last 10 years was Houston, which created a laissez-faire culture that allowed Harden to come and go as he pleased, according to a variety of reports.

After Russell Westbrook was traded to Houston in July 2019, Westbrook reportedly was appalled at the way the Rockets capitulated to Harden.

There’s some irony in that, of course. The Thunder capitulated to Westbrook over the years. But Westbrook’s hold on the Thunder was more about a dominant personality who set a standard on how things should run. Sometimes that standard ran off the rails. But it never was indifferent or permissive.

Westbrook never blew up a team. Harden has, repeatedly.

For years after the Thunder famously traded Harden, a debate swelled. Did the Thunder trade the right sidekick to Kevin Durant?

The answer was yes.

Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.