Furr principal: 82 and energized
$10M grant boosts her effort to turn formerly gang-plagued school around
Students streamed into Principal Bertie Simmons’ office on a September morning.
There was the freshman accused of pushing a teacher with his backpack, the kid who couldn’t afford the $25 fee for a laptop, the woman whose daughter, a 2016 graduate, had shot herself dead, plus five students pleading to transfer into Furr High School. They thought it was safer and better academically than their neighborhood campus.
“You heard we had a young, sexy principal?” the silver-haired Simmons asked a bling-eared boy, now attending struggling Wheatley High School.
His transcript showed he skipped classes. He assured her he would graduate.
“I’m going to accept you,” Simmons said. “But I’m going to keep an eye on you.”
Simmons, 5 feet tall with rosy cheeks and blackrimmed glasses, raised her fist to bump his. It sealed a promise like those she has
made over and over with students since coming out of retirement to take charge of Furr’s turnaround effort in 2000. She would have their backs if only they tried, even if they messed up a time or two.
The principal was just back from a whirlwind four days in Washington, D.C., where she accepted a prestigious $10 million grant that will help her keep meeting the challenges of her formerly gang-plagued high school on Houston’s east side.
Furr was one of 10 schools last month to win the first-ever “super school” contest sponsored by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, and the XQInstitute she chairs. Roughly 700 campuses nationwide applied, submitting proposals to reinvent the American high school. In Simmons and in Furr, the judges found a real-life example of what education experts describe as keys to success: strong leadership and meaningful relationships with students.
Today, Furr’s graduation rate tops 90 percent, the school nurse no longer feels compelled to stockpile trauma dressings and Simmons rarely suspends any of the 1,100 students — even if some teachers think she’s too soft. The school also meets the state’s academic standards, despite weak performance in reading and writing.
Instead of cutting class, students now are studying social and environmental justice. They have filmed an award-winning documentary about immigration, taken water samples from the San Jacinto River and planted a community garden.
Yet, Simmons envisions when Furr will be so much better. Her team’s winning grant proposal calls for giving students more choices, hands-on projects and internships. The grant, spread over five years, will help pay for social workers, a mentorship coordinator, international travel, a health clinic, a center for new immigrants, a university training site and more.
“I have been in education for 57 years, and I have never been this excited,” Simmons said in a video filmed for the contest. Tough love
On this recent morning after returning from Washington, only one visitor rocked Simmons, who at 82 is Texas’ oldest public school principal. A stunned mother in sunglasses came to tell Simmons that her daughter, 21, fatally shot herself in the head over the weekend.
The student had just graduated from REACH, a charter school Simmons started on the Furr campus to curb dropouts. Simmons remembered the student, recalling her battles with bipolar disorder and drugs and her dream to become a veterinarian.
“She would always talk about how you helped her,” the mother told Simmons.
“I tried my best, but I didn’t do enough obviously,” the principal said, as she wrote a $500 personal check for her former student’s funeral.
Simmons hugged the grieving mother before she left, then allowed herself a rare moment to vent.
“You know, this place is just killing me,” Simmons told two of her office workers. “Look how many kids I’ve had die.”
“But look how many you’ve helped,” Sylvia Rosilez, a school clerk, reminded her.
So far this school year, Simmons has dealt with a few skirmishes between students. She wasn’t worried — mostly freshmen adjusting to high school.
Still, one incident was a doozy. A 15-year-old boy slapped a 14-year-old girl in the face. Simmons took the two into an empty office to get answers.
The boy dropped his head, his long black hair covering his face. The girl held ice near her eye.
“If you don’t want to talk, I’ll get a police officer in here,” Simmons calmly told the boy. She always has two armed school district officers on campus.
“Why would you hit a girl? Why are you so angry?” Simmons asked him. His eyes closed, fighting back tears.
Simmons summoned the parents.
They told her their son was distraught over a break-up with his girlfriend. The girl he slapped was one of her close friends.
Simmons forced the boy to apologize to the girl but didn’t suspend him. The approach was unorthodox, more fodder for the principal’s critics who say she’s not tough enough.
She was trying to change the boy’s behavior. She learned long ago as a child when her own dad, drunk, hit her with a belt that harsh punishment alone didn’t work.
Simmons asked the frustrated boy if he wanted to go to college. Yes, he said, and he wanted to play football. So she called her football coach, Cornell Gray. He said the boy needed a physical, but he would get him participating with the team somehow.
“Coach is going to be your mentor,” Simmons said. “I’ll come see you play.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, his head finally up.
Simmons hugged him and his mom and dad, too. Building rapport
The incidents on campus last month were nothing like the old days. Roughly a dozen gangs ruled Furr when Simmons became principal. It was a school where gangsters stole teachers’ cars, students trampled the football coach and one student stabbed another in the left ventricle of the heart.
Most of the employees didn’t want Simmons there. Not that “rich bitch” from West University Place, she heard one say. They welcomed her with cigarette butts in her office toilet and a broken desk chair.
Simmons moved to eviscerate the police-state culture at the school, where officers reportedly slammed students and handcuffed them and called them thugs.
Two years into her tenure, a heinous gang fight broke out on campus. Metal trash cans went flying. Punches were thrown. The assistant principals tried to send about 30 students involved to an alternative school.
But the principal disagreed. Instead, Simmons offered the gangsters a trip to NewYork, to see Ground Zero and “42nd Street” and Chinatown, if they stopped fighting for good. Put another way, Simmons worked to build rapport with the gangsters at her school. They knew she didn’t have to be there.
“Actually, I think the gangstas here are the ones who helped me to finally get to where I could survive,” Simmons said. “They got me so involved in trying to save the school that I think that helped me to keep going on.” ‘I was always an outlier’
When Simmons was asked to serve as Furr’s temporary principal in the spring of 2000, she was mired in a deep depression. She doubted she could be that inspired boss again, once over all the principals in the Houston Independent School District. She had been living like a robot, overwhelmed by the death of her first grandchild, Ashley Fendley. On a ski trip to New Mexico the spring before, Ashley slid off the trail, slammed into a tree and died instantly. She was 16.
Simmons and Ashley had a special bond. The two had been writing a book, interviewing famous Houstonians to solicit lessons for youth. They had gone panning for gold in Alaska. They gushed over musicals.
“She always said, ‘Nana, when I grow up, I’m going to make the world a better place for all people,’” Simmons recalled.
Ashley would want her to take the job at Furr. With that in mind, Simmons had to accept it, knowing there would be challenges.
On Simmons’ first school day there, one student tossed another through a plate-glass window, blood splattering on the terrazzo floor. A week or two later, the attacker was killed in a drive-by shooting.
Like her students, Simmons was forced to be resilient at a young age. Born in April 1934 in rural north Louisiana during the Great Depression, her parents left her alone for hours as a toddler. Her musician father had a radio show. Her mother was a nurse’s aide.
She would occupy herself by chanting a song her mom imparted to keep her brave. The tune still rolls off Simmons’ tongue: “I’m just a bear, just a brown baby bear. … And I am not afraid to be at home all day while maw and paw go stepping out and leave me here to play.”
Simmons considers her momher greatest teacher, a lover of art and poetry who used Henry David Thoreau to inspire self-confidence as she struggled to read aloud as a kid. Simmons suspects she had dyslexia.
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” Simmons said, quoting Thoreau from memory. “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Her mom explained his words to her. “He was saying it was OKto be different and to think differently,” Simmons said. “That made such an impression on me. I was always an outlier.” ‘Lessons Learned’
That attitude helps explain why Simmons clashed at times with the Houston school district’s last superintendent, Terry Grier, who thought teachers and principals should be held more accountable for students’ standardized test scores.
Grier also thought the graduation rates at Furr and REACH should be combined. Roughly half the REACH students drop out, state data show. Simmons argued REACH students came from high schools across the district, and many were dropouts before they arrived. “I told Bertie once, ‘You can love kids to death, but you have to educate them, too. Bertie sometimes defended some faculty that shouldn’t be defended. That’s where we got sideways, but never ever questioning her heart or her professionalism or her talent.”
In 2013, Grier put Simmons and 23 other principals on improvement plans. Under the pressure, about half of them resigned or retired.
“I told Bertie once, ‘You can love kids to death, but you have to educate them, too,’” said Grier, at the helm from 2009 through February 2016. “Bertie sometimes defended some faculty that shouldn’t be defended. That’s where we got sideways, but never ever questioning her heart or her professionalism or her talent.”
Simmons said she thought about retiring early in Grier’s tenure, after hearing rumors he wanted to close her school to bolster district enrollment elsewhere. She even wrote what she thought was the final chapter of her autobiography. “Lessons Learned,” she called it.
“I will be leaving Furr High School knowing there is still much work to be done,” Simmons wrote in 2009. “I have grown to love the students, staff, and community, and my greatest desire is that I will be replaced by a principal who embraces the social justice view of education and has the courage and tenacity to continue the fight to promote opportunity, equality, and equity.” 12-hour workdays
Simmons decided to stay at Furr to keep on saving the school that ended up saving her. Now, she wants to see Furr, a dropout factory when she became the principal, thrive as the grant-winning “super school” for future generations.
“If I felt bad or didn’t have energy, then I would throw it in, but I feel energized all the time,” said Simmons, who works 12hour days and subsists on Nutter Butters, Ensure shakes and iced tea.
Some in the community have told Simmons they want her daughter, Paula Fendley, to eventually succeed her. Fendley was principal of Eastwood Academy in the Houston school district but resigned in August to lead a private school. She had lost trust in Grier’s administration.
“There was a part of me that would have loved to have taken over after she left,” Fendley said, “but I don’t think that was in the cards.”
Richard Carranza, the school district’s new superintendent, recently lauded Simmons at a community meeting, describing her as a “force of nature” who brought pride to a school others had written off. At one point, he even referred to the Furr campus as Bertie Simmons High School.