School report card
‘Gold Ribbon’ schools tout high expectations, hard work
Study up on how the region’s public schools measure up in the 2018 Children At Risk School Report Card.
When MacArthur Elementary School Principal Maria Muñoz tells her students that their potential is limitless, she speaks from experience.
As a child, Muñoz lived in a shabby brick apartment complex across North Main Street from MacArthur, in a close-knit Galena Park neighborhood with strong community support but little money. Despite the odds against her, Muñoz graduated from the University of Houston, rejoined her hometown district as a paraprofessional and worked her way into the top job at her childhood elementary school.
“We let the teachers and students know from the very, very first day that we have high expectations for them, that college is a reality for them,” Muñoz said. “We tell them it’s OK to be a reader, a mathematician, a scientist, that there’s nothing holding you back.”
The always-present belief in every MacArthur child, echoed by Muñoz and her staff, has helped build the Galena Park ISD campus into an annually high-performing school, earning a “Gold Ribbon” designation from the Houston education nonprofit Children At Risk.
This year, as Children At Risk prepared to unveil its 14th-annual school rankings, the organization embarked on a 10-school tour of “Gold Ribbon” campuses — traditional public schools that receive an “A” or “B” grade while serving predominantly lower-income, neighborhood students — to identify how some educators are shrinking performance gaps across the region. The research and advocacy nonprofit drafted a “Blueprint for Success in High-Poverty Schools,” highlighting five common practices echoed by principals and their staff.
In turn, the Houston Chronicle visited five schools that have received multiple “Gold Ribbon” awards in recent years, to see how educators are putting these principles into practice. At each school, campus leaders agreed the nonprofit’s five core tenets have proved vital to their success — while also adding another all-important priority.
1. Set a culture of high expectations
MacArthur Elementary sits along the western edge of Galena Park ISD, an area populated by small, old houses and the occasional apartment building. Although wealth is rare — about 80 percent of students are considered “economically disadvantaged” by the state — family ties run deep, with multiple generations often sharing the same home.
While Children At Risk’s rankings are strongly correlated with the wealth of students’ families, MacArthur Elementary students have bucked that trend, earning three consecutive “B”-level grades for performance. (The nonprofit’s rankings are largely based on raw achievement and student growth in math and reading on the state’s primary standardized test, known as STAAR.)
Campus and district staff said high expectations permeate the school, largely through a culture driven by Muñoz and her administrative team.
Muñoz said she encourages healthy competition among the classes, which helps keep students and teachers engaged. Administrators also mix holding staff and students accountable for performance with lighthearted, positive reinforcement.
“Our teachers really have a sense of family, where they see all of their students as our students,” Muñoz said.
Terri Moore, Galena
Park ISD’s assistant superintendent for communication services and professional development, said MacArthur Elementary students see daily models of their potential in the six campus staff members who attended the school as children.
“They’ve walked in the shoes of our children. They were our children,” Moore said. “They don’t let them have any excuses for not performing.”
2. Communicate continuously with families
Throughout the school year, Meador Elementary School in Pasadena ISD often serves as place to be for family events: Rodeo Day, square dancing, Christmas programs, trackand-field day.
“The way we get parents to come see what we do is to have an event,” said Meador Elementary’s seventh-year principal, Beverly Bolton. “We involve parents as much as possible. Many of them don’t come up and just volunteer during the day, but they do support us.”
Meador Elementary serves one of the most transient student populations among Houston’s “Gold Ribbon” schools, with families frequently moving in and out of the eight apartment complexes located within the campus zone. As a result, parent engagement proves crucial in ensuring students come to class and remain enrolled at Meador, Bolton said.
The constant communication has helped Meador produce high attendance rates — about 97 percent, better than the state average — and test scores in recent years. Meador annually receives an “A” or “B” rating from Children At Risk, climbing in the 2019 rankings to 159th out of
905 schools in the Houston region.
Bolton said her campus, where she’s worked since 2001, has an open-door policy with family members, allowing them to visit children during class or lunch. Relatives know to check students’ backpacks on Tuesdays, when folders containing key communications are sent home.
Staff members send messages to parents through a technology platform called ClassDojo. And Facebook updates are common during events, including a recent live-streamed field day.
3. Use data to drive instruction
After 14 years leading Milton Cooper Elementary School, the campus’ founding principal, Leticia Gonzalez, has her routines down pat.
Every month, a campus attendance committee gathers to ensure plans are in place to assist students missing school. Every six weeks, various staffers gather for a data quality meeting, double-checking that children are coded property and receiving needed services. Every nine weeks, Gonzalez personally reviews each student’s report card, checking with teachers when a grade goes awry.
“We have a lot of systems to help us check ourselves,” Gonzalez said.
While Spring ISD historically has lagged in the Children At Risk rankings, Milton Cooper Elementary has been a bright spot, receiving five consecutive “A”- or “B”-level grades. The campus serves about 800 students — about 60 percent Hispanic and 30 percent black — on the district’s south side.
Gonzalez said teachers employ multiple assessment tools, including the commonly used screening program Renaissance 360 and tests developed by campus educators, to track students’ progress throughout the year.
4. Support the whole child
At Houston ISD’s De Chaumes Elementary School, home to about 850 students on the district’s north side, every employee feels responsible for ensuring students feel safe and welcomed, Principal Elizabeth Garcia said.
“Everybody in this building is about kids, from the clerks at the front to our custodians,” Garcia said. “They feel this school is their family.”
De Chaumes Elementary students share family struggles consistent across many high-poverty, predominantly Hispanic campuses: housing instability, immigration-related issues, family members lacking strong backgrounds in education. While the campus doesn’t yet have a wraparound coordinator — Houston ISD is dedicating staffers to each campus to address students’ nonacademic needs — Garcia said teachers and administrators coordinate plans for each student.
The challenge, Garcia said, is to keep employees motivated in the face of constant home-life turmoil experienced by students. To combat burnout, administrators constantly tell stories of victories — both small and large — by current and since-graduated students.
“Teachers who start out believing that they can make an impact can lose that belief if we’re not careful,” Garcia said. “One of the jobs of leaders and administrators is to keep that belief alive.”
5. Reach outside the box for resources
When Hurricane Harvey flooded Pasadena ISD’s Frazier Elementary School and about half of students’ homes, campus staff made several never-beforeknown contacts that helped the community recover.
Using gifts from across the country, employees and volunteers operated a donation site for about three months, doling out food and supplies to families in need. Teachers tapped the website Donors Choose, raising about $400,000 for replacement items in the classroom. A partnership blossomed with the large Sagemont Church, located about a mile up the road.
The effort followed Frazier Elementary’s habit of seeking outside funding to supplement programs and purchase studentfriendly items, recognizing the impact they can have on student achievement.
“It’s been really teaching us to invest in the family if we really want to get everything we can out of students,” Frazier Elementary Principal Wendy Wiseburn said. “We’re kind of on the front end of that, because we’ve been doing it for several years.”
As she walks through her southwestern Pasadena campus, Wiseburn ticks off the creative ways in which Frazier Elementary has benefited from outside sources. Grant money helped fund unique seats designed to calm fidgety children. An active parent-teacher organization supports holiday events. The school nurse clips coupons and hands out information about local health care providers, denoting which ones take Medicaid.
“We have to go beyond what we think our role is,” Wiseburn said.
6. Hire dedicated, competent employees who love children
While it didn’t make Children At Risk’s blueprint, educators at all five “Gold Ribbon” schools said high-quality, hardworking staff drive student achievement more than any other factor.
The challenge, then, becomes hiring and retaining the district’s best employees. When interviewing potential staff members for De Chaumes Elementary, Garcia said her top priority remains identifying educators with a passion for children.
“I can’t overemphasize the importance of that,” Garcia said. “You can teach people how to teach. You can grow people’s content knowledge. But you can’t teach people how to love kids, to advocate for kids, to believe in kids that look different from them.”
In turn, staff members said the school culture created by the campus principal drives retention of high-performing employees. Tara Merida, a counselor and parent coordinator at Meador Elementary, said Bolton supports staff by valuing their time, showing interest in their needs, keeping an open-door policy and working hard.
“She’s approachable, she helps, she encourages us, she’s always showing us how much she appreciates all the staff,” Merida said. “If you’ve got to work, you’ve got to enjoy who you work with and have fun. We do that here.”