School leaders say relationships ease COVID disruptions Second shot and set
Senior year was supposed to be one of Ehulises Rodriguez’s best at North Houston Early College High School.
As a junior he had worked his way to president of GENTS, a club that helps young men develop leadership skills, when Houston ISD announced campuses would close beyond spring break in March 2020 to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Rodriguez worried that the connections he built with his classmates and teachers would shut down like the rest of the world.
He said he was glad to be wrong.
“Even after the pandemic itself, we’ve still been able to connect with each other and our teachers. It might not be as frequently, but it still feels like a family,” Rodriguez said.
North Houston Early College High was among 35 schools in the Houston region rated as “pandemic proof” by the Children at Risk non-profit in its annual ratings. To earn the rating, 75 percent or more of a school’s students must be classified as low income and the schools must have earned As and Bs on the nonprofit’s rating system for the past three years in a row.
Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, said cam
puses that fit those criteria have already been working with students from challenging backgrounds and have faced more hardships than other campuses.
“We know that schools that serve predominately low income kids, those principals know how to lead. We know that staff and faculty at those schools are the best prepared to overcome obstacles, including the pandemic,” Sanborn said. “They’ve already been putting in the work and dealing with a lot over the past few years, and they’ve been doing it well.”
Houston ISD was home to 16 of the 35 “pandemic proof” schools, more than any other district. Sanborn said that isn’t a surprise, because the district has spent time building a solid early childhood education program and has taken the time to develop great campus leaders. Those investments have transformed some campuses.
DeAnda Elementary, just south of Hobby airport, for example, had nearly made the state’s “improvement required” list when it was designated as a priority campus back in 2015. Lauren Mailhiot, who arrived as assistant principal that year before becoming the schools leader two years ago, said teachers and campus leadership rebuilt the school from expectations up.
“It just really needed a lot of support,” Mailhiot said. “We had to have a major overhaul of what are our expectation for kids were and spelling out what we want for them.”
The school went from having zero after-school programs to more than 15. Teachers went back to the basics for instruction, working to give students solid foundations in reading, writing and math. Staff worked overtime to build trust and relationships with parents, and Mailhiot started monthly coffee meetings with family to share information about things like nutrition and cyberbullying.
Building those relationships with parents proved crucial once the campus was forced to close for in-person instruction in March.
Each teacher was tasked with contacting each student, but about 20 couldn’t be found immediately. One of the school’s assistants, Deyanira Colunga, found ways to get in contact with almost every one of them.
“We’d run it by Mrs. Colunga, who would say ‘Oh, I remember they were neighbors of this family, let me call them to see if they’re still next door,’ or ‘Oh they’re a cousin of this family, let me call their aunt to see if we have the right number,” Mailhiot said.
They were able to connect students’ families with laptops and the resources they needed to get by, and after a couple of weeks dealing with the technology learning curve, students started to get back on track.
Transitioning to virtual learning was easier for students at North Houston Early College High School, where every student was already issued a laptop at the beginning of the 2019-20 school year. Many of their classes both at the high school and those at neighboring Houston Community College’s Northline campus used online platforms for turning in homework.
Although the school’s previous use of technology, NHECHS Principal Samantha Brooks agreed with Mailhiot and said teachers’ relationships with students was among the most helpful advantages the school had when it pivoted to online learning, and again when in-person instruction began in October.
“The relationship and contact is so important, because this is new territory for everybody,” Brooks said. “We all had a big learning curve and realized we all had to help each other through all of this.”
Seniors were allowed to gather — socially distanced — to watch the sun rise on the first day of school. Lizbeth Villanueza, 17, said being back with her classmates felt like a taste of normalcy in an otherwise chaotic year.
“It was kind of a bitter sweet feeling,” she said. “Bitter because we didn’t want to spend our senior year with all these COVID restrictions, but also sweet overall because we got to see each other.”