HISD’s leader gets eye-opening tour on first day
Trip across city showed disparity among schools
As students of the Houston school district returned for their first day of classes Monday, new Superintendent Richard Carranza got a glimpse of the disparity among campuses during a 60-mile jaunt across this diverse city.
Houston school board members have said Carranza’s commitment to increasing equity in the district — the seventh-largest in the nation — was one of the main reasons that they hired him. The former superintendent of San Francisco’s public schools officially took the helm in Houston on Thursday.
New superintendents in the Katy and Humble school districts, Lance Hindt and Elizabeth Fagen, also spent the first day of classes for most of the region’s million-plus students in the trenches — all smiles and high-fives before the inevitable academic, financial and political challenges kick in. With state lawmakers reconvening in January, this school year likely will be punctuated by fights in Austin over public school funding and whether to offer a form of vouchers so that more students can attend private schools.
In the Houston Indepen-
dent School District, Carranza saw firsthand the different conditions in which students learn.
At Yates High School in south Houston’s Third Ward, Carranza walked through musty hallways in the aging building and visited a makeshift student-run television studio that the principal is working to revive. Yates is one of 40 campuses being rebuilt or renovated under the district’s 2012 voter-approved bond referendum, but it’s not set to open until the first quarter of 2018.
Well-funded efforts
Fewer than five miles north, Carranza toured Carnegie Vanguard High School, a 4-year-old facility with giant windows that invite natural light, an outdoor classroom with views of the downtown Houston skyline, and tennis courts on the parking garage. The nationally renowned school serves gifted students, who apply to attend.
“You know, I visited some schools today where they don’t look anything like this,” Carranza told a few students at Carnegie Vanguard, as he joined them in the cafeteria for a hot lunch of grilled cheese and vegetables.
“Yeah, our school’s really nice. And I think our PTO’s a big part of it,” Carnegie sophomore Charlotte Hunsche said, referring to the Parent Teacher Organization. The group’s fundraising efforts helped upgrade the sound system for the joint cafeteria/gym, added outside lighting and gave money to teachers for supplies, according to its website.
Carranza, the 49-year-old son of blue-collar workers and the grandson of Mexican immigrants, talks regularly about wanting to ensure that all students, no matter their background, receive an equitable education. At Yates, while being interviewed by students for a radio broadcast, Carranza elaborated on his philosophy of equity, with the goal of preparing students for college, jobs or the military after high school graduation.
“I want students to be empowered so that they can make decisions, and the system hasn’t made the decision for them,” Carranza said. “You can’t just say equal because then you’re into a cookie-cutter approach — everybody gets exactly the same thing, yet we all know that different communities, different neighborhoods, different districts have different needs. So the way to address that is through an equity lens.”
Carranza has yet to present any specific plans for the district, where 6 in 10 students are Hispanic and 3 of 4 are economically disadvantaged. The district has about 215,000 students.
Time for a song
The talk wasn’t all serious, as Carranza posed for photos with parents and cafeteria workers. Upon request, the noted mariachi musician also sang the traditional Mexican birthday song “Las Mañanitas” to Stevenson Middle School principal Ruth Ruiz.
Carranza toured the south Houston campus to check out teachers implementing the district’s new middle-school literacy initiative. The program expands on the effort launched in elementary schools in 2014, after district leaders acknowledged a literacy crisis, with roughly 4 of 10 students lacking basic reading skills. A key component involves teachers working with small groups of students at a time.
Ruiz explained that the district provided the school with about 400 new books for English classes, on different reading levels to match students’ varied skills. Most of the students at the school come from low-income families, where resources at home are scarce.
Carranza suggested that businesses may want to donate more books and that his central office could help coordinate such partnerships.
“That would be awesome,” Ruiz said as they walked to another class.