Like most learning in pandemic, Houston school fair shifts online

In a year where so much schooling has been virtual, choosing schools has shifted to screens as well. On Saturday morning, 524 users logged on to one of the Houston area’s biggest K-12 school fairs — a dizzying school-a-rama in one of nation’s strongest bastions of school choice.

Normally the nonprofit Families Empowered holds the fair in person, with hundreds of families milling around Houston Community College West

Loop, picking up brochures and chatting with reps for a bewildering array of K-12 options other than the school a family is zoned to: charter schools, magnet schools and private schools.

This year, the explanations

and help sessions moved to Zoom. Families learned that charter and magnet schools are public schools, and so charge no tuition, and that private schools are either low-cost or offer substantial financial aid. Some choose their students by lottery and others by auditions or test scores. Others take all comers. Some share a common application, with the same deadline. Many have their own separate systems. Some offer busing; some don’t.

For most of the four hours, Paul Castro, principal of the tiny A+UP charter middle school, sat alone in his Zoom room, waiting to explain his school’s focus on character, why the school limits its size to 150 students, how it can change the life of a kid who seems to be on the wrong track, the kind of kid who might slip through the cracks in another school. “We want them to be better people,” he explained after the fair, “better thinkers. To be contributors, not takers.”

But during the fair, only one user clicked on A+UP’s link to talk with Castro. Instead, most parents gravitated toward the names they recognized — to the KIPP charter chain, or the YES Prep charter chain, to the Catholic Schools of the Houston-Galveston Archdiocese, or Houston ISD or Aldine ISD’s magnet schools.

That was a shame, thought Colleen Dippel, the CEO of Families Empowered. Dippel founded the organization with the idea that education isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair, but that it can be hard for Texas families to find the best match of the options available. At a live school fair, families might stumble onto little schools they didn’t know existed, very specific schools that might be perfect for their very specific child: places like A+UP or Chinquapin Preparatory School, a boarding school for students from “Houston’s under-resourced communities and schools.”

Filling in the gaps

COVID, though, makes everything harder. Now, as final deadlines loomed, it seemed to her that many families are reluctant to commit, given the extraordinary number of things they can’t know about the coming school year. By fall, will they feel comfortable putting their child on a bus? At any given school, will teachers’ attention still be divided between online students and those sitting in the classroom? And what will each school do about the students who've fallen behind this awful year?

Families Empowered recently surveyed close to 500 Texas parents via its website. The results aren’t scientific, Dippel admits, but even so, they alarm her: Three-quarters said that their child had suffered learning loss, and more than 60 percent believed that come fall, their child would not be prepared to work at their grade level.

“Families are concerned about what the schools plan to do to fill in those gaps,” she said. “They want to know how the school will communicate with them, how the schools will tell them what the plan is.”

Changing relationships

As COVID has shifted more responsibility for educating kids onto parents, she says, it’s also shifted the relationship between schools and parents: “Parents don’t just expect to drop their kids off and drive away. I don’t see how schools can build a recovery plan without asking parents what they need.”

Justin Fuentes, executive director of Houston ISD’s Office of School Choice, gave one of the online fair’s big general presentations, the Zoom equivalent of being on a festival’s main stage. Afterward, he said that applications to HISD magnet programs were down by around 5 percent this year. To be considered in the first round — which is to say, to have a reasonable shot at the district’s most popular magnet schools — families had to apply by November. HISD is now waiting for commitments from the students accepted, and applications are still open for whatever spaces remain.

COVID safety seems to be on parents’ minds, he said. Texas Connections, the district’s online-only charter school, has expanded its enrollment. And he’s noticed that often this year, instead of choosing a more popular school that would be a long bus ride away, families pick a similar-themed school closer to home — that a kid accepted to both Houston School for the Performing and Visual Arts and Westbury High School’s performing and visual arts magnet program might enroll at Westbury, or a kid accepted at both DeBakey High School for Health Professions and Jones Futures Academy would pick Jones.

COVID has thrown inequality into high relief, with vaccine appointments tending to go to the wellconnected and internetsavvy, while death rates are higher in low-income ZIP codes. But Fuentes didn’t think those difficulties had affected HISD’s magnet program much this year. The first couple of district magnet-program online fairs didn’t have many Spanish speakers, he said, but the problem was fixed with better links on the main page in Spanish, so that parents could find people who spoke their language. “You have to meet the customer where they are,” he said.

Finding students

Castro, the principal of A+UP, agreed with that. Lots of his school’s parents find out about it through word of mouth: through referrals from friends or relatives or even pediatricians, but the school is only five years old, so even for a tiny school, that’s enough. Before the pandemic, he and his teachers would walk the neighborhoods, knocking on doors in Third Ward, or playing basketball at Cuney Homes.

“Now we’re spending a ton of money on Facebook ads,” he said glumly. “I’d rather spend that on a teacher. But our families are on Facebook.”

He wishes that parents could come tour his school, the way families used to — that the families who need A+UP could recognize immediately how right it is. It’s not that he’s worried about filling the seats, he said. It’s that he’s worried about missing the kids who need what his school has to offer: “Too many aren’t getting the opportunity.”