In 58 years as educator, she made students her top priority
After 39 years as an educator, Bertie Simmons retired from the Houston Independent School District in 1995, having held tenures at virtually all levels of the largest public school district in Texas, from the classroom to central administration.
It turned out her career was far from over.
Five years later in 2000, she came out of retirement and returned to the district to lead a turnaround at Furr High School, where on her first day an alleged gang member threw another through a plate glass window in the front of the eastside school.
“I said, ‘I must be some kind of crazy old woman to be out here thinking I could make a difference in this school,’” she later would recount.
In 17 years as principal of the school, Simmons saw the graduation rate surpass 90 percent and received a $10 million grant awarded to 10 campuses across the country in a contest pitched to reinvent high school. She died Friday following a lengthy hospitalization, daughter Paula Fendley said. She was 87.
Former students, colleagues and loved ones remembered the student-championing former principal as a woman who centered her 58 years as an educator on children and their needs; a woman who once took an exam to jail so a student who was on track to graduate but got in trouble with the law could take his final.
“She made people a priority,” Fendley said. “She would take time to talk to the parents, to the kids, and she went way beyond what typical schools would do — whatever they needed.”
Born in north Louisiana, Simmons grew up poor before running away and ending up at a university with visions of becoming a dancer, just like a relative, said Sharon Koonce, her friend of 49 years. She soon realized her 5-foot-2-or-so stature may not be that of a dancer’s when she started classes.
She wondered what she could do that would inspire others through her work and figured she should become a teacher, Koonce recounted.
Upon graduating in 1955, Simmons began her career in Louisiana, where she taught at a high school for two years before moving to Houston.
She started as an elementary teacher at HISD and within a decade was named teacher of the year by the district.
“Her students were her top priority, and she poured her energy into making sure they succeeded,” district officials said in a statement Monday. “During her tenure as principal, she successfully turned Furr High School into a high achieving school. Houston ISD mourns the loss of Bertie Simmons and sends our deepest condolences to her family.”
The district removed Simmons from her job in 2017, as it investigated allegations of grade and record manipulation at Furr. Simmons denied any wrongdoing and sued the district with two former Furr employees. Under the terms of a settlement in 2018, she resigned and received $100,000.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said he was “blessed” to have visited Simmons at Furr and witness her work firsthand.
“Dr. Bertie Simmons inspired innumerable educators, students, and Houstonians with her passionate, student and community-focused vision of an education in which any child can succeed regardless of ZIP code,” Turner said.
About a decade ago, Tamika Bartley, then a teacher development specialist for HISD, pulled up to the curb in front of the school after getting stuck in a bit of traffic on the way to a presentation. After a few minutes, a police officer ticketed her car.
Bartley ran inside, seeking help, and found Simmons teaching a class. Simmons walked out to greet her.
“I’ll take care of that ticket, you just make sure you’re teaching my teachers, and I’ll make sure they’re present until you’re done,” Bartley recalled the veteran educator telling her. “That line alone tickled me because she didn’t know me, but she knew her expectations, and she wasn’t going to accept less than.”
A few years later, Jordan Davis met Simmons while interviewing to attend Furr after moving to Houston from California. He recalled how she helped him and his mother avoid homelessness, once paying for a motel room for them, and credited her with helping him develop into a more understanding person.
“You (were) my high school principal but in my heart you were so much more than that,” Davis said in a message he wrote on social media after learning of her death. “Thanks to you there are generations of past students and staff who will hold your legacy in their heart while striving to make the world a better place.”
Juliet Stipeche, former HISD trustee and director of education for the city, met Simmons while running for school board and became her friend over the years. She recalled how Simmons not only talked to young people, but extended the respect they deserved but often did not receive.
“She just had a way of bringing out the community and the joys of education. Not the boring, critical, punitive standardized test stuff that you always hear about,” she recalled, “but the joyful, exuberant, happy, community-building component of what education — the heart of education — is, which is bringing out the passion and the love and the dreams of children.”
Simmons’ infectious inspiration did not subside, and neither did her tireless devotion to children and kindness to others, despite spending more than two weeks in the hospital before her death.
There she complimented her nurses and doctors, making others laugh and expressing her gratitude, Fendley and Koonce said. Up to the day before she passed, she was thinking about things she wanted to accomplish, they said. She was working on some children’s books that are still not finished. She then planned to write a book about a nurse assistant.
And she recently had created buttons that said, “Give hope; show kindness.”
“She thought, if people would make a commitment to being kind and giving hope, that this was something that could spread around the world,” Koonce said.
Every time someone entered her room at the hospital, she would ask Fendley and Koonce to give them a button and explain the meaning. She even sent a button down to the man running the gift shop.
Once it became clear she would not recover from her illness, Simmons handed Koonce a long list of people she wanted to call to tell them how much she loved them and appreciated their work. Receiving high levels of oxygen, she could barely speak but still could dictate who to call, and kept adding names to the list.
When medics told her she had very little time left, she shared a message that Fendley posted on her Facebook, the final line a thank you.
“I am better for having known each and every one of you.”