FINAL TEST
Students at an at-risk Houston high school battle extraordinary odds for one last chance at graduation
Chapter one of four
On the first day of school, the fears swirl inside Diana Del Pilar’s brain. Deep inside her mind — behind her thick, black bangs, behind her horn-rimmed Tiffany & Co. glasses, behind the ever-deepening worry-crease that splits her forehead in two — dread builds over the uncertain future of the lastchance school where she serves as principal: low enrollment. A massive budget shortfall at the district level, spawning rumors of drastic cuts. New state standards. Rising fear of deportation among her students’ families.
She can hear the fears growing louder. But she can’t tell her students this.
Instead, Del Pilar bustles through Middle College High School at HCC Gulfton. She balances an open laptop in one hand and a half-eaten banana in the other as she zips through her school, which occupies half a hallway on the top floor of Houston Community College’s two-story Gulfton branch.
She promises to fix students’ schedules and asks what she’s missed in their lives since she last saw them at orientation 2½ weeks ago, on Aug. 25, as the first bursts of Hurricane Harvey’s rain splattered against the school’s windows. The storm largely spared Gulfton, but she makes plans to reach out to families who were less fortu-
nate than others.
Another worry to add to the list. But she smiles when she sees Daniel Carbajal, a senior, at the beginning of third period.
Third-period pre-calculus is Daniel’s first class of the day. He strolls into Room 215 with a fresh haircut, new Air Force Ones and the black jacket his girlfriend likes. He is a little early, as always, and has his pick of the seats. So he slides his nearly 6-foot-tall frame into a black chair at the front of the class.
Two years ago, he never would have chosen this seat: up front with his eyes on the teacher and his laptop open and ready. But Two Years Ago Daniel is in the past.
Del Pilar knows kids like Daniel don’t always get a fair shot. Realistically, the odds say, his chance of success is dwarfed by the likelihood of failure.
As a Latino, first-generation American whose parents never attended college, living in highcrime, high-poverty Gulfton, he checks enough boxes on a rubric calculating causes for disenfranchisement in the nation’s public education system to score a BINGO.
Those same odds were once stacked against Del Pilar, who came to America from Mexico when she was a toddler and struggled to learn English in her first few years of school.
Maybe that’s why he’s a favorite of hers. Or maybe it’s his easy smile, his please-and-thank-yous, the way he always walks his girlfriend to her class on the other side of the hallway, carrying her purse for her on the way.
Daniel is fine with listening to the teacher lay out rules for the entire 50-minute period. Rules give him structure. And adhering to them gives him hope that he can overcome the shadow of his biggest hurdle: Daniel spent most of 2016 behind bars for aggravated robbery. Being incarcerated as a teen? That reduces a kid’s odds of graduating by a third.
Like many other Middle College kids with a record, Daniel’s arrest happened while hanging out with a group of Southwest Cholos, a high-profile gang in Gulfton. Daniel was never a member of the gang. But his cousin was, and Daniel often hung out with a crew of Cholos he’s known since childhood.
It’s a natural pattern in a part of town that offers kids the streets as their best playground option. Breaking natural patterns isn’t easy. But if Daniel sticks to the plan he and Del Pilar have created, his full course load this semester will not only catch him up on the time he missed while in juvie, he will be able to graduate in January — a whole semester early.
As Del Pilar watches Daniel on the first day of his senior year, tuning out the baby crying in the back row of his math class as he diligently takes notes, she already sees glimmers of his potential.
Daniel isn’t the only student on her mind this first morning of school. There’s also Dakota Koppenol, one of the most gifted students who has ever attended Middle College. A 17year-old who has switched schools more times than he can count since his mother’s suicide, Dakota continues to sell himself short, despite all his brilliance in writing and art.
And then there’s Carmen Zuniga, sitting at a desk not far from Daniel, in a pink, flowery shirt and black pants, her hair carefully straightened. Del Pilar tries not to be surprised to see Carmen, who often misses class to take care of her younger siblings. Maybe this year will be different for Carmen, the principal hopes.
Middle College exists to help kids like Dakota, Carmen and Daniel succeed. On average, students enter with a fifthgrade reading level and a long history of failing state tests used to measure not only their performance but that of their schools.
Some come in with infants and toddlers in their arms, others with gang tattoos and criminal records. Some have been kicked out of their district-assigned high schools; others have dropped out. Most have heard “no” so many times, they’ve forgotten what “yes” sounds like, until they hear it from Del Pilar’s lips.
As a school of choice, Middle College is often a last chance for these students. That’s the whole aim of a “middle college” — a small-school model brought to Houston in 2014, after then-superintendent Terry Grier had success with the concept in his previous district in North Carolina.
Houston Independent School District launched two middle colleges as a partnership with Houston Community College in the 2014-15 school year: one at HCC’s Gulfton location, where Del Pilar is principal, and another at HCC’s Fraga campus on the city’s southeast side.
Classes are smaller, with 15 students apiece, and flexible schedules accommodate work and child care. Students get free lunch, and accelerated programs can help a 17-year-old freshman graduate in a year or so.
The point, Del Pilar says, is to remove obstacles that have held students back, freeing them to succeed.
Over the course of this school year, this takes shape in a variety of ways: Del Pilar calls Ubers for kids when their bus passes run dry; piles students in her SUV for Jack in the Box lunch runs during Saturday makeup sessions; and clears out the teeny-tiny supply closet in the school office so moms have a private — if cramped — space to change diapers between classes.
It’s too early for the district to determine whether Middle College is a success; that requires at least five years’ worth of data. Still, there is a sense that the few hundred kids who have graduated since the school opened wouldn’t have been able to do so in the district’s traditional high schools. Middle College has consistently met state standards, so administrators note that the school shows promise. But as the state plans more ambitious goals for coming years, questions linger about whether the school can
reach them in time, casting doubt over its future.
Diana Del Pilar’s knuckles hit the door in front of her, an apartment where she desperately hopes to find a missing student. Silence. She didn’t cross the city to this home in Gulfton on the last Saturday in September to give up after one knock. So she squares her body to the fadedbrick garden apartment. Then she does what she always coaches her students to do in the face of a closed door: She knocks again. Louder. After a moment, her student’s father appears, welcomes her into the cramped apartment and offers her a rolling office chair. She sits, opens a manilla folder to take notes and leans forward, pushing onto the balls of her feet.
“Where is your daughter?” she asks in Spanish.
Barely ever home, the father tells her, his voice laced with defeat. Over his shoulder, a soggy bowl of chocolate-puff cereal grows warmer next to a stack of diapers.
The man’s daughter was part of Del Pilar’s inaugural class at Middle College in 2014. They’ve battled over attendance that whole time — even before the student became a teen mom. Since then, she’s dropped out and re-enrolled so many times Del Pilar has lost count. But she hasn’t lost hope. Del Pilar looks the man in the eye and preaches the importance of a high school diploma for a young mom. How close his daughter is to graduating. Again. How much it would hurt to see his daughter drop out. Again.
He nods like he knows. Like he’s tried. He’ll tell his daughter Del Pilar stopped by, he promises. But when the conversation ends, the principal senses her words may be wasted.
She tips her head to the sky as she wends her way out of the maze-like apartment complex, back to her Mazda CX-9 across the street at Amigo’s Food Mart.
“It’s so frustrating when the only thing keeping someone from graduating is themself and their friends,” she groans.
But she quickly regroups. Being frustrated gets you nowhere, she tells herself. Doing something about it does.
“I can do this,” she thinks. She’s been trying to convince herself of this a lot lately, during the six- and seven-day workweeks that could soon break her.
She starts her SUV and checks her folder for the next address on her list.
Most principals don’t regularly conduct home visits on Saturdays. This really should be a job for a truancy officer — just another on a long list of positions Del Pilar has had to chisel off her budget this year. And if she can’t persuade enough kids today to return to school, she’ll face even more cuts. Deep ones.
When Del Pilar opened Middle College for the 2017-18 school year on Sept. 11 — two weeks late, thanks to Hurricane Harvey — 111 students showed up. She hadn’t just hoped for more. She needed more. Her budget projected 164, and for each student under that total when her enrollment numbers are due to the school district on “Snapshot Day” in late October, the school’s budget will shrink by $3,300.
Del Pilar’s not a math whiz. But as a divorced mother with three daughters, the 45-yearold knows how to fit a too-small budget to her big-time needs. She’s spent the two weeks since school began rattling off the stakes as if she counts them at night instead of sheep: This kind of budget shortfall could mean cutting three full-time teacher positions in a school that has only seven to begin with.
Not an option. Not at her school, where 90 percent of kids are deemed “at-risk” by federal guidelines. Where each child needs more, not less.
Common sense says she can’t dedicate whole days to this kind of quixotic quest when she has so many other demands: raising student achievement, managing her staff, meeting moving state targets and her own basic human needs, such as eight hours of sleep at night.
But common sense was designed for common situations. And hers is a school full of special cases. So she keeps driving.
She backs out of Amigo’s and drives over the sun-cracked streets, past the washaterias and pawn shops until she reaches the next apartment complex of the day. It takes 10 minutes to find the right front door. Finally, she knocks as an empty Fritos bag catches the wind like a kite and rolls over the asphalt, brushing the back of her sneaker.
She takes a breath and prepares to begin her pitch from the top for a different family — hoping for different results.
When Del Pilar looks at Dakota, she sees unlimited potential. If only Dakota would see it for himself.
“I don’t know, maybe I’ll just give up,” Dakota says one morning as he sits in the reception area outside the principal’s office. It’s early October — a few days after Del Pilar’s weekendwarrior routine and nearly a month into the semester.
Usually, Dakota uses his free periods to take online classes through a program called Apex. But today, the senior is staring at his phone screen as he attempts to navigate the University of Houston’s admissions website. He’s been gathering transcripts and writing essays for weeks. Now, the application just needs a few final touches. But the website keeps churning up obstacles.
He rakes his hands through his hair in frustration. It’s bright blue today. This is his fourth hair color since coming to Middle College last school year. Purple. Blue. Red. Always with a tiny hint of black near the roots.
Dakota’s been cutting and dying his own hair for years. It’s an extension of his creative personality, which also prompts his sketching and flair for poetry. But Dakota also excels at other subjects. All subjects, really. He’s one of a handful of Middle College students who carries the district’s “gifted and talented” label. Still, Dakota isn’t in love with high school.
Even at Middle College, where everyone is constantly battling uphill, he’ll hear classmates complain about their parents butting in for no reason. And he’ll roll his eyes and think, “At least you have parents,” before catching that ugly thought and tucking it away again.
His dad died when Dakota was a toddler. And in the years after his mother committed suicide at 52, Dakota bounced from one aunt or cousin to another. No one understood him, he felt. And no one let him be himself. At his final stop, with an aunt in a small Hill Country town, he refused to go to Bible study or dress the way his aunt wanted. He drew a self-portrait of him staring out the window — all punk hair and thick eyebrows. The window reflected back the vision of him his aunt wanted: the female body he was born into — a girl named Shelby, smiling through her makeup.
He couldn’t be Shelby anymore. He had to be Dakota.
So he ran away, back to Houston to live with his stepfather, Dan Monroe, in the most normal situation he could salvage. When he heard about Middle College from a friend, he took a chance, hoping the school could help him make up for lost time.
Now, he’s made it up. And he’s on the cusp of accomplishing even greater feats.
Getting into the University of Houston would be huge — not just for Dakota but for the school. In the four years since Middle College opened, fewer than five students have gone on to four-year schools. Dakota’s success could be a beacon. But first, he must get in. And on this October morning, as he sits in a leather rolling chair outside the principal’s office, that seems like a long shot. Even for him.
“It’s saying I need to create an account,” he says, his frustration building. He cracks his neck loudly.
He thought he already did that.
Dakota’s fingers fly over his phone screen as he tries to guess what his log-in information might be. But he can’t crack the code. There’s a help icon near the bottom of the screen, but that brings him to a second screen, which also requests his log-in credentials.
“I can’t do this,” he says, slamming his phone down on his lap.
His application is maybe 10 minutes from completion, but he gives up. At a larger high school, he’d be able to walk down the hall to a college-and-career counselor. But Del Pilar had to short that position in her Moneyball budget. There’s no