Prairie View president inspires at Wheatley
Simmons to kids at alma mater: ‘What you do here matters’
Phillis Wheatley High School alumna Ruth Simmons might have added another distinction to her record last week as the final Black History Month speaker at her former campus.
The Prairie View A&M University president’s alma mater is among 10 low-performing schools in the Houston Independent School District that must improve this year or risk triggering a state law that could result in campus closures or a state takeover of the district’s school board.
Wheatley, named for the famous black poet, and other longstruggling schools are concentrated in some of the city’s black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Students next year could be forced to enroll in other schools. HISD officials are working to improve academic achievement to avoid sanctions. They also have plans to respond if schools don’t meet a still-undetermined state performance target.
Simmons told the students to focus on the transformational power of hard work in any circumstance and later touted the value of neighborhood schools.
“You can be successful anywhere,” she told several hundred students and dozens of alumni in the school auditorium audience. “Worry about whether or not you are working hard, worry about whether you’re advancing, worry about whether or not you’re preparing yourselves for difficult and challenging jobs ahead.”
In 2001, Simmons became the first black Ivy League president when she was tapped to lead Brown University. She also served as president of Smith College. She left Brown in 2012 and became interim president at Prairie View last summer before being named to the role permanently in December.
‘I didn’t fit in’
Simmons is featured on a school mural with Houston’s first black members of Congress, both Wheatley alums: Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland. When she was at Wheatley, Simmons did not think she could go to college, but she earned her first degree at Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans. She later earned a master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard University. She said she never anticipated seeing a black president of an Ivy League institution and certainly never thought she would be the first.
“You don’t know where life will take you, so work hard every day — work even harder after that — for no effort is wasted if you aspire to high standards,” Simmons said.
Born in Grapeland, she was the youngest of 12 children of sharecroppers. Her family moved to Houston’s Fifth Ward when she was 7 and she enrolled in Atherton Elementary.
“It was pretty clear to me that I didn’t fit in. OK? My clothes probably looked more like somebody coming from a rural area. My hair was a mess and kids laughed at me,” she said. “I felt pretty bad about that when I was a 7-year-old that I didn’t fit in.
“Here’s what I did: I listened to my teachers. I worked in school. I kept at it relentlessly . ... I found out something very important: Whatever you’re wearing doesn’t matter. However much money you have in your pocket, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you have in here,” she said, gesturing to her forehead, “that matters.”
Simmons also offered a word about “people trying to destroy people” then obliquely commented on the potential sanctions on Wheatley.
‘Purely historic’
“There are those who believe that the single most important thing that you can do is take a test and earn a high score on a test. There’s a lot more that you can do to make your way through life successfully,” she said. “People think things are broken. Things are never broken when human beings are striving. What you do here matters. Who you are matters. People don’t have to denigrate what is here in order to achieve the best result.”
After her speech, Simmons stood outside beside Wheatley’s 1949 cornerstone to describe her reaction as “purely emotional and purely historic” to the challenges her alma mater and childhood neighborhood faces — and the possible impact on students.
“If we continue to disperse them — to uproot them from the things that they know and care about — and if we insist that communities abandon their history, abandon the things that they treasure, then that does not breed the right kind of civic spirit,” she said. “So, I hope that everything will be done to allow the good work that goes on to continue.”