The three-bedroom apartment went from empty to furnished in 90 minutes, thanks to Gallery Furniture, Bethel’s Heavenly Hands, Harris County Youth Services, Westbury High School, and HISD’s Homeless Education Office. Melissa Smith and her seven children had been evicted from their apartment, and with no place to go, were sleeping outside recently on a cold, rainy night. A compassionate neighbor, Virginia Robinson, took them in, fed them, and gave them a place to sleep. “It hurt my heart to think of them out there in the cold,” said Robinson. “I had to do something.”
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Houston Endowment to release remaining $3 million in Apollo funds to HISD
Houston Endowment informed the Houston Independent School District this week that it will release a $3 million payment for the district’s Apollo school turnaround program in January.
The Foundation deferred the final payment on its three-year, $6 million grant to the HISD Foundation pending its review of the project’s third year report by Dr. Roland Fryer of Harvard University.
Don’t let students take a vacation from learning
Beginning Monday, HISD students have a two-week holiday from school – but don’t let it be a two-week holiday from learning. Below are some tips from HISD’s Family and Community Engagement Department to keep your child’s mind active over the break and ready to start school again in 2014.
What it means if your student’s report card has an ‘NG’
When HISD parents from grades K-12 receive report cards on Jan. 10, they may be finding a new notation – “NG” – that blocks the grade from being seen because of poor attendance.
NG isn’t a reflection of failure – in fact the grade may be passing – but under expanded state requirements for school attendance, the student didn’t put in enough time in class to receive a grade in it.
“Excessive, unexcused absences,” is the official explanation parents will see – meaning the student was missing 10 percent or more of the time the class met. A grade will actually be assigned and recorded by HISD, but it will, in effect, be masked on the report card.
Joint venture a win-win for two companies doing business with HISD
HISD Team Lead for Supplier Diversity Bernard Willingham shared a success story Tuesday on Global Momentum Construction, a minority-owned business that partnered with a global construction firm to land a HISD building contract. Continue reading
Top hoopsters hit the courts in 74th annual HISD tourney
Thirty-one of the Houston area’s best prep teams will begin three days of action Thursday in the 74th annual HISD Boys Basketball Tournament at nine district locations – and they’ll combine play with holiday giving.
Fans bringing two nonperishable food items and one unwrapped toy will gain free admission, with no re-entry permitted. The toys will go to the U.S. Marines Toys for Tots Drive, and the food will benefit the Houston Food Bank. Collection points will be located at each site for those who want to contribute additional items.
Voice of experience: Successful 1:1 school district praises PowerUp
HISD’s implementation of the PowerUp one-to-one laptop initiative is getting rave reviews from a North Carolina school district which successfully implemented a similar program six years ago. A team of educators from the Mooresville Graded School District recently visited classrooms at three HISD campuses which distributed student laptops in October.
“One of the things we were very impressed with was the rather extensive use of laptops for instruction in the classrooms,” said Steve Mauney, executive director for secondary instruction at the Mooresville Graded School District. “That is something we didn’t expect to see at the schools only two months after deployment.”
HISD Police Chief Dotson to retire in new year; Mock named as new chief
HISD Chief of Police Jimmy Dotson, left, will retire in January, and will be succeeded by now-Assistant Chief of Police Robert Mock, right.
When HISD Police Chief Jimmy Dotson broke the news of his retirement to his department a month ago, he told the officers that after five years, the time had come for him to leave the district.
“We have worked very hard as a department to get to where we are today,” said Dotson, whose last day with the district will be Jan. 31. “But it is time for me to go. Everything is about timing, and the time is just right.”
On Tuesday, Dotson, 66, was excited about the announcement of his successor – HISD Assistant Chief of Police Robert Mock, who will be sworn in as the district’s new police chief on Jan. 6 at a 2 p.m. ceremony at the High School for Law Enforcement & Criminal Justice. Continue reading
Historic Milby High School yearbooks going digital
Milby HS alumna Florence Schillaci (née Waters) holds up an iPad with a photo of herself on it from the newly digitized 1936 yearbook, The Buffalo. (HISD/Dave Einsel)
Librarian Rowena Verdin has come up with an innovative way of handling the many requests she receives each year for copies of old yearbooks—she is taking Milby High School digital.
Verdin began digitizing the school’s old yearbooks in 2010, starting with two editions from each decade. “Right now, only the 1925 and the 1936 editions are online, but we’ve got about 15 of them in digital format,” she said. “We’ve even got one from 1920, back when Milby was still known as Harrisburg High School.”
HISD students outperforming peers in large urban districts
Nation’s Report Card shows gains in math across all student groups since 2003; reading scores unchanged from 2007 to 2013
The Houston Independent School District performed better than most large urban school districts in math, showing increases across all student groups compared to 2003, while reading scores remained unchanged, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report released Dec. 18, 2013 (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/).