The Houston Symphony is launching its annual series of free summer community family concerts throughout the Houston area, and HISD’s Booker T. Washington High School is on the list of venues.
Symphony musicians will play a program of family-friendly music celebrating composers of diverse backgrounds, ranging from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to Ravel’s Suite from Mother Goose, conducted by Robert Franz.
Thousands of Houston ISD seniors will receive their high school diplomas during 42 ceremonies at 12 locations throughout the district beginning at 7 p.m. today (May 30) and continuing through June 8. The schedule is available here.
The late philanthropists Jesse H. Jones and his wife, Mary Gibbs Jones, were stalwart believers in the power of education to improve people’s quality of life. It’s one of the reasons they founded the Jones Scholars program through the Houston Endowment in 1958, and since its inception, that organization has provided more than $94 million to young men and women to help them pay for college.
More than 300 members of the Class of 2014 received $16,000 scholarships through the program this year, and almost a third of those were from HISD schools.
HISD’s 2014 Librarian of the Year Rowena Verdin (center) with Principal Roy de la Garza (left) and School Support Officer Justin Fuentes
Rowena Verdin has been finding innovative ways to do her job since practically the minute she stepped onto the Milby High School campus. After only a year of fielding requests for copies of old yearbooks from dozens of alumni, she launched an effort to digitize them for easier access. And to entice students to read more, she set up her own version of the Red Box movie-rental kiosk in a display window, adorning popular books with bright red covers that say, “Have you ‘red’ any good books lately?”
It is these efforts and more that have earned Verdin the title of HISD’s Librarian of the Year for 2014.
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Garden Oaks Elementary students recently had a hands-on chance to learn more about science, technology, engineering and math thanks to help from Waltrip High School.
The theme of the May 22 STEM Night was “Around the World with STEM.” Students were given passports to visit four different areas. “Roboville” was one of the most popular “countries.”
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Every student at Bonham Elementary has books to read over the summer thanks to Books Between Kids. The organization stopped by the school on Monday to give each child six books.
“One of the things that’s great about distributing the books this time of year is that the kids get excited about reading,” said Sandra Alhorn, co-founder of Books Between Kids. “They’re done with testing, they’re pretty much done with school, they get their books to take home. All of a sudden they’re excited and can’t wait to go read.”
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Natalie Nelson, Michael Bennett, Brandi Latimer, Mariela Niland, Shelbi Craig
Last fall, we asked five first-year teachers to share their experiences with us through a blog called 177 Days, and over the past year, our bloggers have learned a number of valuable lessons, such as the importance of having a back-up plan (Natalie Nelson), the discovery that little things can make a big difference (Shelbi Craig), how meeting with parents can improve both their own and their students’ performance (Michael Bennett), why setting behavioral expectations early is so critical to success (Brandi Latimer), and even the importance of staying well-nourished during the day (Mariela Niland).
Now the regular academic year is coming to a close, so we asked our bloggers to share some parting words with us before they cleaned out their desks and closed up their classrooms for the summer.
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The HISD supplier diversity team collaborated with the City of Houston, Port of Houston Authority, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County to talk contracts with small businesses during May’s Workshop Wednesday hosted by the district’s business assistance office.
Students at Neff Elementary got a special surprise on Tuesday. First Book donated more than 5,000 books for students to take home and start their personal library.
“If they don’t become better readers during the summer, they will start back at a negative situation because they will have lost the ability, the concentration, the confidence that they are good readers,” said Sheila Long Armstrong, greater Houston chair of First Book, which teams up with the Disney/ABC Television Group and its owned-and-operated Houston TV station, ABC-13 (KTRK), for the program.
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Chávez High School first-year teacher Natalie Nelson is looking forward to some free time this summer, but she is also mulling over the things she will do differently next year. Nelson is one of five first-year HISD teachers who were invited to blog about their experiences on the district’s website. The blog, called “177 Days” for the number of days a teacher works each school year, chronicled the ups and downs of new teachers working in a large urban school district.
Nelson teaches government and economics to seniors, so she is saying goodbye to most of her students as they prepare to enter the next phase of their lives. As a softball coach, however, she has returning students with whom she has bonded, and she is looking forward to seeing them next year. Being a coach made sense for Nelson, because she was a year-round athlete herself in high school, playing five sports during her four years there. “Coaching is a huge commitment on top of carrying a full load of teaching with two preps,” she wrote on her blog, “but it has given me a larger connection to the student body and school community.”
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