Yearly Archives: 2014

Engineers, college professor, and even a cowboy share love of reading with elementary students

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Reading aloud to students is widely recognized as the single most important activity for developing literacy. And if that reader also can serve as a positive male role model, even better.

This past fall, Anderson Elementary Dual Language School launched M.A.L.E. (Men and Literacy Evolving), an initiative in which male members of the community come to the school to read to students on the last Monday of each month. Anderson Principal Roslyn Stiles Vaughn envisioned the program after a member of her church expressed his desire to make a difference by reading to students. Continue reading →

Teacher attributes his own ‘value-added’ growth to principal’s guidance

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When Tiffany Chenier became the new principal of McNamara Elementary School back in 2006, one of the first things she did was analyze her student data. That led to a series of “serious conversations” with teacher Pang-Cheng Liu, whose student passing rate at the time was only around 50 percent. Continue reading →

Spring 2015 testing date changes for STAAR math test for grades 5, 8

Texas Commissioner of Education Michael Williams has notified Texas school districts and charters that the spring testing date for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) grades 5 and 8 mathematics will be shifted for the 2014–2015 school year.

The spring testing date for STAAR grades 5 and 8 mathematics will change from March 30, 2015, to April 20, 2015. Continue reading →

Students learn what it takes to run the City of Houston

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Twenty-one seniors from Barbara Jordan High School for Careers were recognized Tuesday, Dec. 9 by the City of Houston for their commitment to job shadowing with more than 10 city departments to get a comprehensive look at what it takes to provide services to residents of the nation’s fourth largest city. Continue reading →

HISD employees donate more than $309,000 to Combined Charities

Top contributors saluted for Combined Charities participation

Top contributors saluted for Combined Charities participation

HISD’s Combined Charities Campaign concluded on Oct. 31 this year, and when all of the pledges were tallied, district employees had contributed more than $309,000 to support their favorite causes.

Continue reading →

Day 3: Middle school students connect creatively with Hour of Code

Eighth-graders at Fonville Middle School joined the districtwide coding challenge for the Hour of Code with a tutorial in programming. This is the second year that Fonville students have participated in the international initiative designed to generate awareness about computer programming. [su_vimeo url=”http://vimeo.com/114140296″ responsive=”no”]

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HISD student wins grand prize worth $25K in Microsoft’s Bing Summer Story Challenge

Park Place students won big in the national Bing Summer Story Challenge. From left to right are Adrian Pizarro, Johana Contreras Castillo, and grand prize winner Shaun Toliao.

Park Place students won big in the national Bing Summer Story Challenge. From left to right are Adrian Pizarro, Johana Contreras Castillo, and grand prize winner Shaun Toliao.

Third-grader Shaun Toliao will be taking his family to Hawaii, just for writing a story about what he did last summer. The Park Place Elementary School student was the grand prize winner of the Bing in the Classroom Summer Story Challenge, a digital storytelling contest sponsored by Microsoft.

He also won a Surface Pro Tablet and other tech prizes, as well as the opportunity to take classes in digital literacy while in Hawaii. Toliao’s prize is worth a grand total of $25,000. Continue reading →

Students explore similarities of medicine, energy, aerospace at Pumps & Pipes

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Forty HISD students experienced what it would be like to be a surgeon and an engineer at  Pumps and Pipes, where thousands of medicine, energy and aerospace professionals and researchers exchanged ideas and explored crossover technologies in each industry.

“The aerospace, energy and medical fields have different techniques, but they basically use the same concepts,” said Energy Institute High School sophomore Shawn Attar.

Students from Energy, Baylor College of Medicine Academy at Ryan, DeBakey High School for Health Professions, Furr High School, Kashmere High School, Lamar High School, M.C. Williams Middle School, and South Early College High School attended the annual event Monday, Dec. 8 at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. The event is organized by ExxonMobil, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center, University of Houston, and NASA. Continue reading →

Teaching language arts helps one educator publish his first book

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When Mark Dostert was hired as a “children’s attendant” at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center back in 1997, he didn’t realize that meant he would actually be serving as an unarmed guard of the facility’s inmates.

But the seventh-grade English language arts teacher, now in his eleventh year at HISD’s Johnston Middle School, said the year-long experience in Chicago taught him some valuable lessons about working with at-risk youth—and now he is sharing those lessons with other educators. Continue reading →