Category Archives: District II – Kathy Blueford-Daniels

Two alternative certification grads discuss what makes HISD’s program superior

Physics teacher Adeeb Barqawi works with his students at Kashmere High School.

Physics teacher Adeeb Barqawi works with his students at Kashmere High School.

The one thing most participants in HISD’s Alternative Certification Program have in common is that they did not originally plan to pursue a career in education. However, the desire to be a positive influence on children and the greater Houston community eventually brought them to the classroom, and to HISD.

Recently, we sat down with Cory Bates, a bilingual Pre-K teacher at Stevens Elementary School, and Adeeb Barqawi, a physics teacher at Kashmere High School, to reflect on their experiences in the district’s Alternative Certification Program, also known as the Effective Teacher Fellowship (ETF), and why they feel HISD’s program is superior to others. The deadline to apply to the next Effective Teacher Fellowship cohort is Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015.  Continue reading →

Student Congress giving high school kids a voice in their own education

Speaker of the Congress Zaakir Tameez (lower left) poses with members of the Student Congress at the Dec. 11 Board of Education meeting.

Speaker of the Congress Zaakir Tameez (lower left) poses with members of the Student Congress at the Dec. 11 Board of Education meeting.

A group of juniors and seniors from four HISD campuses is on a mission to give their peers a voice in public education—and they have created a new Student Congress to do it.

More than a dozen students from Bellaire, Carnegie Vanguard, Lamar, and Yates high schools founded the congress last spring, after participating in senior Zaakir Tameez’s Texas Performance Standards Project at Carnegie Vanguard.

“We were originally called ‘Our Shared Future’ and talked about current events,” explains Outreach Chair Amy Fan, now a junior at Bellaire High School. “But as we met with city leaders from all over Houston, our conversations would constantly lead back to education. Yet the only people with whom we could share our critiques was each other.” Continue reading →

Vanguard magnet programs challenge students with rigorous courses

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In the Vanguard magnet program at Black Middle School, students are taking advanced courses such as biology, geometry, and creative writing. They’re working on their own experiments, researching history on a local and national scale, and even writing their first novels.

“Our students are taking high-school level courses in the seventh and eighth grades,” said Katelyn Riley, the school’s Vanguard coordinator. “Our sixth-graders are learning seventh-grade math, and we have students taking geometry and biology as eighth-graders.” 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 →

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 →

Luby’s surprises student with $1,000 check for demonstrating great character

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The restaurant chain Luby’s surprised a student with a $1,000 check on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at  Mickey Leland College Preparatory Academy for Young Men as an award for demonstrating outstanding character. Continue reading →

Cheer on your favorite teams at annual girls’ basketball tournament 

Spectators can catch the hoops action from Thursday, Dec. 4, through Saturday

If you’re in the mood for some exciting full-court action this weekend, check out one (or more!) of the games in HISD’s 31st annual girls’ basketball tournament.

The match-ups will take place at Chávez, North Forest, Reagan, and Westside high schools, as well as the Wilkins Pavilion located on the Forest Brook Middle School campus. Individual game tickets cost $4 each, but a $10 tournament pass will grant admission to all of them.  Continue reading →

High school students lead STEM lesson for elementary, middle students

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Booker T. Washington High School teacher Dr. Nghia Le and his students recently led hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities for students and parents at Garden Oaks Montessori.

Students collaborated in their efforts to design the perfect landing vehicle for their precious cargo – an egg. Students worked together in small groups and learned that sometimes failure is part of the process for scientists who learn from practice in order to perfect a design.  Continue reading →

Students investigate juvenile crime scene for geographic information systems presentation

Students at the High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice collected data and created maps during an investigation of juvenile crimes committed in the Houston metropolitan area for a presentation at Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day in the City of Houston.

Students from HSLECJ and Houston Academy for International Studies in addition to Lee, Waltrip, and Wheatley high schools participated in the grassroots effort on Nov. 21 at Texas Southern University to learn about geography and the uses of GIS in society. HSLECJ students were the only group to make a GIS presentation at the event. Continue reading →

Strong classroom support promotes success for HISD dual language expansion

When Houston ISD doubled its dual language programs to include 28 schools this August, that was just the beginning of district’s commitment to making sure students on those campuses become bilingual and biliterate.

Representatives of HISD’s Multilingual Programs Department have visited each school to evaluate instructional practices and to offer support for principals and teachers to embed language instruction into strong academic content. Native Spanish-speakers learn English, and English speakers gain a second language through immersion. Continue reading →