New Sunrise Center gives homeless HISD students a safe place to land

On Monday, Oct. 9, HISD christened the Cornerstone Sunrise Center, the second of a proposed seven community centers created in partnership with existing community assistance organizations to fill specific needs for HISD students, families, and community members.

The Cornerstone Sunrise Center is located at the Star of Hope Cornerstone Community Transformational Campus, and together with Star of Hope and Buckner International will serve homeless community members by providing housing, career development, counseling, health and safety resources, and more.

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Hispanic heritage and history lives on in HISD campus namesakes – Week Four

Hispanic Heritage Month runs Sept. 15 through Oct. 15.

District wide, Hispanic descendants are honored by having schools carry their namesake allowing their rich history to live on.

HISD has 22 schools that recognize the contributions of Hispanic civic and community leaders who range from educators and civil servants to local restaurateurs, newscasters, Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, and even Nobel Prize-winners.

Each week throughout Hispanic Heritage Month, we’ve been featuring schools who carry on these important legacies.

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Middle school folklórico troupe brings traditional folk dance to generations of students

Burbank Middle School is nearly a century old, but has never been the kind of institution to stay stuck in the past. Expanding alongside the growing city of Houston, Burbank evolved from a small school in an undeveloped, rural farming area into an inner-city school with a growing student body to match. With all that growth and change, current students at Burbank Middle School probably wouldn’t expect that they’d have much in common with previous generations of Burbank scholars. They certainly wouldn’t guess that they participate in the very same after school dance troupe, under the tutelage of the very same teacher, as Burbank students did nearly 40 years ago.

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Hartsfield ES students embark on underwater drone project

On the journey to Destination 2035, HISD educators are looking for ways to incorporate innovative lessons in technology-focused core competencies. At Hartsfield Elementary School, students are learning with underwater drones.

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HISD students use STEM concepts to design spy gadgets for special Netflix events

What do you get when you combine a hit movie franchise, a box of crayons, and a cafeteria full of inventive fifth graders? If you didn’t say “gadgets designed to save the world,” then you’re not thinking like a Spy Kid.

Students at several HISD elementary schools were treated to a preview of the new Netflix movie “Spy Kids: Armageddon” and challenged to design their own spy gadget with the hope that the exercise will serve as a gateway to an interest in STEM learning.

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Hispanic heritage and history lives on in HISD campus namesakes – Week Three

Hispanic Heritage Month runs Sept. 15 through Oct. 15.

District wide, Hispanic descendants are honored by having schools carry their namesake allowing their rich history to live on.

HISD has 22 schools that recognize the contributions of Hispanic civic and community leaders who range from educators and civil servants to local restaurateurs, newscasters, Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, and even Nobel Prize-winners.

We invite you to visit our blog each week throughout Hispanic Heritage Month as we will feature more schools who carry on these important legacies.

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HISD high school students host first ever TEDx Youth event

Driven by a passion to enlighten young minds about the world of business and initiate their own socially impactful ventures, two HISD high school students organized TEDx Holt St Youth on Saturday, Sept. 9, at The Ion Houston, drawing an audience of more than 100 attendees.

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HISD North and Central Divisions help students re-engage and return to school

Over the holiday weekend, teachers and administrators from 10 HISD high schools hit the streets in Houston’s North and Central Divisions hoping to connect with the community and re-engage students who did not return to school this fall.

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Chávez HS students blast off toward national rocketry competition

The casual observer might never guess that the students who gather after school in Dr. Maqsuda Afroz’s science classroom at César E. Chávez High School are anything but ordinary high schoolers. They gossip and smack-talk and speculate about the future, most of them seniors with one foot out the door. Few would guess that these “average high schoolers” are in fact literal rocket scientists.

The Chávez Rocketry Club, headed by Afroz, spends two afternoons a week (and sometimes lunch periods or whatever scraps of free time they can get) designing and engineering model rockets for an international competition, The American Rocketry Challenge.

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