Help HISD get dropouts back in school by volunteering for the 2014 Grads Within Reach walk.
This year’s event will be held at 24 high schools from 8 a.m. to noon on Sat., Sept. 6, 2014. Volunteers will be placed in teams and fan out across the city, based on the school to which they are assigned, and visit the last known address of students who dropped out or didn’t show up for the first weeks of school. Continue reading
Performing manual labor outdoors in July is probably not the way most Houstonians would choose to spend their time, but for some HISD students, there’s nowhere else they’d rather be.
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High school students looking to boost their PSAT scores tested their math and reading skills against peers Monday in a challenging game of fill-in-the-blank-sentences, vocabulary connotations and math problems. Continue reading
More than a dozen students from six HISD high schools are $16,000 closer to achieving their dreams of higher education, thanks to an organization founded by the descendant of an HISD school’s namesake and her husband. Continue reading
Neff ES student Leticia Hernandez is all smiles after reading her April pen pal letter from Westside HS student Annie Edick.
When Neff Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Stefani Patch first coordinated a pen pal exchange between her students and some of their older counterparts last school year, she had no idea that it would result in both parties improving their literacy skills.
But participating students at Westside High School were forced to bring their “A game” to the table once they saw the caliber of their younger correspondents’ letters.
“My students were blown away by the quality of writing from the younger students,” said Westside High School teacher Donna Patch (who is also Stefani’s mother). “It challenged them to be more creative and to focus on their own writing.”
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Teachers at eight HISD high schools are preparing their coursework for the upcoming year a bit differently than they have in the past. Campus teams from Chavez, Eastwood Academy, Furr, Lee, Milby, Reagan, Sterling, and Westside are refining plans to teach core subjects through project-based learning — a part of the district’s commitment to the Linked Learning approach. These campus teams shared their plans at the Linked Learning Summer Institute during June.
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Educators from eight HISD high schools — Chavez, Eastwood Academy, Furr, Lee, Milby, Reagan, Sterling, and Westside — are spending their summer designing industry-themed programs of study intended to make learning exciting, challenging and relevant to real-world experiences. The program, known as Linked Learning, will help students build a strong foundation that leads to fulfilling and successful college and career experiences.
“It’s amazing. It’s awesome,” said Linked Learning superintendent Adam Stephens.
Linked Learning pathways differ from Texas House Bill 5’s mandated pathways. Continue reading
Scholarship offers and financial aid awards for the Class of 2014 are still coming in, but this year’s graduating seniors have already shattered last year’s record by more than $69 million.
They didn’t win any official prizes at the recent Cooking Up Change competition, but for the three Westside High School students who participated in the event, the experience of making it to the national finals in Washington, D.C. was its own reward.
“It’s a huge achievement, not only for our school, but for our state,” said student Barrosha Boykin, who participated in the finals on June 9 with fellow rising seniors Santiago Castañeda and Andrew Winkle.
Scholarship offers and financial aid awards for the Class of 2014 are still coming in, but this year’s graduating seniors have already shattered last year’s record by nearly $50 million.