H-E-B district starts students early on the path to college and beyond
Third-grader Marcos Salcido uses data to explain his progress at Harrison Lane Elementary School.
“This shows the lessons we did this week,” Salcido said, paging through a folder where he charts his test scores and keeps notes about his academic strengths and areas where he needs to improve.
“We’ve been working on poetry,” said Salcido, a student in teacher Cyndi Lorton’s English-social studies class. “We had to tell how many lines there were and what the rhyming words were. And the theme. The theme is what you take away from it.”
In the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district, students get an early start on planning for life beyond high school. It begins with teaching elementary school students to set goals and document their own progress.
Teachers and administrators said early preparation is one reason the district received a “post-secondary readiness” designation from the Texas Education Agency for the 2014-15 school year. H-E-B was one of 24 districts in the state to earn the distinction. The districts are noted in the state’s accountability ratings.
“There’s no magic formula,” said Lydia Martin, deputy superintendent of educational operations for the H-E-B district. “We have a really tight curriculum, and teachers that engage students with rigor and relevance in their lessons. The students monitor their own data and buy into the fact that they are responsible for their own learning. The students can articulate where their strengths are and where they need to work. It’s pretty powerful.”
The state considers test scores and other factors to gauge how well students are prepared for success after graduation.
“Post-secondary readiness is really looking at students achieving at a high level so that when they reach junior high, and when they reach the high school level, they have many avenues available to them,” said Darrell Brown, H-E-B’s director of curriculum.
In H-E-B, success might mean taking International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement courses in high school to prepare to attend college. Or it might mean earning a certification from one of the programs at the district’s Gene A. Buinger Career & Technical Education Academy.
H-E-B and Carroll were the only two area districts to earn the post-secondary readiness distinction, of more than 1,200 school districts and charter schools statewide.
The Carroll school district is in Southlake, where just 2.1 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. In H-E-B, many students come from families with limited resources, and 53 percent are economically disadvantaged.
H-E-B maintains that all students can achieve, even those lacking family support or resources.
“Whether a parent is the most supportive or not, it’s not an excuse,” Martin said. “We get the children where they need to be so they are ready to go to college or do something else after they graduate.”
‘An absolute master’
At Harrison Lane Elementary, college logos are posted on the cafeteria walls to remind students of where teachers and other staffers earned their degrees. The mascot is a bulldog, so the school holds “pup” rallies to cheer for honor-roll students and celebrate high marks on test scores. Seventy-five percent of students at the school are economically disadvantaged.
“I want to get all A’s,” said third-grader Macaria Smith. She plans to concentrate on “taking my time and writing more notes” to reach her goal.
Lorton is modest about her ability to inspire students, but others are quick to praise her.
“She is an absolute master,” said Christal Hollinger, an assistant principal at Harrison Lane. “She’s so good at building relationships with the students. She really pulls them in.”
Lorton said she is “addicted” to studying research-based teaching techniques she can use in her classroom.
A book by educator Ron Clark, Move Your Bus, talks about different types of achievers — runners, joggers, walkers and riders, she said.
“Someone asked, ‘Are you a runner?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not. But I want to be one,’ ” Lorton said.
Her teaching approach is fast-paced and high-energy. She uses scavenger hunts or “Minute to Win It” games to get students moving and excited about learning. Often, she stands on a chair while she teaches, as a way to grab her students’ attention.
“Sometimes the more novelty there is, the better the attention span,” said Karen Miller, H-E-B’s coordinator of quality learning.
Many options for students
The district’s push for high achievement starts even earlier than third grade.
“It starts in pre-K, and from the time they’re in kindergarten, the students can pull up their data and tell you what their goals are and how they’re doing,” Hollinger said.
Beyond the flash and fun in the classroom is a curriculum built on state standards and brain-based research.
“We write the curriculum ourselves, and we build in the rigor and relevance that is necessary,” Martin said. “The curriculum is very standardized across the entire district.”
The district’s 17.6 percent mobility rate requires grade levels to teach the same material at the same time. Students who move from one school to another are usually within two or three days of what they were learning, Brown said.
All of it is designed so that by the time students reach high school, they have a strong foundation.
For college-bound students, there are Advanced Placement and International Baccaulareate programs. But H-E-B is unique in the range of career and technology programs it offers. Many of the programs are housed at the Buinger Academy.
This is not the technical and career education of decades past.
“Career and technology has really changed,” said Brown. “There was a time when students were taking career and technology courses because they were not going to pursue a degree. That really changed, and it started around 2006. There are so many careers out there — like engineering — that require so much knowledge for students to be accepted into some of the high-quality programs.”
Careers in public safety also have more requirements than what was expected in years past, he said.
“Maybe they want to pursue a degree in law enforcement or something as a fireman,” Brown said. “There are more requirements for these jobs than there used to be.”
Courses are offered in court systems, forensic science, principles of public safety and law enforcement.
“They have a little courtroom over there,” Brown said. The program’s mock courtroom features a judge’s stand and a raised jury box.
‘Exposed to the concepts’
Education, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), hospitality, information technology (IT), transportation, architecture and medical sciences are among the many other programs offered at the Buinger Academy.
Megan Dickson, 17, a senior, said she is taking an anatomy course at Buinger because she plans to become an OB-GYN doctor.
“It’s really cool,” she said. “I’ve never taken classes here until this year. Last semester, I took medical terminology to get myself exposed to all of the words I knew I was going to be working with.”
Dickson will also have the chance to work inside a doctor’s office.
“I’ll get to go to an OB-GYN office and spend four days a week there and learn with them,” she said. “I’ll be able to do stuff with them — check blood pressure and vitals and things like that.”
During a recent classroom lesson at the Buinger Academy, anatomy teacher Janet Williamson discussed how DNA plays a role in the development of diseases. She told students how sickle-cell anemia develops and how it appears when viewed through a microscope.
The lesson hit home for Akira French, 17, a senior who plans on being an oncologist.
“Studying anatomy is a lot more difficult in college, but we are being exposed to the concepts, so it won’t be so hard once we’re in college,” French said.
French said he has a family history of cancer, and a cousin died of sickle-cell anemia,
“My little cousin died of sickle cell, so that was another push to get me going into the medical field,” he said. “ I did a lot of research into that when that happened. If I did decide to not do oncology, I’d want to do hematology — something to do with blood.”
Through his courses, French has had the chance to work in a hospital. Once he received basic certifications, he had the chance to shadow nurses and sometimes doctors.
“It was nice to be thrown in that environment,” French said. “Because if I’m going to go into the medical route, I need to know that I’m going to enjoy it. And it was nice. The staff was nice and the patients were very nice. They were very accepting of having us watch them being treated.”
French said he appreciated the chance to have real-world career experience.
“A lot of school districts don’t have programs like this,” he said. “I’m actually one of the few to get hands-on experience before I even get to college. If you don’t get to experience it for yourself, you don’t know what it’s really like.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2016 at 2:30 PM with the headline "H-E-B district starts students early on the path to college and beyond."