Project School Tries to Teach Lessons of Life

Like grade-school students across America, Wilbert and Depriest Johnson face the flag each morning, their hands over their hearts. But when they finish pledging allegiance, they say something more.

“We are prepared,” the brothers and their schoolmates repeat in unison. “We always walk. We are always respectful. We have only friendly physical interactions and conversations. We expect to learn and achieve.”

The daily speech was written by the teachers at the TSU-HISD Laboratory School, housed in two renovated apartment buildings in the middle of the sprawling Cuney Homes project. The words, says Principal Herschel Williams, give the 100 or so students--who come from Cuney Homes and three other public housing developments--a frame of mind to start their day.

“We already know where they come from,” says Williams. But no one wants to set limits as to where they’ll end up. “We take each student as we find him or her and try and take them as far as we possibly can.”

TSU-HISD opened a year ago to address the special needs of kids who grow up in public housing. The school sprang from a partnership among the Houston Independent School District, the city housing authority and Texas Southern University, a historically black college and a neighbor of Cuney Homes.

“Because Texas Southern University is an urban institution and because the Cuney Homes complex sits right in the shadows of Texas Southern University, it was felt that that would be the appropriate thing to do,” Williams says.

Cooperative learning and multi-age classrooms are among the innovations at the two-story brick school. In lieu of desks, students of varying ages share tables for four. “In society, you’re going to have to work as a team,” says Ingrid Haynes, who teaches kindergarten through second grade.

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Many of the school’s methods were adapted from research at TSU to help students at risk of failing. School administrators are constantly trying to determine which elements of the curriculum will lead to high test scores. Because of the school’s experimental nature, adjustments can be made here and there, Williams says.

For example, a new math program--one based on moving from the concrete to the abstract--replaced the old one this year. “It’s based on what works,” Williams says. If students are not achieving at the appropriate level, administrators dig for the source of the problem, looking at the teacher, the material and the strategy.

They do not, however, take into account the students’ low-income homes.

“We don’t use that as a crutch in terms of what they can’t do,” Williams says. “We know they have certain deficits. But we’re not going to let that deter us in terms of what we need to provide them.”

In Haynes’ classroom, no one is allowed to feel sorry for himself.

“We don’t talk about, ‘Oh, you live in the Cuney Homes,’ ” she says. “And I tell them it doesn’t matter where your mama [is]. ‘My mom’s in jail, my daddy’s here.’ I don’t want to hear that.”

Rather, Haynes sees it as a blessing for many of the kids that they live close enough to walk to school. “You have a lot of students that have missed a lot of days out of school because ‘My momma overslept.’ ‘My mom couldn’t get here.’. . . But here, the school’s right here.”

On this, the second day of school, Haynes’ students are hard at work in their gray, white and maroon uniforms, coming up with synonyms, learning to count and finding the differences between two similar pictures.

The Johnson brothers, 8-year-old Wilbert and 5-year-old Depriest, both are in Haynes’ class. “The older one, he needed more time,” says his mother, Juanita Johnson, who arrives with 2-week-old Jasmine on her shoulder to drop off Wilbert, Depriest, 9-year-old Mattie and 6-year-old Monica.

Now a Houston school district teacher, Haynes last year was a student-teacher from TSU. She believes the partnership between the university and the school district will affect the children for many years, and says some already aspire to attend college there.

“They already know where the university is and what a university is. That’s not a foreign vocabulary,” K-2 teacher Angie Blake says as her pupils work on self-portraits. “They already have something to strive for.”

Fifth-grader Simira Williams says that’s exactly what she wants to do. The lanky 11-year-old says her goal is to return to the lab school as a teacher.

Simira says she walks from her apartment to school each day with her mom and little brother Anthony, a pre-kindergartener. She chats enthusiastically about the number of computers in her classroom (there are seven), the Internet and last year’s field trip to the planetarium.

“It’s better than any other place I’ve been,” Simira says of the school as her classmates read “The Egyptian Cinderella” aloud to their partners.

Their voices grow louder and louder until they are interrupted by Dorothy Arceneaux, their third- through fifth-grade teacher. “If I hear something other than a 3-inch voice. . . .” she warns, and a hush comes over the classroom before she can finish.

A teacher for 28 years, Arceneaux is as amazed as Simira by the technology in her classroom. “Everything is on the cutting edge, which to me would seem to equip our kids to become the productive citizens that business and industry are saying they need,” she says.

Though school has just begun, Arceneaux is already impressed by her students’ eagerness to learn. “They walk in groups and it’s cute to see,” she says. “And they’re always on time. Notice when the bell rang and it’s time for school to start, they are here.”