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Photo courtesy savejwilljones.com

At J. Will Jones Elementary, workers are busy retrofitting, and the staff is getting ready to leave for good.

"It's sad to walk through the building and see all the rooms empty, the library stripped clean," Brian Flores, the former principal, tells Hair Balls.

After a drawn-out resistance from angry locals and parents the 101-year-old school officially closed its doors, due to low enrollment, with the end of the school year. (It will be reopened next year for high school classes.) Flores and others have been scrambling to take care of mundane things like inventory and record-keeping before they're due out of the building on July 7.

Flores has won widespread admiration for taking a school that in 2004 was slapped with the Texas Education Agency's lowest rating and turning it into a model for how to succeed with disadvantaged kids. About half of the school's 300 children were homeless this year, yet it is projected to become a "recognized" school for the second straight year. It also won the Texas Governor's Educator Excellence Award from 2003 to 2005, among other honors.

KHOU had a nice report recently about Spring ISD spending thousands of dollars on staff retreats at a time when school districts generally are hurting for cash.

A couple of things, though.

1) Here's some of the report: "One retreat will take place this week at La Torretta Del Lago Resort and Spa. The resort's Web site says there are 445 'lush' suites, many with 'breathtaking views' of Lake Conroe....Later this summer, Spring ISD administrators will head to another overnight getaway, this one at The Retreat at Artesian Lakes just east of Cleveland, Texas."

Cleveland. Texas and "breathtaking views of Lake Conroe"? Oh, the humanity!!

These reports always feature the relevant hotel's generous description of itself, which really doesn't tell you much. For instance, if you wanted to go by a recent press release, you could describe a Motel 6 as a place with a "sleek European boutique-style guestroom" that feature "bright accent colors, ambient lighting, and a pedestal bed that complements the room's sleek, clean design."

Sounds great, but it's still a Motel 6.

HISD is expanding its at-home learning program, whereby kids from across the state (mostly home-schoolers) can get a tuition-free educational curriculum monitored by a certified teacher via computer and phone.

The district partners with the Texas Connections Academy to offer the program, which is the only one of its kind in the state, HISD spokesman Norm Uhl tells Hair Balls.

The release from the district says the program, which began with 100 kids in grades three through eight, will expand to 1,000 this coming year. It likely will grow beyond that in future years, Uhl says.

"A wide range of students are taking advantage of the Texas Connections Academy, including Home bound students, home schooled students, those who are significantly ahead or behind in the classroom, students who want more individualized instruction, those who want a more flexible learning schedule and those who need a learning environment outside of the traditional classroom," the release says.

Photo courtesy of Marina Castillo-Knuti

Keep the DREAM alive. That's what community activists in Houston are trying to do tomorrow at Mason Park when they hold a rally in support of the DREAM Act, a piece of federal legislation that would allow certain undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship.

Officially called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, (see our take on it here) the proposed law would let illegal immigrants who entered the United States before the age of 16 and have lived here for at least five years to earn permanent residency by either serving in the military for two years or by completing at least two years of college.

Sponsors of the tomorrow's rally, Immigrant Families and Students in the Struggle, ask that supporters don their cap and gown to symbolize all of the undocumented students' graduating from high school and college. The event in Houston coincides with the National DREAM Act Graduation Day in Washington, D.C.

Photo courtesy Steep Creek Media

The financially beleaguered Cypress-Fairbanks ISD has decided to put advertising on its yellow school buses as a way of raising some much-needed revenue.

The school-bus advertising partnership is with Steep Creek Media and proceeds from ad revenues would be split 60-40 with the 60 percent going to the district, according to Steep Creek spokeswoman Olivia Calvert.

Dr. David Anthony, Cy-Fair's superintendent, attracted a lot of attention when he announced recently that the district was considering rescinding its homestead exemption on property taxes as a way of countering an anticipated budget shortfall of at least $28.8 million.

In a press release announcing a press conference at 4 pm Thursday (and ribbon cutting at 5 pm) Anthony stated:

Photo by antkriz

The deep, dark mystery of just how much it's going to cost to build the proposed Fort Bend school district's elaborate "science center" has been solved -- to a degree.

The school board approved a resolution recently that more or less caps the cost at $26 million.

And now former Sugar Land mayor David Wallace has said he will lead the effort to get at least $5.3 million in private donations towards the project.

The so-called "Global Science and Technology Center" will house all kinds of labs and stuff that would generally be in individual schools, with the added benefit of making kids schlep all the way over to it.

School officials say the center will be able to provide services and equipment far beyond what could be done in individual schools; critics say the thing's a boondoggle.

God bless the Aggies. Who else could hire a new president amidst much fanfare (She's Hispanic, y'all!!) and then fire her 18 months later?

Although we're not quite sure why she got fired. Sure, as we showed last week via an Open Records Act request, she was given a not-so-hot job review, but hey, that's only one year.

And judging from the official statements given by both parties, it sounds like there's nothing wrong. Says departing president Elsa Murano:
 

I am truly grateful for the countless expressions of support that I have received from our faculty, staff, current and former students, and friends of Texas A&M. I cannot adequately express how much I have appreciated your many letters, phone calls, emails, and especially your prayers. They have been truly uplifting and I thank you from the bottom of my heart....My husband Peter and I fell in love with Texas A&M the moment we set foot in Aggieland back in 1995.

Sounds great!

Turns out, Houston ISD superintendent Abe Saavedra sent out an e-mail to district administrators last Friday, giving them his last day news.

HISD spokesman Norm Uhl found out about it Friday afternoon and planned to release the news today, "but the Bellaire Examiner got a tip and scooped me. Good work on their part.

In his farewell notification, Saavedra gave himself and his administrators a pat on the back before cutting to the chase.

The full e-mail is after the jump.

Photo courtesy HISD

If it turns out to be true -- and since it's the weekend it's tough to tell -- full kudos to the Bellaire Examiner for this scoop -- HISD superintendent Abe Saavedra's last day on the job will be August 31..

HISD board member Dianne Johnson told the paper that Saavedra has told the board he's gone as of the end of August; previously it was assumed he would stay on until a successor was named.

The paper said Johnson wasn't sure how the announcement would affect the timing of announcing a new superintendent:

"That will depend on the pace/quality of applicants from the search," she wrote in an e-mail response to the Examiners' questions about Saavedra's notification. "If all goes well, the timing should be about right."

Saavedra had initially indicated he would be willing to serve through next March, and the board has engaged a search firm in what they hoped would be an accelerated process to identify a new replacement as quickly as possible.

If it's true, that means HISD essentially starts the new school year with either a new, or an interim, superintendent.

When last Hair Balls looked into the sudden closure of the Human Development Lab, UH's venerable and acclaimed (if ominously named) pre-school, the situation was just starting to simmer.

By now the stew over on Wheeler is on full boil. A Save HDLS web site has been created, and parents have protested on the UH campus. The university's general counsel is bedeviled with gales upon gales of open records requests, and vicious emails are flying back and forth between outraged parents and the honchos of UH's College of Education, which, for the last few years, has run the Lab School. Right into the ground, many parents say...

First, parents and staff are upset about the official reasons given for the school's closure. In speaking to parents, UH Provost John Antel cited "safety concerns" and a failure to adhere to "best practices" and claimed that the school was $100,000 in the red each year for the past five years. Antel also cited a disconnect between the Lab School's constructivist educational philosophy and the behaviorism that is the teaching mode du jour in the College of Education.