They are looking for tutors who meet these qualifications:

• has a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university
• possesses strong math skills
• enjoys working with young people

Tutors will receive:

• A $20,000 salary for 10 months of service
• Benefits, including health-care coverage
• Performance and attendance bonus of up to $5,000

For more information, visit www.houstonisd.org/Apollo20Tutor.

Davila was first elected to the board in November of 2003. The board will decide, at a future date, whether to appoint a replacement to fill out the term through November 2011 or hold a special election to fill the vacancy.

In other action, the board approved the following measures:

Expanded access to popular Grad Lab courses

HISD will amend its contract with Apex Learning Inc., to accommodate an increase in demand for online credit recovery through HISD’s Grad Lab program.

Nearly 5000 students have utilized the Grad Labs since they were launched in mid-January. A total of 2053 students have completed at least one course.  All together, 3161 credits have been recovered. The average time to complete a course is 61 days with a “B” average. Graduation Coaches report that 441 students graduated in May thanks to Grad Labs and another 209 are on track to graduate in August.

Access to Advance Placement (AP) online courses will also be expanded, as well programs for alternative education, dropout prevention, pre-AP, middle-school transition, and TAKS preparedness.

Acceptance of funds for Algebra I readiness program

This $1.8 million dollar grant will be used to implement programs at nine schools to increase the preparedness of middle-school students to succeed in Algebra I.

Acceptance of funds for ninth-Grade transition and intervention program

This $258,381 grant will be distributed to fifteen high schools to aid in the successful transition of middle school students to high school.

Approval to use capital funds on emergency basis for Lee High School

The board decided to use capital funds on an emergency basis to pay for engineering and consultation services as well as construction and contractual work to repair structural damage at Lee High School

Approval of contract to create new college readiness measurement tool

The board approved a $30,000 contract with the College Board to develop a measurement tool with HISD that will diagnose a middle school’s capacity to build a foundation that prepares its students for college readiness.

Of those, five are from Bellaire High School; two are from the DeBakey High School for Health Professions and there is one each from Carnegie Vanguard, Lamar and Westside. Here is the list by high school:

Lamar High School

Tonhu Q. Nguyen

Probable career field: Chemical Engineering

NATIONAL MERIT RICE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Bellaire High School

Karen Ding

Probable career field: Medicine/Health

NATIONAL MERIT RICE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Lumeng Li

Probable career field: Medicine

NATIONAL MERIT UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON SCHOLARSHIP

Ian C. Mauzy

Probable career field: Computer Science

NATIONAL MERIT RICE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Mengwei Ni

Probable career field: Bioengineering

NATIONAL MERIT RICE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Wilma Qiu

Probable career field: Business

NATIONAL MERIT EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Carnegie Vanguard High School

Larissa B. Little

Probable career field: Engineering

NATIONAL MERIT FRANKLIN W. OLIN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING SCHOLARSHIP

DeBakey High School for Health Professions

Alexander S. Kortum

Probable career field: Physics

NATIONAL MERIT RICE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

Fatima Syed

Probable career field: Medicine

NATIONAL MERIT UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON SCHOLARSHIP

Westside High School

Yu-Di Lin

Probable career field: Healthcare

NATIONAL MERIT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP

National Merit Scholarships are announced in four rounds. Counting Monday’s final announcement for 2010, a total of 27 HISD students received National Merit Scholarships. The value of all scholarships offered to HISD’s Class of 2010 totals more than $97 million, which is a new record.

This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began when more than 1.5 million juniors in over 22,000 high schools took the 2008 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

In September 2009, some 16,000 Semifinalists were named on a state representational basis, in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of high school graduating seniors. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of a state’s seniors.

To become Finalists, Semifinalists had to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and describing contributions and leadership activities in high school and the community, have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT scores that confirm the qualifying test performance.

About 15,000 Semifinalists attained Finalist standing, and more than half of this group was chosen to receive National Merit Scholarships.

The tournament will start at 10 a.m. on Thursday and Friday.

The winners in the five divisions will be awarded trophies. Competitors advanced to the tournament because they are the best of the 400 Harris County girls and boys who played in the five-week, preliminary rounds at countywide neighborhood agencies’ sites.

Three-on-3 Basketball, added to the Street Olympics in 1998, is designed to teach leadership, discipline and the value of teamwork.

The Street Olympics program, which Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee started 24 years ago, provides free educational and social activities for youth.

For more information, visit www.streetolympics.org.

Twenty students will undergo a “Day in the Life” of a leading agency, a one-day event that will give future marketers an insider’s taste of a career in full-service communications. Representatives from Lopez Negrete’s various disciplines will provide educational presentations, and attendees will get an up-close look at what goes into the creation of a fully integrated marketing campaign.

The program is geared toward students with an affinity for the industry, and registration will be handled on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The free event will take place on Wednesday, July 14 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the offices of Lopez Negrete Communications, 3336 Richmond Ave.

For more information, contact Julie Grayum at julie@lopeznegrete.com or 832-295-5424.

Rice University Professor Junichiro Kono, standing, and graduate student Thomas Searles set out to study interactions between magnetic fields and electrically charged particles and found that strong magnets can stop the flow of electrons through metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Metallic carbon nanotubes show great promise for applications from microelectronics to power lines because of their ballistic transmission of electrons. But who knew magnets could stop those electrons in their tracks?

Rice physicist Junichiro Kono and his team have been studying the Aharonov-Bohm effect – the interaction between electrically charged particles and magnetic fields – and how it relates to carbon nanotubes.  While doing so, they came to the unexpected conclusion that magnetic fields can turn highly conductive nanotubes into semiconductors.

Their findings are published online this month in Physical Review Letters.

“When you apply a magnetic field, a band gap opens up and it becomes an insulator,” said Kono, a Rice professor in electrical and computer engineering and in physics and astronomy. “You are changing a conductor into a semiconductor, and you can switch between the two. So this experiment explores both an important aspect of the results of the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the novel magnetic properties of carbon nanotubes.”

Kono, graduate student Thomas Searles and their colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and in Japan successfully measured the magnetic susceptibility of a variety of nanotubes for the first time; they confirmed that metallics are far more susceptible to magnetic fields than semiconducting nanotubes, depending upon the orientation and strength of the field.

Single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) – rolled-up sheets of graphene – would all look the same to the naked eye if one could see them. But a closer look reveals nanotubes come in many forms, or chiralities, depending on how they’re rolled. Some are semiconducting; some are highly conductive metallics. The gold standard for conductivity is the armchair nanotube, so-called because the open ends form a pattern that looks like armchairs.

Not just any magnet would do for their experiments. Kono and Searles traveled to the Tsukuba Magnet Laboratory at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan, where the world’s second-largest electromagnet was used to tease a refined ensemble of 10 chiralities of SWNTs, some metallic and some semiconducting, into giving up their secrets.

By ramping the big magnet up to 35 tesla, they found that the nanotubes would begin to align themselves in parallel and that the metallics reacted far more strongly than the semiconductors. (For comparison, the average MRI machine for medical imaging has electromagnets rated at 0.5 to 3 tesla.) Spectroscopic analysis confirmed the metallics, particularly armchair nanotubes, were two to four times more susceptible to the magnetic field than semiconductors and that each chirality reacted differently.

The nanotubes were all about 0.7 to 0.8 nanometers (or billionths of a meter) wide and 500 nanometers long, so variations in size were not a factor in results by Searles. He spent a week last fall running experiments at the Tsukuba facility’s “hybrid,” a large-bore superconducting magnet that contains a water-cooled resistive magnet.

Kono said the work would continue on purified batches of nanotubes produced by ultracentrifugation at Rice. That should yield more specific information about their susceptibility to magnetic fields, though he suspects the effect should be even stronger in longer metallics. “This work clearly shows that metallic tubes and semiconducting tubes are different, but now that we have metallic-enriched samples, we can compare different chiralities within the metallic family,” he said.

Co-authors of the paper include Yasutaka Imanaka and Tadashi Takamasu of NIMS, Tsukuba, Japan; Hiroshi Ajiki of the Photon Pioneers Center at Osaka University, Japan; and Jeffrey Fagan and Erik Hobbie, researchers at NIST, Gaithersburg, Md.

Searles conducted the majority of the research during a visit to NIMS supported in part by a National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education grant to Kono and his co-principal investigators. Other funding came from the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.

The YMCA Operation Backpack press conference and kick-off will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday at Tijerina Elementary, 6501 Sherman Street.

The event will include Houston City Councilman James Rodriguez, HISD Chief Communications Officer Aggie Alvez, Harris County Precinct 6 Constable Victor Trevino, YMCA staff and several students from Tijerina Elementary who have received supplies from past YMCA Operation Backpack efforts.  Also, Tellepsen/Downtown Family YMCA day campers will perform a song and cheer with college mascots, “Shasta,” of the University of Houston, and “Mingo,” of Houston Baptist University.  The mascots will also help the children fill backpacks with school supplies and place them in donation bins, followed by a march throughout the school hallway.

“I am very excited to see the efforts of the YMCA and the Houston community come together to ensure that the children of my school and other HISD schools are well prepared to engage in learning when the school year starts,” said Tijerina Principal Paola Espitia Daniels. “A small donation of a backpack can make a huge difference in a child’s life.”

Last year, YMCA Operation Backpack collected more than 18,356 backpacks and about 167,742 school supply items, thanks to generous Houston area donors.  All of the items helped prepare 35,130 children for their first day of school.  This year’s goal is to touch the lives of 40,000 children. The campaign runs through August 15.

Donations can be dropped off at all YMCA centers. Shoe Carnival will be participating in Operation Backpack for the second consecutive year, collecting backpacks and schools supplies at its store locations throughout the Houston area. Toyota, also a returning sponsor, will be collecting at its greater Houston area dealerships.

New this year, Houstonians can make monetary donations to Operation Backpack online. Visit www.ymcaoperationbackpack.org to contribute, as well as find additional information, including a suggested list of school supplies and a complete list of drop-off locations.

YMCA Operation Backpack collection bins also are located at participating churches across the Houston area.

Rice University researchers have come up with a computer program to accurately simulate protein folding dramatically faster than previous methods. It will allow scientists to peer deeper into the roots of diseases caused by proteins that fold incorrectly.

Authors Cheng Zhang and Jianpeng Ma describe their simulation of three short proteins with the new technique in the cover story of the current Journal of Chemical Physics. Ma is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. Zhang is an applied physics graduate student at Rice.

“Protein folding is regarded as one of the biggest unsolved problems in biophysics,” Ma said. “This is a technically challenging task, and many groups around the world have been competing for years to make the process faster and more accurate.”

Understanding the intricacies of protein folding is a crucial step in deciphering the genetic code that serves as the operating system of all living things.

Correctly folded proteins perform many roles: as enzymes vital to metabolism; structural elements in bone, muscle and cell scaffolding; mechanisms in cell signaling and immune response and much more. But protein misfolding is a critical factor in many diseases, including Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, emphysema and various cancers.

Proteins start as amino acid molecules floating in a cell. Following DNA blueprints, the molecules are strung together like beads on a necklace, called a polypeptide. Every polypeptide of a given sequence will fold precisely the same way into the shape, called the native state that determines its function.

Like a river finding the shortest route to the sea, proteins always find their way to their native states in an instant. How that happens is one of life’s great mysteries.

“The question is how nature finds this final folded state so quickly,” Ma said.

Zhang and Ma reached unprecedented accuracy and speed in simulating the folding of three relatively short but well-understood proteins – trpzip2, trp-cage and the villin headpiece – in the presence of water molecules, which Ma described as the best way to simulate physiological conditions.

Though the proteins assemble themselves in nature almost instantly, the Rice team’s algorithm took weeks to run the simulation. Still, that was far faster than others have achieved.

“And for trpzip and villin, nobody has reached this level of accuracy in the native state under similar simulation conditions – that is, in the presence of water, which is the most stringent condition,” Ma said.

The researchers employed two novel strategies, continuously variable temperature and single-copy simulation.

“In the process of simulation, called sampling, the computer has to search through many, many possible structures of the protein chain to find the lowest-energy solution,” Ma said. “A polypeptide chain en route to its native state encounters many energy barriers, much like when one navigates through a rugged mountain landscape.

“Speeding up the process of crossing those barriers is the key to finding the true global minimum (energy state),” he said. “In our simulation, temperature is a variable that goes continuously up and down. When the temperature is higher, proteins can overcome energy barriers faster. It’s equivalent to speeding up the motion of atoms.”

Ma said the previous state of the art was to run multiple copies of a simulation in parallel on many computers – an intensive and expensive approach. “The single-copy approach uses only one simulation, essentially, to find the native state of the protein. This is a major plus, because anyone with reasonable computing power can run this method.”

Even so, it takes computational muscle to simulate a biological task that the body’s cells accomplish as a matter of course. Zhang and Ma found it in Rice’s supercomputer cluster, the Shared University Grid at Rice, aka SUG@R. “We can’t overstate the significance of state-of-the-art computing facilities, as well as excellent service from Rice’s Research Computing Support Group,” Ma said. His group is continuing its work on Rice’s newest supercomputer cluster, BlueBioU, for longer polypeptide sequences.

“These supercomputer resources will continue to make Rice one of the leading institutions in the field of protein folding and computational biophysics,” Ma said.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Welch Foundation, the Welch Chemistry and Biology Collaborative Grant from the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics and the Rice Faculty Initiatives Fund supported the research.

Watercolor, “The Derelict,” by Presbyterian School second grader, Mia D'Andrea.

A child born today will see more images in a lifetime than the number of stars in the universe. But how do children learn the skills that will help them respond to the world around them with “thinking” rather than “passive” eyes?

Teach Me to See, a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, is comprised of a series of looking and art-making activities which cultivate “thinking” eyes in students ages 3 to 7.   Teach Me to See, on display at the MFAH beginning July 3 through January 9 will feature 21 works of art made by Presbyterian School students who took part in the MFAH Storytime Tour Program this past school year.

During the MFAH Storytime Tours Program, Presbyterian School students participated in six, one-hour guided tours of the MFAH.  The Storytime Tours Program combines the reading of children’s literature in front of a work of art with discussion and other activities designed to help students understand and make sense of what they see.  Activities include articulating what they see, using their senses to experience art, and imagining unseen details in a work of art followed by discussion and questions.

After a MFAH storytime highlighting the artwork of John Singer Sergeant and Maurice Prendergast, Presbyterian

Watercolor, “Rialto, Venice,” by Presbyterian School second grader, Erin Oldham.

School second grade students created their own work of art in response to Sergeant and Prendergast’s art.  Each student was called upon to interpret the artist’s style and to incorporate elements of the artist’s style within their personal response pieces.

First, students examined the medium of each artist and decided upon an appropriate medium they would use to capture the essence of the artist’s style.  Next, students emphasized such elements as color choices, mark making, subject matter, use of texture and perspective and whether the original artist chose to use more or less detail.   Students had available for their works watercolor paints, water based oil pastel, water color pencils, tempera paint,  a large selection of brushes and interesting ways to create texture. Students were encouraged to do multiple response pieces including ones that used a light pencil sketch and a piece using the brush as a pencil.

“My students did a marvelous job analyzing the characteristics of each artist’s style, even pointing out that Maurice Prendergast’s work shows crowds of people but John Singer Sargeant’s work depicts small groups or just one or two people,” Presbyterian Lower School Art teacher, Jacqui Chaltain said. “Controlling watercolor so that the colors did not bleed was a big challenge, but my students were determined to learn. I hope this project is only the beginning of their lifelong engagement with the arts.”

The second grade Sergeant and Prendergast response artwork may be viewed at the MFAH Teach Me To See exhibition from July 3 to January 9 and also in the administrative offices of Presbyterian School, located at 10 Oakdale Street, one block from the museum.

Those hired will receive a salary of $20,000, a generous benefits package that includes medical benefits, and an incentive award of up to $5,000 for one year of service in the Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program.

The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is one of the largest in-school tutoring programs that has ever been launched in an urban public school district.

The Apollo 20 Math Fellows will be placed in one of nine HISD schools that are part of the district’s Apollo 20 school turn-around effort. Fellows will be placed in large cohorts to serve an entire grade—either 6th grade or 9th grade —with focused intensive math support. Tutors will work daily with five or six pairs of students, each for 60 to 80 minutes at a time, tutoring them in math.

“We know from the research of Dr. Roland Fryer and our partnership with EdLabs at Harvard University, that intensive, one-on-one tutoring can make a difference with a struggling student,” said HISD Superintendent Terry Grier.  “Our Apollo 20 Math Fellows will be able to develop a close relationship with each one of their students and have the chance to make a significant impact in their lives.”

The program is similar to Teach For America in that HISD is seeking outstanding college graduates who have a passion for helping the neediest children succeed and thrive. The program is different in that the commitment is only one year, not two, and the work emphasizes working closely with a few students rather than teaching several sections of 20 or more students.

To become an Apollo 20 Math Fellow, candidates must have at least a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university, possess strong math skills and make a commitment of ten months, beginning Aug. 2.

For more information visit www.houstonisd.org/Apollo20Tutor.

John McDevitt

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has granted $3.7 million to Rice University researchers to fund an innovative cancer diagnostics program.

The funds will help the BioScience Research Collaborative lab overseen by John McDevitt, Rice’s Brown-Wiess Professor in Bioengineering and Chemistry, in its mission to make the Texas Medical Center (TMC) the hub for diagnostics research into cancer and other diseases.

The work is made possible by McDevitt’s development of a cost-effective Bio-Nano-Chip that can provide patients with early warning of the onset of disease, cutting the time and cost of treatment. McDevitt is principal investigator of a multi-investigator project that totals $6 million for cancer research, of which Rice’s portion is $3.7 million. The remainder of the grant will be subcontracted to investigators at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

CPRIT is a state-funded agency charged by Texas voters with issuing $3 billion in bonds over 10 years to fund grants for cancer research and prevention. Last week, the agency announced $142 million in grants to support innovative programs, including the funds to Rice.

“The BioScience Research Collaborative and Rice have provided the ideal setting to launch the Texas Cancer Diagnostics Pipeline Consortium,” said McDevitt, a pioneer in the creation of microfluidic devices for biomedical testing. “This Rice-led cancer initiative brings together the dream team of Texas clinicians for oral cancer, prostate cancer and ovarian cancer.”

Rice’s Bio-Nano-Chips are based on state-of-the-art microprocessor technology and can be programmed to quickly find specific biomarkers in blood, saliva and urine to diagnose cancers, HIV and heart disease. A human trial of the chip is currently testing patients’ saliva for signs of a heart attack at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine. In addition, another large-scale trial of a chip to detect signs of oral cancer also showed promising results.

Eventually, McDevitt said, emergency medical technicians may perform such tests at a home or in an ambulance so they know where to take a patient for the most effective treatment.

“This is what CPRIT was created to do – to invest in the people and projects that will find a cure for cancer,” said the institute’s oversight committee chairman, Jimmy Mansour. “The groundbreaking work singled out (by the new round of grants) brings us one step closer to that audacious goal.”

On Tuesday at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center, 4440 West 18^th Street, there will be two open discussion meetings surrounding HISD’s Strategic Direction and its effort to become the best school district in America.

Those wishing to attend can RSVP at www.houstonisd.org by clicking in the upper left hand calendar and choosing  the “calendar of activities” tab under the resources menu.  Those unable to attend can still email their comments to strategicdirection@houstonisd.org.

In addition, HISD will be holding two interactive, live TV shows to gather comments and feedback from the community. The first will be on June 28, from 7 to 8 p.m., on the HISD channel, and will be hosted by KPRC’s Khambrel Marshall, Board President Greg Meyers, and Superintendent Terry Grier. Viewers will be able to phone, email, and Twitter their comments during the live show.

The second show will be broadcast on Univision 45 Houston from 5 to 10:30 p.m. on June 29. The program will be hosted by Board Trustees Diana Dávila and Manuel Rodríguez along with Univision on-air news talent. Throughout the evening there will be periodic updates and interviews during Univision’s regular programming.

The development of the long-term Strategic Direction is  a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.

Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from employees, parents, students, and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, nonprofit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, placing an effective principal in every school, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action.

For more information about HISD’s Strategic Direction, visit www.houstonisd.org/strategicdirection.

“This district has made significant progress in recent years, but if we want to achieve our goal of making HISD the best school district in the country, we’ve got to do more,” Superintendent Terry Grier said. “We’ve got to build on the successful strategies that are already in place in schools across the district. We have to raise the level of achievement for all students, and this is why we’re initiating the Apollo 20 project in the fall. We are going to ensure that every child in this district graduates prepared for success in college and the workplace.”

Right now, the state standard for TAKS scores indicating college readiness is a scale score of 2100. HISD’s standard of college readiness is higher at 2200, but 2300 may be a more realistic measure of college readiness.

Research shows that 61 percent of HISD students with a scale score of 2300 or higher graduated from college within 4.5 years while only 17 percent of students with scores lower than 2300 finished college in the same time frame.

The Board also got a progress report on the development of a Strategic Direction for the future in partnership with parents, teachers, students, business partners and a diverse cross-section of the community. In the many public hearings held across the district several common themes have emerged:

• Increasing focus on hiring and supporting high-quality teachers and principals

• Enhancing instructional options to best prepare all students for college and career success

• Integrating health, nutrition, physical activity, and support services into students’ education

• Heightening safety measures at school campuses

• Improving transparency and accountability

• Augmenting frequency and clarity of communications

• Providing further opportunities for parent engagement and creating partnerships with community, private sector, and government

One recurring theme from the community meetings is increasing the focus on hiring high-quality teachers and principals. On June 17, the board voted on accepting 250 Teach for America applicants for HISD teaching positions. Nine of the district’s lower performing schools are part of Apollo 20. Eleven Elementary Schools will be added in the 2011-12 school year for a total of 20.

Teach for America will play a role in the Apollo effort. Of the 250 corps members, 50 will be considered for teaching positions at the nine schools that will be part of the inaugural Apollo 20 school turn-around project beginning this fall. Research shows that TFA produces many high-performing teachers, particularly in the areas of math and science. TFA corps members are recruited right out of college and commit to a two-year assignment in urban schools, teaching in the subject areas for which they received college degrees.

This year, more 46,000 college graduates applied for 4500 TFA positions nationwide. Houston ISD is TFA’s oldest partner in training and hiring TFA corps members.

Strake Jesuit cheerleaders attended UCA cheer camp at Texas A&M recently and brought home the first place Varsity Camp Champion trophy for Extreme Dance & Cheer routine, third place Varsity Cheer routine, and all Varsity and JV gold superior plus, blue superior, one red excellent ribbons for their efforts throughout the week.

Varsity cheerleaders include Tatiana Angulo, Carson Bogatto, Kate Cooksey, Sarah Farley, Layda Guajardo, Lauren Fontenot, Lyndsey Foresman, Ally Fraustro, Elizabeth Jones, Grace Klein, Jamie Manis, Taylor McBride, Alex Pain, Leila Ruiz, Captain Karen Steffensen, Anna Stuchly, Co-Captain Chelsea Thompson, and Alex Vaio.  JV cheerleaders include Nicole Cavender, Natalie Diala, Sarah Dismuke, Emily Egbert, Kylie Fichter, Branda Greening, Alex Guidry, Erica Hoffman, Cailin Kavanagh, Sarah Klein, Bria Mitchell-Gillespie, Laura Nunez, Jenny Osborn, and Carly Stender.  Additionally, named to the All American squad were Karen Steffensen, Chelsea Thompson, Kate Cooksey, Carly Stender, and Bria Mitchell-Gillespie.  Denise Crawford, Cheer Moderator, and Chelsea Brooks, former MIZZOU collegiate cheerleader, accompanied the girls to camp and will assist them throughout the year.

Pershing Middle School pre-ordered uniform forms are due this Friday.

The order form can be found on the Pershing website or copies are in the school office.

Uniforms will be available for pickup on Aug. 10 and Aug. 11 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Uniforms can also be picked up on Aug. 12 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The board also voted 6 to 1 to renew the contract with Community Education Partners to continue operating two secondary alternative schools. The new contract will have significant changes, including a reduction in cost of more than $4 million and new accountability measures.

New accountability features include credit completion rates, pre and post assessment results as well as truancy and dropout rates. HISD also will develop an “Intervention Behavior Model” to attempt to lower the number of students who are sent to CEP for discretionary placement. The district explored other alternatives to CEP which proved unfeasible and costly to put in place by the beginning of the next school year.

The board also voted to approve the five research-based tenets that will be the foundation of the new Apollo 20 school turn-around program. The five tenets focus on effective teachers and principals, more time on task, date-driven instruction, high dosage tutoring and high expectations. These five areas emerged as the common denominators of successful schools in the extensive research of Harvard Professor Roland Fryer who will partner with HISD in the Apollo 20 program.

The board also accepted $200,000 from JPMorgan Chase to support HISD’s Strategic Direction process, which is gathering public input to develop a road map for the future of HISD.

The meeting also included reports on the growing number of meals being served to students, the increases in the number of students earning “commended” status on the TAKS test and exceeding national averages on national achievement tests.

CIPA is a federal law enacted by Congress to address concerns about access to offensive content over the Internet on school district computers. The law requires the district to filter Internet access by minors to inappropriate matter and to have a policy in place that that addresses the safety and security of minors, unlawful online activities by minors, unauthorized online disclosure of personal information by minors, and restriction of minors’ access to harmful materials

Under HISD’s policy parent who do not wish their children to have Internet access can opt out by signing a form. The district policy requires students using the Internet to:

• Be courteous and respectful

• Use appropriate language

• Keep personal information confidential

• Use electronic services for educational purposes only

• Notify an adult immediately if inappropriate materials are encountered or observed.

The policy also address unacceptable use of computers and networks stating that student must not:

• Damage computers, network or others work

• Install illegal software, shareware, malware or freeware

• Send offensive materials or pictures

• Attempt to access inappropriate material or “hack” into the network, either internally or externally

The regular monthly meeting of the HISD Board of Education will follow the public hearing. Once the acceptable use policy is finalized it will be voted on by the Board of Education.

To ensure that all key stakeholders are engaged and involved in this process, HISD is inviting any member of the Houston community to give their input at open discussions tonight from 6 to 7:30 p.m. and on Tuesday at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center’s board auditorium, 4440 West 18^th Street.

In addition, HISD will be holding two interactive, live TV shows in June to gather more input and feedback from the community. The first will be on June 28, from 7 to 8 p.m., on the HISD channel, and will be hosted by KPRC’s Khambrel Marshall, Board President Greg Meyers, and Superintendent Dr. Terry Grier. Viewers will be able to phone, email and Twitter their comments during the live show.

The second show will be broadcast on Univision 45 Houston from 5 to 10:30 p.m. on June 29. The program will be hosted by Board Trustees Diana Dávila and Manuel Rodríguez along with Univision on-air news talent. Throughout the evening there will be periodic updates and interviews during Univision’s regular programming.

To develop a long-term Strategic Direction, HISD is working with the Apollo Consulting Group in a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.

Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from members of Team HISD, as well as from parents and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, non-profit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, supporting the principal as the CEO, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action. 

“True transformation cannot happen overnight and it cannot happen without the input from everyone at Team HISD and those in our community who hold a stake in the education of Houston’s children,” said Grier. “In order for it to be meaningful, we need everyone to lend their voice to the process and help us shape the future direction of HISD.”

HISD students applied for and received 5,158 scholarship offers with many students receiving multiple offers. Of that number, 4551 were offered in academics and 270 were offered in athletics.

Schools and universities offering scholarships include local, state and several prestigious military and Ivy League schools including West Point, Harvard, Yale and Duke University.

More than $17.8 million dollars in college scholarships offers were made to HISD students who will be the first in their family to attend college. In creating a college bound culture, the district is seeing more students offered scholarships than ever before.

Here are the breakdowns of the statistics:

Schools topping $5 Million in Offered Scholarships

DeBakey                        $11,180,677

HSPVA                          $9,702,182

Bellaire                          $8,910,874

Lamar                            $8,104,092

Westside                        $7,468,226

Carnegie Vanguard   $5,303,088

Scholarships accepted by groups

American Indian     $674,836

Asian                             $9,953,909

Black                             $31,866,953

Hispanic                      $25,495,776

White                             $24,930,529

Colleges/Universities Offering Scholarships

Baylor                            $3,698,022

Houston Baptist            $2,769,121

University of Houston   $2,743,978

Texas A&M                            $2,271,309

University of Texas       $1,926,597

Prairie View A&M         $904,917

Rice                                $785,132

West Point                     $604,000

Yale                               $197,600

Harvard                         $100,750

Princeton                       $84,000

Duke                              $51,450

Coastal prairie once blanketed much of the Houston area, including the neighborhood around Pershing Middle School but coastal prairies are now one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the U.S.

This spring, the Pershing students turned seeds and soil into 1,400 Texas coneflower plants for the Katy Prairie Conservancy (KPC). These colorful native flowers will be used to restore areas along a new publicly accessible trail on the historic Warren Ranch in western Harris County. Students and their families will be invited to help plant their coneflowers on the prairie this fall.

Conservancy staff will pick 800 of the 1,400 coneflowers that still reside at Pershing today.

The Katy Prairie Conservancy has been working since 1992 to preserve a sustainable portion of the Katy Prairie. KPC has conserved nearly 18,000 acres of land so that future generations can enjoy this part of Texas’s natural heritage.