Austin’s embattled Eastside Memorial High School has made state accountability for the first time since 2002. The Texas Education Agency published ratings for all campuses and districts in the state on Friday. Eastside has been under threat of closure since 2013. In order for the school to keep its doors open, administrators, teachers, staff, and students have worked to resuscitate failing test scores and close achievement gaps. The school’s quest was chronicled this spring in An Eastside Education, a digital documentary produced by KLRU.

In June 2013, Education Commissioner Michael Williams said Eastside could stay open, but gave school leaders and the Austin ISD School Board three years to make accountability or be shuttered for a year. They are now partnered with Johns Hopkins Talent Development Secondary, a contracted partner out of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

At a press conference Austin Independent School District’s Superintendent Paul Cruz shares that all AISD high schools met state accountability. The Texas Education Agency released the accountability results for Texas schools August 7, 2015. This is the first time in over 10 years that Eastside Memorial High School has met state accountability standards.

Austin ISD Superintendent Dr. Paul Cruz expressed pride in Eastside’s ability to break through at a press conference Friday.

“The teachers, staff members, the leadership at the school, parents really focused on one thing and that’s student results and they stayed on it,” Dr. Cruz said. “They stayed on it to make sure that all kids would learn.”

He said he spoke with Eastside Principal Bryan Miller once the scores were announced.

“[Principal Miller] was elated,” Dr. Cruz said. “We look at preliminary indicators, we never know until the state puts out accountability results, but he was elated and now that it is here, he’ll be sharing it with his staff members as well.”

Throughout filming of An Eastside Education, teachers, staff, and administrators warned of the dangers in trying to predict a rating before results are announced. All were cautiously optimistic after STAAR test scores were returned in June but stressed the importance of waiting until August when the state makes ratings official.

111 out of AISD’s 124 schools made state accountability this school year, including all of the district’s high schools. That’s up from 109 last year. The state’s current accountability ratings are Met Standard, Met Alternative Standard, Not Rated, or Improvement Required. Eastside Memorial’s official rating before this year was Improvement Required. It is now Met Standard, the highest rating possible.

State accountability for each school in the state is based on four indexes: Student Achievement (or STAAR test scores), student progress from year to year, closing performance gaps between high and low performing students, and Postsecondary Readiness. Eastside has continuously been unable to meet standards on Index 4, Postsecondary Readiness. In previous years, the school met standards on each of the other indexes.

To meet the standard on Index 4, Eastside students needed to not only pass the end of course STAAR exams but also score well enough on the college-readiness scale to be “Level II Recommended.” This year they outperformed the state’s target scores in all of those indexes. The school earned an additional three of seven possible distinctions, including academic achievement in math.

A sticking point for many teachers and students at Eastside has been the so-called “choice policy,” which means that since Eastside has been rated a failing school parents can opt out of sending their child there in favor of a higher rated school. This has led to very low enrollment and, according to many on campus, a brain drain of smart kids leaving Eastside for other area high schools. Dr. Cruz said regardless of the new rating, that policy is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

“I don’t see a change [in the choice policy] for Eastside Memorial High School,” Dr. Cruz said. “We do have a choice policy around the district so I do see that we would continue that with the school. We have choice in all of our schools. It’s a little bit different [at Eastside] with transportation but some of our other schools have that as well. I do think it’s important for parents to choose schools, choose programs, and so that is something that we value as a district.”

The final chapter of An Eastside Education will be released September 1, 2015.

 An Eastside Education is part of KLRU’s American Graduate initiative, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. American Graduate is aimed at increasing awareness about factors that lead to dropout in Central Texas.

In April, the Greater Austin Black Chamber of Commerce capitalized on the “Greater Austin” part of its name and expanded operations to Pflugerville. The GABCC signed a deal with the Pflugerville Community Development Corporation to offer services and programs to black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.

According to the PCDC, Pflugerville ranks “among the top cities in Central Texas for greater ethnic diversity, higher wages and lower unemployment rates based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2013 results.” The city has the highest African-American population, at 14.4%, in the region. Austin’s African-American population is 8% and declining as many families relocate to the suburbs.

“We talk a lot about social capital and community, and what happens when you have someone who can not only inspire you, but can connect you to a new opportunities to advance yourself and your company,” Greater Austin Black Chamber of Commerce CEO Natalie Cofield says. “And having more black entrepreneurs in the city of Austin, having more entrepreneurs, period, is important to the fabric of any city. So why would we not want more black entrepreneurs to be part of the equation of what happens with this city’s growth?”

We also spoke to April Kearney who owns Blling Salon and Retail in downtown Pflugerville. Alsmot 10 years ago she moved her business from Austin to Pflugerville. You can see that story on Saturday during NewsHour or here.

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Summer Brain Drain, or “Summer Slide” or “Summer Learning Loss,” is used to describe the estimated 43 million children in the U.S. who miss out on learning opportunities in the summer. Low-income youth lose more than 2 months worth of reading skills, while their higher income peers make small gains. Those numbers come from The Boys and Girls Club, which runs a national program called Summer Brain Gain aimed at keeping at-risk children on track.

The Boys and Girls Club of Austin runs the program at Thurmond Heights and Chalmers Court apartments, which are operated by the Housing Authority of the City of Austin. Participants are rising Kindergartners through upcoming 5th graders. The program also runs during the school year, allowing children who are at-risk to obtain quality out of school time all year long.

“[Our participants] are high risk for everything,” Boys and Girls Club of Austin CEO Mark Kiester says. “What we try to do is flip the school day for the kids. We feed them, they get some exercise, but we turn learning into engaging activities. That’s what makes learning different.”

We hear more from Kiester and from Dr. Walter Stroup, Associate Professor at UT’s School of Education in our Sunday story. You can see it in the video below.

KLRU News Briefs air locally at 6:30pm during PBS NewsHour Weekend. Our Sunday story is part of KLRU’s American Graduate initiative which is aimed at increasing awareness about factors that lead to dropout in Central Texas. 

Do you have an American Graduate story idea? We’d love to hear from you! Email us at CivicSummit@klru.org, post a comment, or tweet at us using #amgradtx. 

Food banks serve about 3.5 million Texans each year. One of the most effective ways to make sure children are fed is through school breakfast and lunch programs, which are free or reduced-price for about two-thirds of Texas school children. But, when schools lets out for the summer, those children need to be fed in other ways.

“At our food banks we always see an increase in requests for emergency food from families with children during the summer months,” said Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, an association which represents the state’s 21 food banks. “It’s hard to quantify; some kids are eating at home, some kids may be in camp, but we know from the sheer numbers that are relying on that important school meal during the day, that when summer hits a lot of those kids may go hungry.”

One organization running a summer lunch program is iACT, or Interfaith Action of Central Texas. iACT works with refugees to teach them English and train them how to assimilate to life in the U.S. They also run a summer program for refugee children, which provides food and English lessons taught by volunteer teachers.

When refugees arrive in Austin they receive 3 months rent, utilities, food stamps, and Medicaid for about 8 months.

“These are people with very few resources,” Program Director Lubna Zeidan says. “They are the working poor. The children, there’s not a lot of food at home. There’s some food because they know how to make ends meet. They know how to be frugal, but again, the children’s nutrition is probably suffering in some families.”

Many of the families iACT works with are Muslim, so they work with the food bank to provide halal meats and meals without pork products. Zeidan says one of the biggest challenges is overcoming differences in the way the families are used to eating.

“It’s important that they have american food,” she says. “One of the things is the kids won’t drink the milk. Because milk is a very American drink. So we find that nobody drinks the milk. Except for the chocolate milk because you have the angle of it being chocolate.”

She says many of the parents find American supermarkets foreign and overwhelming. Her clients find vegetables and fruits they’ve never eaten and with very limited money they often resort of eating only rice and beans, which can lead to malnutrition.

Malnutrition can severely impact a young person’s development and ability to learn in the classroom.

“It can mean more absences, more difficulty concentrating, lower test scores, health, all sorts of problems that can affect a kid’s growing and health and development, particularly in those younger years,” Cole of Feeding Texas says. “So we don’t want to see kids missing a meal because their parents can’t afford to feed them under any circumstances. It’s having consequences that aren’t only hurting that kid, or that family, or that community, or that school, but have serious cost to the whole state of Texas.”

Feeding Texas keeps track of how many children are accessing free or reduced-price lunch versus the amount who are being fed by summer programs and have found only 1 in 10 kids are being reached when school is out. So they are working on pilot programs to bring food to where children are, rather than relying on busy parents to drop their child off at a food bank, camp, or nonprofit location.

“You’ll often hear, ‘hunger is a health problem’ and ‘hunger is a pocketbook issue,'” Cole says. “And it’s true, the costs associated with food insecurity are just enormous for the state. So we have every reason to invest in strategies and programs during the summer months that make sure that kids go back to school ready to learn and healthy in the fall.”

This story airs on KLRU on Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 6:30pm during PBS NewsHour Weekend. It’s part of KLRU’s American Graduate initiative which is aimed at increasing awareness about the dropout crisis in Central Texas. 

Do you have an American Graduate story idea? We’d love to hear from you! Email us at CivicSummit@klru.org, post a comment, or tweet at us using #amgradtx.