FortBendNow.com

A grass-roots movement has sprung up in Missouri City, including teachers, students, business sponsors, parents and area pastors who are rallying to keep the highly regarded Electronic Engineering Academy at Marshall High School.

The loosely knit group is working to recruit 100 incoming freshmen to apply for entry into the academy – a number they say they have to meet by May 30 to prevent the EE Academy from being moved to Elkins High School.

But even if that number of student recruits is met, supporters of the academy say they’re skeptical Fort Bend Independent School District officials will allow the program to remain.

The EE Academy was targeted in spring of 2008 for removal. “There was a plan to pull the academy from here and move it to Elkins,” said one district employee. Like other teachers and school officials involved in the program, the employee spoke only on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals from district administrators. “Nobody in the program was consulted,” the employee added. “Our advisory committee was livid when they found out.”

After push-back last fall from the committee, made up of corporate sponsors including Shell Oil Co., Fluor Corp., Schlumberger Ltd. and Dynegy Inc., district officials decided to give supporters a chance to keep the academy in Marshall.

Administrators say they originally intended to move the Marshall academy along with the Engineering Academy at Hightower High School, and combine them at Elkins. The main reason cited was too few students in the EE Academy, and too few from schools other than Marshall.

Michael McKie, FBISD Assistant Superintendent for High Schools, said the district’s academies are expected to recruit students from the entire district. In late 2008, the Electronic Engineering Academy supporters were told “you need to recruit an adequate number of students” in order for the program to remain at Marshall, he said.

“We’re talking about 80 to 100 students” in the incoming freshman class, McKie added. “If you had 75 students would we leave it there? Probably.” However, “if they only have 40 students, then yes, we would look at moving to Elkins in 2010.”

“They gave us the rest of the semester to get 100 students,” said Matt Davis, an engineer, a mentor in the program and also an area pastor. “We’re going to make it. But will we be up against that wall every semester?”

One teacher involved in the program questioned “the logic” of the forced recruitment, adding, “we don’t even have the facilities to handle 100 students.”

The EE Academy’s supporters point to its record with pride. Students enrolled there have achieved a 100% graduation rate, and have gone on to prestigious schools including MIT, Texas A&M, UT, Stanford, Purdue and Syracuse. Graduation from the academy means an automatic 21 credit hours at Houston Community College, supporters say.

Davis and others also said the academy’s robotics team took 4th place in a coveted international competition including teams from China. And, Davis said, the high school’s past three valedictorians were academy enrollees, as will be the current year’s valedictorian and salutatorian both.

“Why move that? If it’s not successful, that’s one thing,” said the Rev. Theodore Deaver, president of the East Fort Bend Pastors Association, which supports keeping the EE Academy at Marshall. “Here we have, out on the east end of Fort Bend ISD, a program that’s finally successful in that area, and the one positive thing we can really brag on is being sent away.”

“Lives are being saved through that academy, and they don’t get it,” Davis said of Fort Bend ISD administrators. “They don’t want to get it.”

“The quickest way to hurt a community is for something like this to go,” said one district employee involved with the academy. “They go away, and then all you have is gangs.”

Davis said he doesn’t think school or district officials have made enough of an effort themselves to recruit students to what they say is a highly successful program. “The school hasn’t had a fair chance, and it has had a negative reputation,” he added.

McKie disputes that contention, and said the district has prepared high-quality recruiting material on behalf of the program, adding, “they were afforded the same opportunities as any other academy.” Some of those resources, including the EE Academy’s, are available on the district’s web site.

McKie also said the district has decided to allow Marshall to continue with the electronic engineering program even if the EE Academy is moved to Elkins.

But people involved with the program say if the academy designation were removed, a key funding mechanism they referred to as a Carl Perkins grant also would evaporate.

Among other conditions, the Carl Perkins grant calls for Marshall to offer a “specific curriculum pathway,” one employee involved in the academy said. Without the structure that grant requires, “it leaves us at the mercy of the building administration as far as what to do with the funding. Historically, you’re at the mercy of them just draining the program dry.”

Marshall Principal Alonzo Reynolds III didn’t return a call for comment on the matter.

“I know one thing: If the academy goes, all the volunteers on the advisory team, and those parents, we’re all going,” Davis said, meaning that they would all quit.

Deaver discussed the possibility of race playing a part in the fate of the academy. Marshall, in northern Missouri City on Buffalo Run between Texas Parkway and Fondren Road, has a much higher percentage of black students than does Elkins, at the city’s south end off State Highway 6 between Lake Olympia and Sienna Plantation parkways.

“I hope this won’t sound too controversial, but we’ll come as a people to their community, but they won’t come to our community,” Deaver said. “It seems to me that east Fort Bend is used as a test sample to see if things are going to work.”

“We’re not trying to tell the district how to run their business,” he added, “but as citizens of the community, we deserve every opportunity for success.”