HOUSTON — Summer is over for Alief Independent School District's staff and students. As the hallways fill for a new school year, our Mia Gradney sat down with the district's superintendent Dr. Anthony Mays to get answers to the questions you asked on our back-to-school survey.
Alief ISD is home to 39,000 students. It’s one of the most diverse districts in the Houston area led by Dr. Mays.
“It really is about the best instructional strategies to meet our students where they are,” Mays told us. “We have 96 different languages spoken here in Alief.”
“A parent who participated in our survey asks, ‘Will teachers and administrators be ready and prepared for this upcoming school year?’” Gradney passed along to the superintendent.
“I hope so,” he said with a chuckle. “I believe we're going to be ready. So of course, these last couple of weeks that we have before students come back, all we've been doing is training. So teachers have been getting training. Our principals have been getting training. Our administrators have been getting training. So you try to frontload all of that so that we can be well prepared to meet student needs. But even with that being said, things are going to come up, right? And guess what? We'll adjust and we'll get the training that we need to try to meet those needs, too.”
Then there are those needs outside of the classroom, like family circumstances. At least 65% of overall survey participants expressed financial concerns leading into this school year. Many inquired about free and reduced school lunches.
“Is that any indicator to the district of the financial hardships the community is going through, looking at the request and the need for those school lunches?” Gradney asked.
“Yeah, I think, you know, free and reduced lunch is always an indicator of how we're doing financially,” Mays said. “And so far at least, we're right at about 88% of our students needing free and reduced lunch. We try to, of course, keep all of our students engaged, so students usually are here from sunup to sundown or sometimes past sundown. And what we don't want is for a student to be operating on an empty stomach because we know that they're going to perform better if, you know, you got some food here.”
“Are there other opportunities? Does the school district do food distributions, food drives?” Gradney asked him.
“Good question,” Mays answered. “So we actually have a food bank, right here in the middle of a live at Hastings High School.”
Dr. Mays said the district is constantly listening to the community.
“What's going to be new for parents and students this year?” Gradney asked.
“So I think we continue to have conversations throughout our community, and you try to again be responsive to what you hear,” Mays said. “And so, believe it or not, we get a lot of concerns that are tabled about our stadium being as old as it is. And so recently we, fortunate for us, we were working on putting up a new scoreboard.”
The community's invited to celebrate the improvements at Leroy Crump Stadium on Aug. 31, just a few weeks into the new school year.”
Watch Mia Gradney's full interview with Alief Superintendent Dr. Anthony Mays here.
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