Segregating the Past from the Present

“Remember, you are supposed to be helping each other, not insulting each other,” Pamela Henderson, says with authority as she surveys the almost 30 students in her eighth-grade classroom. Henderson's students duly nod their heads.

The students, seated in wooden desks arranged in groups of four, help each other solve compound inequalities. A tall young lady leaves her desk and approaches Henderson. 

"Ms. Henderson, number twelve doesn't make sense," she says.

Henderson tells her to ask a classmate who finished the problem, a teaching technique often called peer teaching or collaborative learning.

"But he talks too fast,” the student replies.

“Just try and listen,” Henderson says. Her voice changes, from authoritative to nurturing.

The veteran teacher says using a stern "teacher voice" helps her manage the classroom, but she also recognizes that certain situations call for a more nurturing approach. Her goal, she says, is to create a structured environment where her students know their expectations, feel supported and feel safe. She understands structure and nurture do not always show up in the lives of students outside her Kealing Middle School classroom.

 Kealing resides in a gentrifying pocket of East Austin. The surrounding blocks house both an artisanal pizza shop frequented by mustached hipsters and a public housing project. 

The school opened its doors in 1930 as the first junior high school for African-Americans in the city.  Thanks to racially restrictive housing covenants, the surrounding neighborhood became almost all black at the time. Kealing served as the only middle school option for African-Americans students in Austin.  

Henderson, an African-American woman with more than two decades experience as a teacher and school administrator, understands the history of racial discrimination in Austin schools and feels like she can make things a little better for her minority students.

 “My dad was military so I am very regimented and a lot of these kids that’s what they need. They need schedules and regiment because their lives are chaos. They live with this person, or their uncle, or whoever. They ride the city bus. If they don’t have money, then they don’t come to school,” Henderson said.       

Despite an outcry from black students and parents, the school district announced it would close Kealing in 1971. In an attempt to integrate schools the district shut Kealing down and bussed black students to schools across town. Residents say the change was a blow to the cohesiveness of the neighborhood.

In 1986, the district reopened Kealing and added a magnet component to the school. Students attending Kealing either live in the surrounding neighborhood and attend its academy program, or were accepted into the magnet program and reside in different parts of Austin.

However, Kealing struggles to escape its history of racial segregation. The mostly white and Asian students who attend the magnet program engage in little interaction with the rest of Kealing's mostly black and Hispanic students.

Henderson says the legacy of this racial history impacts Kealing's classrooms and hallways today.

“When I first came here the kids were always saying, ‘Why you talking white?’ and I’m like ‘What are you talking about? There is no talking a color, you guys. Oh! Because I speak proper it’s white and if I jack up the language then it’s black?" Henderson said.

At Kealing mostly white and Asian students populate the magnet program and help skew the school’s achievement statistics. For STAAR testing in all subjects, only 38 percent of black students met or exceeded their progress level from the previous year. On the other hand, 85 percent of white students and 89 percent of Asian students met or exceeded progress in Kealing.

Academy students also show lower numbers for postsecondary readiness. 15 percent of black students and 55 percent Hispanic students met the standard in two or more subjects. While 96 percent white and 98 percent Asian students met the same standard.

“The atmosphere was very different and part of the reason was this school was very segregated,” Henderson said as she recalls her impressions of the school.

In 2007, the district even proposed a plan to divide Kealing into two separate schools, but instead it remained the same. At the time, the magnet program enrollment was 8 percent black, 26 percent Hispanic, and 54 percent white students.

This demographic reality blew away Henderson during her first faculty meeting.  All the teachers were in the cafeteria, Henderson said, and then the Principal addressed the group.

“Ok all the magnet teachers, we are meeting here,’ she said, and all the white teachers went over there and all the minority teachers went over here and I was so mad and upset that I went to the principal,” Henderson said.

Since it started, Kealing has retained the “separate but equal” appearance focused around the magnet and academy program. Principal Kenisha Coburn developed a group called the “Programmatic Diversity Committee,” made of faculty from both programs (including Henderson), as a way to discuss and battle segregation issues still existent within the school.

“So we look at [topics] like, ‘Why are there fewer black students identified as gifted?’ or ‘building boys into men’ because a lot of our population doesn’t have men in their lives…We’ve had arguments. We’ve had crying,” Henderson said.

Students began enrolling in new classes which mixed students from academy and magnet programs to learn social and emotional skills to help them in their day-to-day lives outside the classroom. These new courses target conversations around safety and bullying among other issues middle school students might face. The elective courses also mix students from both programs as a way to desegregate the school.

“What [Kealing is] trying to do,” Henderson said, “is have a sense of pride in the school because a lot of minorities and lower socioeconomic [people] don’t see school as a positive thing or that learning is fun and that it gets you further in life. A lot of them don’t see that, so we’re trying to teach [students] that. We’re still learning as adults and teachers. You never stop learning. We’re trying to show [the students] how all of this applies in life because they’re always like, ‘Miss why do we have to know this? I’m going to work in my uncle’s garage,’ ‘No you’re not. You’re going to be my lawyer’ I joke like that. It’s just kind of to get them to think differently.”

Prior to her transition to East Austin, Henderson served as teacher and assistant principal in the Arlington area. She notes how her military background helped her with the transition and how it influenced her teaching style by instilling structure into her students.  “I always tell the kids when I start teaching, ‘I’m teaching you life lessons and algebra,’” she said.