The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

Senior Signing Day Should Be A National Holiday

May 02, 2011 by Mark DiBella

I have decided to make it official. Senior Signing Day is now a national holiday. I haven’t actually gotten this approved by anyone but I have emailed the President, so I’ll let you know when I find out more. Given that I look forward to SSD more than my own birthday, I’ve decided it needs to take its place as a fully recognized holiday. In fact, as I was heading to SSD on Friday, I started making a list of my favorite days every year. It was crazy to realize that next to Christmas and Thanksgiving, SSD is arguably my favorite day of the year. Of course, the last day of school is a close 4th.

For those of you that have never attended a Senior Signing Day, you should put next year's event on your calendar.  Senior Signing Day started as a way to honor our graduating seniors for the

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YES Prep Ranks in the Top Ten of Houston Chronicle’s Annual School Report Card

April 18, 2011 by Chris Barbic

Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle and Children at Risk released their annual School Report Card. We were thrilled to see that YES Prep Southeast was once again ranked a top ten high school in Houston, placing sixth on the list. YES Prep has been ranked on this list ever since Children At Risk and the Houston Chronicle first teamed up to create it. Starting last year, the rankings also began including the top middle schools in Houston. ALL of our eligible campuses ranked in the top 25—on a list that includes over 265 area schools. We were particularly excited to see our YES Prep Southwest campus ranked 5th on this list. As the national debate about public education and charter schools continues, we were also pleased to see that four of the top ten schools on the list were state and

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YES Prep and the Texas Budget Crisis

April 13, 2011 by Ryan Dolibois

It seems that every day  there is a new article or news report about the Texas budget crisis. As the news has highlighted, lawmakers in Austin are currently grappling with a budget shortfall that could be as high as $27 billion for the biennium.  The vast majority of the state budget is allocated to education and health/human services, so cuts to state education funding are inevitable.

Since we are a public school system, YES Prep is tracking this budget issue very closely. According to a recent study conducted by R.C. Wood & Associates, Texas charter schools annually receive up to $2,000 less per year, per student than traditional school districts across Texas. This means that the proposed budget cuts could affect us even more severely than traditional districts, depending on how

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YP Brays Oaks Visits University of Houston for It’s Second Model United Nations Competition

April 08, 2011 by Sarah Straub

March 30, 2011 is a day that should go down in YES Prep history.  Twelve students from YES Prep Brays Oaks’ campus travelled to the University of Houston to participate in their second Model UN competition. Representing Spain, Argentina, India and Qatar, these students have given up their Fridays for the past couple of months in anticipation of this competition. These students also had the privilege to hear from the Honorable Donna M. Blair, Minister Counselor of the Senior Foreign Service. She has served as Consul General in Nigeria, Mexico, Kenya, Venezuela, Ghana, Spain, Argentina and Hong Kong. She has worked in the State Department in the Bureau of African Affairs, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Bureau of Human Resources. She spoke about the opportunities that

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FROM ZERO TO INFINITY: A New Path to College Begins in Houston’s Northside

March 07, 2011 by Matt Neal

YES Prep began in the late 1990s in a parking lot east of downtown Houston, envisioned by a small group of idealistic, dedicated upstarts who wanted to make a change. Their efforts planted a seed of hope, of possibility, of city-wide transformation.

It’s more than a decade later, though, and that seed has grown into quite an expansive tree! We are past the heady days when the primary driver of student success was the sheer tenacity of those early pioneers. While grit is still an essential ingredient, YES Prep now has a fully developed college-preparatory curriculum in grades 6-12, a collaboration structure that is the envy of school systems around the country, a teacher training program that offers full certification to our early-career professionals, and eight distinct campuses

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