First Person
Very Special Ed
How the alternative school Chinquapin prepares me and other students from Houston’s inner city for college – and life in a multicultural world.
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What accounts for Chinquapin’s success? “We are very small, which allows us to know each and every student inside and out,” says Kathy Heinzerling, who works with her husband, Bill, as the school’s codirector. “We are able to give them the attention they need.” The directors and teachers live on campus and act as surrogate parents as well as counselors, social workers, and friends. “Nobody can get away with anything here,” she says. “We try very hard to deal with their needs, whether it is a family problem, an academic problem, or a discipline problem.” With 112 students in grades seven through twelve and eleven full-time faculty members, Chinquapin boasts a student-to-teacher ratio of ten to one. Along with the school’s size, Bill Heinzerling credits its excellent faculty for contributing to its success: “We search across the country for the best teachers.”
Students respond to this nurturing environment. “The thing I like about Chinquapin the most is its intimacy,” says senior Grejuana Dennis. “It is like a community, a family. It is not like going to school every day. The faculty are your friends.” Adds eighth grader Rafael Chico Trujillo: “It is like going to camp for a week. At home there are a lot of bad things going on in my neighborhood. Here, it is peaceful. At night you can see the constellations. It is like being in the country.”
Chinquapin lies on 32 acres of land that formerly served as a chicken farm. The physical layout of the campus has changed dramatically since I was a student there. Sidewalks have replaced wooden pallets, young trees shade the quadrangle, and buildings have been added and, in some cases, replaced the dilapidated ones I grew up in. There’s a new library, administrative hall, and gymnasium, and the classrooms are air-conditioned (Robert Moore did not allow air conditioning because it was too expensive). Teachers live in decent duplex houses.
Another major change has been the addition of girls. Chinquapin was an all-boys school until 1978, when one female student was admitted on a trial basis. Now almost 40 percent of the student body is female. While the boys get to spend Monday through Friday on campus and sleep in dormitories segregated by grade, the girls are bused to the school.
Since Chinquapin’s mission is to give poor kids a chance to go to college, most students come from the inner city of Houston. Hispanics make up 65 percent of the student body, blacks 25 percent, and Asians and whites 10 percent. The school would like to have a more balanced mixture, but it has had trouble recruiting non-Hispanic students. “The school is going after low-income students, which means that in many cases it is dealing with a single-parent environment and the little boy is the only male figure at home,” says Jarvis Johnson, a 1990 graduate who is black and who voluntarily recruits black students for Chinquapin through his work as the program director for D.A.R.E. + P.L.U.S., an after-school drug-prevention program. “Mothers don’t like to let go of their sons, especially to send them to a place where they are outnumbered,” he explains. “I try to convince them that they must let him go because he will never reach his full potential.”
For a long time people believed that Chinquapin was a reform school because, in the early years, it accepted practically anyone who applied. “We would give them a thermometer, and if they were alive, we would take them,” quips Moore. Today some 200 students compete every year for one of 35 to 40 slots available—20 of them in each new seventh-grade class, the rest vacancies in the other grades. “We love to have straight-A students, but we are also open to taking average students who have some gumption, who have motivation,” says Bill Heinzerling. “We are even open to taking a troublemaker if that student is interested in turning it around and sees the value of a good education.”
Getting into Chinquapin is a three-step process. Students and their parents must attend a recruiting meeting offered in the spring at various Houston locations. The students then take reading and math tests and are interviewed by faculty members. If they clear those hurdles, they attend a one-week summer session at the school, where they take regular academic courses and are evaluated on how well they handle schoolwork and get along with other students. Chinquapin students must be able to live, eat, study, and play together in a truly integrated community.
Once admitted, the students get one of the best bargains around. Though it costs Chinquapin about $7,000 a year to educate each student, students pay only $30 to $100 a month, depending on their family’s income, for the nine-month term. About 85 percent of the students pay the minimum; those who can’t pay even that work additional hours of chores. Money to support Chinquapin comes mainly from foundations and private donations. After years of operating on a shoestring (lack of funds almost closed the school one year), it recently completed two fundraising campaigns that raised $3.25 million in capital and boosted its endowment to $4.5 million.
Students may not have to pay much, but they have to give back to the school in other ways. Chinquapin’s motto is “Quid Pro Quo,” meaning that in return for a quality education, its students must do chores—gardening, cleaning the campus, keeping their living spaces neat—for an hour a day. Through this simple practice they learn to be self-reliant and help the school as well as themselves.
Life at Chinquapin demands discipline. An electronic bell wakes the students at 6:20 a.m., at which time they must hit the track for a couple of laps. After breakfast they hustle to clean their rooms for the 7:45 dorm inspection. Classes run from 8 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., followed by chores, sports (basketball, volleyball, soccer, tennis), a free period, dinner, study hour, and another free period. Lights go out in the dorm at 10:30 (10 for seventh graders). Watching TV is not allowed, and phone calls are limited to three minutes.
Sound harsh? Not really. Chinquapin demands, but not in a military way. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the campus. Teachers as well as students dress informally and treat one another as friends. Students run their own government and issue punishments (usually extra morning chores or detention) to troublemakers. “We don’t put a lot of unnecessary stress on our students,” says Craig Wade, a 1982 graduate who earned his degree from Colorado College and now teaches at Chinquapin. “We put them at ease, and that allows them to absorb more of what is going on in the classroom.”
The curriculum is traditional: English, history, biology, physics, chemistry, and math, which ranges in high school from algebra to calculus. The students must also take four years of vocabulary-building courses, three years of Spanish, and a senior-year course on environmental issues. Less-traditional programs are offered after classes, when students can play in a band, put on a play, or join a men’s or women’s discussion group. They can help others by joining the Peer Assistance and Leadership (PAL) program or working on community service projects such as building houses for Habitat for Humanity and cleaning beaches. Chinquapin also offers summer programs that take students to the wilderness of Colorado or to such exotic places as Ghana, China, and Greece.
There’s a tendency in us to want to make a good thing even better, and so it is with Chinquapin. The school recently bought twelve adjoining acres, where it has built a directors’ house, a science center, and two dormitories that will open next month. The student body will expand, but only to 125. “I don’t want three hundred and fifty students at Chinquapin,” says Bill Heinzerling. “We would lose a major reason for our success. I understand that there are more students who need Chinquapin, but my answer is that I wish there were more Chinquapins.”
In an ideal society, there would be.
D. Medina is the senior editor of the alumni magazine and the minority community affairs director at Rice University.
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