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They wanted to shut down and privatize this struggling school in Austin, Texas. The students, the teachers and school staff, the parents, union members and the community came together and transformed their school into a great family of learning. Here are some of the images and stories they shared with us.

We begin with a video the students made. (Warning:tearjerker)

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A School Worth Fighting For: Eastside Memorial High School - Lily's Blackboard

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They wanted to shut down and privatize this struggling school in Austin, Texas. The students, the teachers and school staff, the parents, union members and the community came together and transformed their school into a great family of learning. More...

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http://kxan.com/2017/06/17/johnston-hs-grads-protest-eastside-memorial-hs-move-to-make-room-for-lasa/ talk about lasa already knowing about the move and how eastide has suffered enough.

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https://www.austinisd.org/schools/eastsidememorial

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In Chicago today, parents and activists are entering the 12th day of a hunger strike over the future of Walter H. Dyett High School, a 43-year-old school in the mostly black Washington Park neighborhood, which the city has considered closing or converting to a charter school. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has been a time to consider the transformation of the New Orleans school system, where most neighborhood schools were replaced after the flood by an atomized portfolio of charter schools that draws students from across the city. And in this week's New Yorker, Jelani Cobb considers the closure of his own high school, 123-year-old Jamaica High in Queens. Starved of resources and blamed for its own low test scores and attendance, it was replaced by a few new, smaller schools.

But at Austin's Eastside Memorial High School, a new school year began for the first time in years without the familiar threat of closure, mass layoffs or reorganization from above. Its students earned a passing grade from the state last year, ending a run of more than a decade in which at least part of the campus came up short in the state's ratings. In 2008, it became the first school in Texas closed for poor test performance. Austin ISD has been frantically trying to right the ship ever since.

So on Tuesday, it was especially sweet to hear Education Commissioner Michael Williams in the school library delivering the good news: "We ain't closing the school."

Eastside Memorial's principal, Bryan Miller, who has held the job since 2011, says the school's progress shouldn't suggest that schools should simply be left alone.

Unlikely as it seemed not too long ago, students, teachers, neighborhood activists and even the state's top education official are all singing the same happy song about Eastside. What's remarkable, they all agree, is how the community has helped the school succeed where so many other reform attempts had failed. The activists who fought to keep the school open say that Eastside could be a model for how schools on the brink of being erased can make it.

The school now known as Eastside Memorial has been closed, retooled and renamed three times in the last decade. As Kimberly Reeves wrote in a 2007 Austin Chronicle story, district officials talked about closing the school, or handing it to a charter school, for years before the state finally shut it down. Once known as Johnston High, after the Texian and Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, it was rechristened Eastside Memorial when it reopened in fall 2008. Later, it was split for a time into two separate schools called Green Tech and Global Tech. Teachers and administrators came and went with each of those shakeups and name changes. Students could never be sure what sort of school they'd have to return to each fall. Or even if there would be a school.

A plan in 2011 to hand the campus to IDEA Public Schools, a charter school chain from South Texas, turned Eastside Memorial into a rallying point for parents and other advocates for Austin's black and Hispanic-majority neighborhood schools, who said they'd been ignored by the district for far too long. The next year's school board election became a referendum on the IDEA takeover, and three new trustees were elected who tipped the board's majority against the plan. The school district solicited input from East Austin principals and community leaders to pick another partner from outside the district. They settled on a program from Johns Hopkins University that wouldn't "turn the school upside down," as AISD Associate Superintendent Edmund Oropez put it. Commissioner Williams made a surprise appearance at Eastside's 2013 graduation ceremony to announce that he'd approved the deal; the school would stay open if it met state standards within a few years. Members of the school community were allowed to choose an improvement strategy - rather than have one imposed by the district or the state - and given time to make it work. Eastside Memorial satisfied the deal last year, meeting state standards with extra distinctions for its math scores and overall improvement.

"Things are indeed looking up," Williams told reporters in the library on Tuesday, after four students led him on a tour of the school's new programs. Eastside's graduation rate has jumped from 69 percent to 96 percent in three years. Williams said Eastside offered a lesson to the state and other districts doing school improvement work: "Being open to advice and counsel of others, and engaging the larger community in a way that gets everyone excited, and on board, and participating in the learning experience, is helpful."

The school now known as Eastside Memorial has been closed, retooled and renamed three times in the last decade.

Julian Medrano, who graduated from Eastside at the ceremony where Williams made his surprise appearance, was a high-profile advocate for his school when its prospects seemed bleakest. Now a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, he says the good press for his alma mater is long overdue. In high school, he saw how the turmoil made life difficult for his teachers. "When they're told every year that they're probably not going to be there and we might have a new principal, that's stressful," he says. "We can't just focus on learning when we have to worry about our school closing down." It's no mystery to him why test scores would suffer in an environment like that, where long-term substitutes must cover for teachers who leave mid-year, and new teachers repeat material the students have already covered.

"The kids have been at the forefront of it and they've been so graceful and impressive," says choir teacher Meghan Buchanan. "Being under a gun all the time and having all of this pressure has forced them to be strong advocates for themselves. We call it, like, our social justice campus."

Buchanan has been at the school since 2008, when it was first called Eastside Memorial. In the years that her school was billed as an objective failure, she saw a strong, supportive and accepting community that thrived despite the chaos and bad press. Teaching in a neighborhood school, she says, particularly one with 97 percent students of color, is inherently political work. She says the district's reform plans forced Eastside's teachers to take on a double role as instructors and advocates, spending their days with their students and their nights with the school board. Since Eastside's reprieve in 2013, she says Eastside has thrived in an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. "Teachers have been able to give more input than in the past. We've tried to learn from each other rather than bring in outside consultants, and the district is listening to the community more."

Eastside's graduation rate has jumped from 69 percent to 96 percent in three years.

Vincent Tovar, co-founder of the neighborhood group PRIDE of the Eastside, also describes the news as a homegrown victory over meddling forces. For years, Tovar's activism has been directed against the school accountability system that always left Eastside on the losing end. He's still against that system, he says, but he's thrilled to see Eastside finally cast as a success story. "We're celebrating a school community who worked together to make sure that it would achieve in the way that it wanted to achieve, not in the way that outsiders wanted it to succeed," he says.

Tovar says Eastside can serve as an inspiration to other neighborhood schools. "We're celebrating that we've completed a template that other communities can use in order to fight for the respect that their communities deserve," he says.

Those could even include the middle and elementary schools near Eastside, Tovar says. Martin Middle School, whose graduates go on to Eastside, has missed the state accountability standards for three straight years. He's hoping for a systemic shift away from the urge to label schools as "low-performing" and replace them or encourage students to go elsewhere. Nor is there any guarantee that Eastside will remain on the state's good side. "I don't know if anyone really feels like the state is off our back," Buchanan says. "The people who've been there, we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. They changed the accountability before, and there was nothing we could do."

Eastside Memorial's principal, Bryan Miller, who has held the job since 2011, says the school's progress shouldn't suggest that schools should simply be left alone. Eastside began a concerted reform effort in fall 2013, under a plan that the community supported, with enough time and resources from the district to help it succeed. "Johns Hopkins was picked for a reason: They really closely aligned with the things that we were already doing," Miller says. That approach includes a focus on reading and math, plus new career programs supported with extra funding from the district, and a dropout prevention effort based on early intervention and giving students a greater voice in the school.

Miller hopes that the latest round of celebration, shaking off the specter of yet another closure and reorganization, will create a positive buzz around the school that can lure students back to Eastside. Last year Eastside had an enrollment of 620 students, about a third of the school's size 20 years ago. With more students, and more money, Miller hopes to build the sort of long-term stability that can carry Eastside for years. "We have great programs that sometimes can't flourish as much as they could with more kids," Miller says. "We really do want more kids to come and choose Eastside because it is a great school."

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How Austin's Eastside Memorial High School Rallied to Save Itself

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In Chicago today, parents and activists are entering the 12th day of a hunger strike over the future of Walter H. Dyett High School, a 43-year-old school in the mostly black Washington Park neighborhood, which the city has considered closing or converting to a charter school.

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The next few days will be make-or-break for Eastside Memorial High School, as Commissioner of Education Michael Williams issues his ruling on the school's fate. Community members hope he'll see all the positives about the campus.

On May 6, the Austin ISD board of trustees picked Johns Hopkins Talent Development Secondaryprogram to be their partner at the campus. The plan is to build on the successes, not impose yet another educational model. For the community, it's a matter of Panther pride. They've been putting their paws up to show their support and their hard work, and they just want the commissioner to let them get them back down on the ground and get back to hunting higher scores, bigger graduating classes, and a brighter future.

As the Eastside graduating class takes to the stage at the Frank Erwin Center tonight, school boosters hope they will be among the first and not the last. If Williams agrees to let the campus be operated in partnership, then there will be a lot of work to do. The campus' problems have been widely reported: But less headline-grabbing have been its successes. Community members argue the district should have been talking about them for years. Instead, there's a feeling that the district has spread a feeling of negativity. It's been hard for students to feel up-beat when the district has sounded like it is tolling the bell.

Take every board agenda item about Eastside for the last two years: They start with a four page litany of doom and gloom, starting in 2008 with Johnston High School being rated Academically Unacceptable for the fifth year running, through to the administration being "concerned about the ability of the proposed partner to meet the performance requirements of the Commissioner."

Austin ISD Board President Vince Torres said he took community concerns about negativity very seriously. He said that the historical context component had only been included to give context, and since the board officially voted to move forward with Johns Hopkins, that it has been dropped as inessential. He said that the official rhetoric has very much been shaped by what is in the Texas Education Agency files, "and often times we have to make sure that we're reflecting what they're saying to us." However, moving forward, he saw hopes for a new environment and new tone of discussion, and that it would be guided by a new model that "both respects the community's desire to support this new plan, but also recognizes that there are some improvements occurring at the school as a result of work that has gone on at the school in the last couple of years."

Education Austin President Ken Zarifis said there is a narrative: "'This is a low performing school in a broken feeder, everything is negative.' Yet we know that really good things are happening in spite of all the things that have happened over the last couple of years."

These have been tumultuous times. Since the campus was re-opened as Eastside Memorial in 2008, it has been reconfigured three times. In the midst of that upheaval, its most popular and successful principal, Connor Grady was removed by the administration. After his departure, there were three principals in 18 months, and nothing damages student performance like leadership and staff shakeups.

But amidst all of this, there's one truth. Eastside's last ranking on the state accountability system gauged it Academically Acceptable. The rhetoric that it is a multi-year Academically Unacceptable campus was true five years ago, but not any more. There have been big gains have been in the TAKS scores, especially the all-important 11th grade exit scores. Preliminary scores are in for 2012-13, and if the old state accountability system had been in place, Eastside would have been two points shy of being a recommended campus. While these are still only preliminary numbers, they are unlikely to shift radically, or by more than a current of points.

Then there are highlights of the enrichment programs, like the Eastside Panther Band performing at Rachel Ray's SXSW Feedback party. Or the highly-regarded and award-winning Eastside Memorial High School Engineering and Robotics team, which beat all other Austin teams at the FIRST Robotics Competition. As the student team captain put it, "We have a bad reputation, but it's not because we did it. It's because people put it over us."

Williams has voiced concerns about the state of Eastside's middle school feeders, and whether there has been enough effort to truly align them with the secondary program. The board and the district have arguably dramatically undersold how much work has been going on around science, technology engineering and mathematics in the past couple of years. Austin Voices in Education executive Director Allen Weeks praised the work by those middle school principals, and said, "They've got lots going on about STEM, and they've done lots of planning."

Weeks is also eager to discourage the public myth that Eastside is hemorrhaging students to other campus: In fact, while students are going to other highs, such as Reagan and Austin, 107 kids have transferred to Eastside from other attendance zones. Weeks said "I think if Eastside started pulling in students the way Reagan has, in four or five years they would be at 1,100 kids."

There's an undertow of criticism that says that kids are only staying because they had nowhere else to go. One Eastside parent with a child with a learning disability countered that argument, saying she had made the active choice to keep her child at the campus where she is flourishing. She said, "Had I thought about taking my daughter out of that school before? It has crossed my mind. But it's the family atmosphere, how my daughter has felt there."

And then there is the more nebulous, harder-to-define efforts from the community. Staff, students and parents have turned up first thing in the morning to sign up to speak at board meetings last thing at night. Students have pushed their scores up, created videos, campaigned, pushed and struggled. Parents participated in the process to select Johns Hopkins. Zarifis said, "These are the kids that have been involved in civil participation, and their scores are strong. Is there a correlation there? I don't know, but it sure seems that these are kids that are vested in their school."

At some levels, it's a matter of perspective. Superintendent Meria Carstarphen has said that the social studies scores have stalled: But, as Zarifis sees it, it's hard to see big improvements when the pass rates have been over 94% since the 2009-10 school year.

So when parents and teachers gather tonight to celebrate the achievements their kids have made and continue to make, they hope that Williams will be see all those paws in the air.

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- High school football: Eastside Memorial long on heart, short on depth

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- High school football: Eastside Memorial long on heart, short on depth

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http://www.mystatesman.com/sports/high-school-football/high-school-football-eastside-memorial-long-heart-short-depth/5ZNpqV9HglD63dBUbzfyfI/
This article talks about the struggles and disadvantages about the Eastside Memorial High School football team and how despite that they still go out and give their efforts.

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History came to a halt for Eastside Memorial's boys soccer team.

Boerne survived a plethora of Eastside Memorial scoring chances before heading home the match's lone goal late in extra time to escape Nelson Field with a 1-0 win Friday in a Class 4A, Region IV area playoff game.

While the result sends Boerne (14-8-4) into the third round, the Greyhounds gutted a gritty Eastside Memorial squad that notched its first postseason win since the campus - formerly known as Johnston High School - reopened in 2008. The Texas Education Agency shut down the campus the school earlier in 2008 after students repeatedly failed to meet academic standards.

"I know this hurts the guys tonight," said Eastside Memorial coach Joshua Zapata, a 2005 graduate of Austin High who has spent the past three seasons coaching the Panthers (15-4-4).

"But I couldn't be prouder of them. I want them to realize that they'll have other shots to play again. Hopefully, they take this in and use it as fuel next season."

Budget limitations forced the Panthers to compete at a Class 5A level with other Austin schools from 2014-16 despite having an enrollment of just 850, which includes 261 students from the International High School which is based on campus. Prior to this year, the team dropped down to Class 4A and emerged as a powerhouse, outscoring their opponents 121-33.

Eastside Memorial will likely enter next season as another strong playoff favorite, if a team that includes just one senior remains together, which is not a given considering the structure of the school.

Students and graduates from IHS make up the majority of the team, but a student that completes the required two years of intense English-immersion classes will have the opportunity to attend a high school in his own attendance zone within the Austin school district.

But next season wasn't on the minds of the Panthers' players as they laid sprawled across the turf following the final whistle. Eastside Memorial dominated possession and had a 10 more shots on frame than Boerne, who had five shots against Panther keeper Osnan Orellana Torres.

"I told the guys that anything can happen in soccer," Zapata said. "You can't talk about whether you should have won or you could have won. You can dominate and have 900 shots to 1 and still lose the game."

Some of Eastside Memorial's best chances came during a flurry of shots by Augustin Mejia Macias and Jonathan Benitez-Flores in the match's first five minutes. But Boerne, which lost to the Panthers 3-2 in an early-season scrimmage, survived that onslaught with a packed-in defense and the occasional counterattack. The frustration seemed to mount for a Panther team that had not been shut out all season; instead of dissecting Boerne's defense with crisp passing and quick runs like they did early in the match, the Panthers began relying on long shots and desperate balls into the box.

One long shot by Cristofer Chinchilla Calderon almost found the back on the net midway through the second half, but Boerne keeper Harvey Sanchez made a diving save.

Both teams traded chances in extra time before Tyler Rahn found space on the far post and headed in the winning goal on a corner kick from Alonso Hernandez with five minutes left in extra time.

AREA-ROUND PLAYOFF RESULTS

BOYS

* Class 6A

Hendrickson 1, Klein Forest 0

Aldine Nimitz 5, McNeil 0

Pflugerville 3, Aldine Eisenhower 0

S.A. Jay 0, Westlake 0 (Jay 4-3 PKs)

Lake Travis 4, S.A. Stevens 2

Stony Point 2, Aldine MacArthur 1

* Class 5A

Waco High 2, Connally 2 (Waco wins PKs 4-3

Austin High 1, S.A. Memorial 0

A&M Consolidated 3, Georgetown 1

Richmond Foster 2, Marble Falls 0

* Class 4A

Boerne 1, Eastside Memorial 0

Bandera 1, Liberty Hill 0

Canyon Lake 2, Salado 1

GIRLS

* Class 6A

Round Rock 2, Klein Oak 1

Vandegrift 4, Schertz Clemens 0

Westlake 2, S.A. Brandeis 1

Klein 1, Westwood 0

Hendrickson 1, Houston Memorial 1 (Hendrickson 5-4 PKs)

Cedar Ridge 3, Klein Collins 0

* Class 5A

College Station 1, Cedar Park 0

Hutto 3, Jacksonville 1

Austin High 4, Richmond Foster 0

Dripping Springs 4, S.A. Highlands 0

Rouse 3, A&M Consolidated 0

Cedar Creek 6, Waco University 1

* Class 4A

Salado 6, Canyon Lake 1

Liberty Hill 3, Fredericksburg 0

Boerne 5, Burnet 0

Wimberley 1, Giddings 0

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Historical season ends for Eastside Memorial's boys soccer team

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History came to a halt for Eastside Memorial's boys soccer team. Boerne survived a plethora of Eastside Memorial scoring chances before heading home the match's lone goal late in extra time to escape Nelson Field with a 1-0 win Friday in a Class 4A, Region IV area playoff game.

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becoming the first green school in Texas

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AUSTIN, Texas -- A local high school is being recognized by the National Wildlife Federation for its environmental efforts.

The organization named Eastside Memorial High School the first Green Flag High School in Texas.

Eastside Memorial began the Keep Eastside Beautiful project in 2014.

Since then, the school conducted a waste audit on itself and found 82 percent of its waste was recyclable or compostable.

Eastside Memorial students made recycling bins available in each class, and built 3D display boards to remind the community to recycle.

The green flag was raised yesterday after the East Austin school was honored as a 2016 Zero Waste Champion.

"It's very breathtaking, and incredibly satisfying to see how much effort we put into it being manifested into... these very elegant projects that we worked on, that we produced, that we brainstormed," said Alex De la Cruz.

Eastside Memorial High School was also awarded the Bright Green Future grant.

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Eastside Memorial Honored For Environmental Work

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AUSTIN, Texas -- A local high school is being recognized by the National Wildlife Federation for its environmental efforts. The organization named Eastside Memorial High School the first Green Flag High School in Texas. Eastside Memorial began the Keep Eastside Beautiful project in 2014.

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Carlos- How Eastside became a green school 

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Carlos- How Eastside became a green school 

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http://keepaustinbeautiful.org/EastSideChickens2015

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Carlos- this is a student body and it tell our diffrent race here at eastside 

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Carlos- this is a student body and it tell our diffrent race here at eastside 

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https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/texas/districts/austin-independent-school-district/eastside-memorial-at-the-johnston-campus-18625/student-body

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Click here to see this school's feeder pattern

This feeder pattern represents the path students take as they advance to high school. Each child's exact path is determined by his or her home address. To find out where your child will attend, click on the school finder below the feeder pattern.

2016 STAAR Passing Rates

2016 Accountability

Met Standard

2016 Distinction Designations

Student Progress

Source: Texas Education Agency

2016-17 Student Demographics "

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Eastside Memorial Early College High School

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This feeder pattern represents the path students take as they advance to high school. Each child's exact path is determined by his or her home address. To find out where your child will attend, click on the school finder below the feeder pattern.

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Press conference after the school met test standards in 2015

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- Save East Austin Schools

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- Save East Austin Schools

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http://www.fox7austin.com/news/local-news/local-high-school-getting-national-attention-for-its-recycling-and-composting-efforts Talks about Eastside Memorial going green, through the students' efforts.

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https://www.texasobserver.org/how-austin-eastside-memorial-high-school-was-saved/
https://www.texasobserver.org/how-austin-eastside-memorial-high-school-was-saved/
https://www.texasobserver.org/how-austin-eastside-memorial-high-school-was-saved/
lilly, jonathan, and agustin

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- An Eastside Education

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Isaias Cervantes & William Norwood- An Eastside Education

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http://www.klru.org/eastside/ Talks about Eastside Memorial/Johnston's history and how through it came a time where Johnston was officially closed and recently the newly renamed school Eastside Memorial was faced with closure. With the extra efforts of the staff and John Hopkins University, we were able to meet and exceed TEA academic requirements.

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Year 2015
Texas Observer
About Eastside turnaround to stay open

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In Chicago today, parents and activists are entering the 12th day of a hunger strike over the future of Walter H. Dyett High School, a 43-year-old school in the mostly black Washington Park neighborhood, which the city has considered closing or converting to a charter school. The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has been a time to consider the transformation of the New Orleans school system, where most neighborhood schools were replaced after the flood by an atomized portfolio of charter schools that draws students from across the city. And in this week's New Yorker, Jelani Cobb considers the closure of his own high school, 123-year-old Jamaica High in Queens. Starved of resources and blamed for its own low test scores and attendance, it was replaced by a few new, smaller schools.

But at Austin's Eastside Memorial High School, a new school year began for the first time in years without the familiar threat of closure, mass layoffs or reorganization from above. Its students earned a passing grade from the state last year, ending a run of more than a decade in which at least part of the campus came up short in the state's ratings. In 2008, it became the first school in Texas closed for poor test performance. Austin ISD has been frantically trying to right the ship ever since.

So on Tuesday, it was especially sweet to hear Education Commissioner Michael Williams in the school library delivering the good news: "We ain't closing the school."

Eastside Memorial's principal, Bryan Miller, who has held the job since 2011, says the school's progress shouldn't suggest that schools should simply be left alone.

Unlikely as it seemed not too long ago, students, teachers, neighborhood activists and even the state's top education official are all singing the same happy song about Eastside. What's remarkable, they all agree, is how the community has helped the school succeed where so many other reform attempts had failed. The activists who fought to keep the school open say that Eastside could be a model for how schools on the brink of being erased can make it.

The school now known as Eastside Memorial has been closed, retooled and renamed three times in the last decade. As Kimberly Reeves wrote in a 2007 Austin Chronicle story, district officials talked about closing the school, or handing it to a charter school, for years before the state finally shut it down. Once known as Johnston High, after the Texian and Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, it was rechristened Eastside Memorial when it reopened in fall 2008. Later, it was split for a time into two separate schools called Green Tech and Global Tech. Teachers and administrators came and went with each of those shakeups and name changes. Students could never be sure what sort of school they'd have to return to each fall. Or even if there would be a school.

A plan in 2011 to hand the campus to IDEA Public Schools, a charter school chain from South Texas, turned Eastside Memorial into a rallying point for parents and other advocates for Austin's black and Hispanic-majority neighborhood schools, who said they'd been ignored by the district for far too long. The next year's school board election became a referendum on the IDEA takeover, and three new trustees were elected who tipped the board's majority against the plan. The school district solicited input from East Austin principals and community leaders to pick another partner from outside the district. They settled on a program from Johns Hopkins University that wouldn't "turn the school upside down," as AISD Associate Superintendent Edmund Oropez put it. Commissioner Williams made a surprise appearance at Eastside's 2013 graduation ceremony to announce that he'd approved the deal; the school would stay open if it met state standards within a few years. Members of the school community were allowed to choose an improvement strategy - rather than have one imposed by the district or the state - and given time to make it work. Eastside Memorial satisfied the deal last year, meeting state standards with extra distinctions for its math scores and overall improvement.

"Things are indeed looking up," Williams told reporters in the library on Tuesday, after four students led him on a tour of the school's new programs. Eastside's graduation rate has jumped from 69 percent to 96 percent in three years. Williams said Eastside offered a lesson to the state and other districts doing school improvement work: "Being open to advice and counsel of others, and engaging the larger community in a way that gets everyone excited, and on board, and participating in the learning experience, is helpful."

The school now known as Eastside Memorial has been closed, retooled and renamed three times in the last decade.

Julian Medrano, who graduated from Eastside at the ceremony where Williams made his surprise appearance, was a high-profile advocate for his school when its prospects seemed bleakest. Now a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, he says the good press for his alma mater is long overdue. In high school, he saw how the turmoil made life difficult for his teachers. "When they're told every year that they're probably not going to be there and we might have a new principal, that's stressful," he says. "We can't just focus on learning when we have to worry about our school closing down." It's no mystery to him why test scores would suffer in an environment like that, where long-term substitutes must cover for teachers who leave mid-year, and new teachers repeat material the students have already covered.

"The kids have been at the forefront of it and they've been so graceful and impressive," says choir teacher Meghan Buchanan. "Being under a gun all the time and having all of this pressure has forced them to be strong advocates for themselves. We call it, like, our social justice campus."

Buchanan has been at the school since 2008, when it was first called Eastside Memorial. In the years that her school was billed as an objective failure, she saw a strong, supportive and accepting community that thrived despite the chaos and bad press. Teaching in a neighborhood school, she says, particularly one with 97 percent students of color, is inherently political work. She says the district's reform plans forced Eastside's teachers to take on a double role as instructors and advocates, spending their days with their students and their nights with the school board. Since Eastside's reprieve in 2013, she says Eastside has thrived in an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. "Teachers have been able to give more input than in the past. We've tried to learn from each other rather than bring in outside consultants, and the district is listening to the community more."

Eastside's graduation rate has jumped from 69 percent to 96 percent in three years.

Vincent Tovar, co-founder of the neighborhood group PRIDE of the Eastside, also describes the news as a homegrown victory over meddling forces. For years, Tovar's activism has been directed against the school accountability system that always left Eastside on the losing end. He's still against that system, he says, but he's thrilled to see Eastside finally cast as a success story. "We're celebrating a school community who worked together to make sure that it would achieve in the way that it wanted to achieve, not in the way that outsiders wanted it to succeed," he says.

Tovar says Eastside can serve as an inspiration to other neighborhood schools. "We're celebrating that we've completed a template that other communities can use in order to fight for the respect that their communities deserve," he says.

Those could even include the middle and elementary schools near Eastside, Tovar says. Martin Middle School, whose graduates go on to Eastside, has missed the state accountability standards for three straight years. He's hoping for a systemic shift away from the urge to label schools as "low-performing" and replace them or encourage students to go elsewhere. Nor is there any guarantee that Eastside will remain on the state's good side. "I don't know if anyone really feels like the state is off our back," Buchanan says. "The people who've been there, we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. They changed the accountability before, and there was nothing we could do."

Eastside Memorial's principal, Bryan Miller, who has held the job since 2011, says the school's progress shouldn't suggest that schools should simply be left alone. Eastside began a concerted reform effort in fall 2013, under a plan that the community supported, with enough time and resources from the district to help it succeed. "Johns Hopkins was picked for a reason: They really closely aligned with the things that we were already doing," Miller says. That approach includes a focus on reading and math, plus new career programs supported with extra funding from the district, and a dropout prevention effort based on early intervention and giving students a greater voice in the school.

Miller hopes that the latest round of celebration, shaking off the specter of yet another closure and reorganization, will create a positive buzz around the school that can lure students back to Eastside. Last year Eastside had an enrollment of 620 students, about a third of the school's size 20 years ago. With more students, and more money, Miller hopes to build the sort of long-term stability that can carry Eastside for years. "We have great programs that sometimes can't flourish as much as they could with more kids," Miller says. "We really do want more kids to come and choose Eastside because it is a great school."

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How Austin's Eastside Memorial High School Rallied to Save Itself

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In Chicago today, parents and activists are entering the 12th day of a hunger strike over the future of Walter H. Dyett High School, a 43-year-old school in the mostly black Washington Park neighborhood, which the city has considered closing or converting to a charter school.

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Jason Shen - Stanford Class of 2008 - describes 7 ways for students to be better leaders in student groups, government and athletic teams.

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https://www.texasobserver.org/how-austin-eastside-memorial-high-school-was-saved/ this talks about how Eastside students buckled down and got past the set test score goal set by AISD.

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https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/06/eastside-memorial-move/