page_title: Margaret Long Wisdom High School
section_title: Post-1980s
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Long Wisdom High School / History / Post-1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: The official Lee High School Entrance.
context_page_description: Margaret Long Wisdom High School, formerly Robert E. Lee High School, is a publicly funded secondary school located in Southwest Houston, Texas, United States 77057. The Houston Independent School District, the 7th largest school district in the United States, operates Wisdom, a public admission school that enrolls grades 9 through 12. The school serves the neighborhoods of Uptown, Briargrove, Westchase, and Gulfton areas of the city of Houston. Houston Independent School District will submit construction documents in 2016–2017 school year. After the construction documents are submitted, They will vote to seek approval for the new school.
  The school is named after teacher Margaret Long "Tiny" Wisdom.
context_section_description: As times changed, the demographic of Lee's student body shifted. As of 2008, it was made up predominantly of Hispanic immigrants and sons and daughters of Hispanic immigrants. Lee's multi-ethnic population changes parallel Houston's immigration waves, beginning with the Vietnamese families in the early 1980s. With the change in apartment housing rules in the 1980s, both the community and the school population changed. The demographic of Lee's student body shifted significantly in the 1990s, as students from the south zone (Gulfton area) who are a majority Mexican and Central American immigrants and/or sons and daughters of Hispanic immigrants became the overwhelming majority of the student body. Lee became one of the largest 5A high schools in the region by the late 1990s.
  From 1990 to 1991 Yvonne Gonzalez, later a school superintendent, served as Lee's principal.
  Stacey Childress, author of Transforming Public Education: Cases in Education Entrepreneurship, wrote that in the mid-1990s Lee "was one of Houston's most feared schools" due to the surrounding area having one of the highest rates of juvenile crime in the state and due to being the school with the lowest rate of English fluency in Houston.
  Lee's student body was relieved of about 1,000 students when Westside High School, about 7 miles (11 km) west of Lee, opened in 2000, removing the last significant numbers of middle-class students and non-Hispanic White students. When Westside opened, residents of the Lee attendance boundary gained the option to attend Westside instead of Lee.
  Around 2000 the school stopped using the "Robert E." part of the same, and its logo became that of a four-point, star-bodied person. Steve Amstutz, the principal, said around that year "People think we stole it from Cingular." The school removed its portraits of Robert E. Lee. The star in the logo juggles ten balls, representing ten learning communities established around that year to provide personalized education to students. The establishment of the learning communities was part of a $68 million HISD initiative to personalize and improve high schools throughout the district; this reflected a national trend of personalizing education in high schools.
  Newcomer Charter High School (as of 2007, known as Liberty High School) was opened in January 2005 and housed in Lee High School. In 2006 it was scheduled to move into a new campus at 6400 Southwest Freeway (U.S. Highway 59).
  According to the Houston Independent School District October 2006 "For Your Information" newsletter, Lee was one of four high schools that took the most refugees from Hurricane Katrina.
  In the 2005–2006 school year, HISD was required to provide free tutoring to low income students at Lee because for three consecutive years, Lee did not meet academic targets, which were set by the federal No Child Left Behind act. During the school year, 2,912 students at Lee, Marshall Middle School, and Kay On-Going Education Center qualified for the tutoring. The tutoring, which covered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), began on February 4, 2006. On the three campuses, 74 students, 3% of the eligible students, enrolled in the tutoring program. Mercedes Alejandro of the group Parents for Public Schools accused HISD of not effectively communicating that the tutoring was available to the communities at the schools.
  In 2007, a study by Johns Hopkins University and the Associated Press referred to Lee among American high schools designated as "dropout factories", where at least 40% of the entering freshman class does not make it to their senior year.
  YES Prep Lee, a charter middle school, was located inside the Lee High School campus; the school planned to expand to a six through 12 campus with 30 classrooms. In the summer of 2007 the school was established on the third floor of Lee High School. YES paid $65,000 annually to lease the space. YES intended to grow its school to around 700 students. YES and charter officials wanted state officials to pass a bill allowing schools occupying the same campus to share test scor
caption: The official Lee High School Entrance.
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