Pledging Allegiance to the Texas Flag

Day: 278
High Temp: 91F

Last friday morning at 7:45am, I found myself in a large room inside a temporary building, surrounded by a few hundred children all under the age of 10 pledging my allegiance to the Texas State flag.  It was my first experience pledging my allegiance to Texas, and with all the ridiculousness going on right now in the debate on what text books in Texas should contain I was thinking to myself, "Maybe not allegiance to Texas, but Austin... okay, I feel good about pledging my allegiance to Austin."

In a state where you spend the entirety of your 4th grade social studies class learning Texas state history, it should be no surprise this is a rudimentary part of the morning at UT Elementary School, but I was a bit caught off guard, nonetheless.

This all came about as I was invited to a monthly breakfast and tour that UT Elementary School hosts for University staff, faculty and any other interested community members. It's a chance to hear from the principal about what the school is doing right, meet the crazy-smart, well behaved and articulate students, and get a peek at how UTES is working with other urban schools to improve education for the underserved. It was really cool.

The scene of my allegiance pledging was the morning school-wide assembly. It's just 5-10 minutes each morning where the school comes together as a community to pledge allegiance in English and in Spanish, (and not just to Texas, but to the US flag as well), sing their school song (with UTES appropriate lyrics set to "The Eyes of Texas"), recite their "peace code" and hear any school announcements.  If it's your birthday, the whole school will sing to you at assembly (as happened for little Francisco the morning I visited). And if it's Friday you also get to hear a joke from one or two of the kids as a part of what they call "Friday Funnies".

The school is truly a model of how amazing urban education can be, if you just have a little money, and the luxury of small classroom sizes.  Of course, so few urban schools have those luxuries, so it was good to see how dedicated this school is to working with teachers and administrators from other Austin public schools, and how they supplement the teaching degree programs here at UT with unparalleled hands-on opportunities in the classrooms.

With their emphasis on early interventions (physical, behavioral, psychological, etc) and a thing they call "Social and Emotional Learning", this school is doing so much right. You can see the proof in the respect the kids have for themselves, their teachers and their school.  I was mightily impressed by these "Little Longhorns."