What is NES?

A primary goal of the NES model is to raise academic achievement and close achievement gaps for the highest-need students. To do this, the NES model concentrates resources and support services toward the most vulnerable students.

NES schools offer more instructional time for students who are in chronically under-performing schools and behind grade level. NES classes also provide multiple instructors for each classroom, improving the student-teacher ratio.

HISD’s seven “ Sunrise Centers ”, which are community-based student-resource hubs, are positioned near NES campuses. Mental health, medical care, food pantries, and other services are provided at Sunrise Centers.

The NES model calls for placing the best teachers in the most challenging classrooms and provides additional compensation and support for those teachers.

The average teacher salary at NES campuses is $85,000, with a $10,000 stipend. The average teacher salary statewide is $55,969. The higher salaries serve to attract and retain the best teachers.

The NES model also removes non-teaching tasks from teacher’s workloads , ensuring teachers can focus on providing quality instruction. Classroom discipline, creating powerpoints, making copies, and similar tasks are handled by teacher apprentices or principals, allowing teachers more time for instruction.

NES schools help students learn by building knowledge, perspective, and experience. For HISD graduates to get good jobs in the future, they need to know how to think critically, solve problems, work in teams, evaluate, use different types of information, and communicate effectively.

Eligible students get to travel and experience new places and cultures. This spring, eligible seventh graders will travel to Washington, D.C., and eligible eighth graders will travel to Japan for free.

Students in grades 3 - 8 take specialty elective classes in the areas of fitness, music, fine arts, 21st-century media and technology, and hands-on science.

NES students also take “ Art of Thinking ”, which teaches critical thinking skills, problem-solving, and how to evaluate information. These skills increase student understanding of their environments and allow for better decision-making.

Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small stated on X that he expected negative responses, but instead found that the 33 families interviewed were mostly “cautiously optimistic.”