I am the proud principal of Fox Tech High School for Health and Law Professions. We are a small magnet school that serves San Antonio ISD students. We actually serve all of Bexar County, so we have kids that come outside of SAISD. Students aren’t in a place right now to really handle a traditional school day.
If kids do not have a shelter, if they don’t have food, there’s no way we’re going to get to engage them in any type of platform, whether it’s face-to-face or on the phone or virtual. So our idea was really keeping it simple for kids and focusing on a CTE type of module that allowed us to integrate math, science, social studies, and English. And then the second thing was to really reach out to kids on an SEL level to build and create activities daily where kids could engage in socio-emotional learning.
You have to know what your core values are, right? Why your school is created, what you’re doing, what your mission is. It’s really hard to stay grounded. Everything that we do in our core curriculum should always support health and law, period. So this just allowed us to reinforce what our values are, what our core, our mission statement, is. The biggest thing that I posed to the faculty and to my leaders at the beginning was Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that if we can’t meet this physiological need at the very bottom, we’re never going to get to self-actualization and into learning.