Margaret Long Wisdom High School

Margaret Long Wisdom High School is a publicly funded secondary school located in Southwest Houston, Texas, United States. It is part of the Houston Independent School District, the seventh largest school district in the United States.
Wisdom is a public admission school and enrolls grades 9 through 12. The school serves the neighborhoods of Uptown, Briargrove, Westchase, and Gulfton areas of the city of Houston.
The school is named after teacher Margaret Long "Tiny" Wisdom.

History

Early history

Wisdom High School was originally Robert E. Lee Senior High School, named after Robert E. Lee. It opened in 1962 to relieve high attendance at Lamar and Bellaire High Schools. Lee's first principal, Woodrow Watts, was previously the principal of Lamar. After its opening, Lee became Lamar's primary athletic rival. At that time, Lee High School had a white and mostly affluent and suburban student body.
For its first 25 years, Robert E. Lee High School built a comprehensive suburban high school, drawing students primarily from Afton Oaks, Tanglewood, Briargrove, Briarcroft/Briarmeadow, and Rivercrest/Briargrove Park/Walnut Bend neighborhoods, all south of Buffalo Bayou.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy's Robert E. Lee chapter 186 supported the school in its early years; it donated portraits of Lee, gave American Civil War-related books to the library, and gave the school a rebel flag. The school's symbol is the Lee family coat of arms, which has a squirrel on the top holding a nut.

Post-1980s

As times changed, the demographic of Lee's student body shifted. As of 2008, it was made up predominantly of first- and second-generation 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 Hispanic students from the south zone 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 the school having the lowest rate of English fluency in Houston.
Lee's student body was relieved of about 1,000 students when Westside High School, about west of Lee, opened in 2000, removing the last significant numbers of middle-class students and non-Hispanic White students.
Around 2000 the school dropped "Robert E." from its name, removed its portraits of Robert E. Lee, and changed its logo to a four-point, star-bodied person. Principal Steve Amstutz said around that year, "People think we stole it from Cingular." The star in the logo juggles 10 balls, representing the school's 10 learning communities established around that year. The learning communities were part of a $68 million Houston ISD initiative to personalize and improve high schools throughout the district, reflecting a national trend of personalizing education in high schools.
Newcomer Charter 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.
According to Houston ISD's 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, Houston ISD was required to provide free tutoring to low-income students at Lee because for three consecutive years, Lee did not meet the academic targets set by the federal No Child Left Behind act. 2,912 students at Lee High School, Marshall Middle School, and Kay On-Going Education Center qualified for the tutoring. The tutoring, which covered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, began on February 4, 2006. On the three campuses, 74 students enrolled in the tutoring program. Mercedes Alejandro of the group Parents for Public Schools accused Houston ISD 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.
In the summer of 2007, YES Prep Lee—a charter middle school—began leasing space on the third floor of Lee High School, paying $65,000 annually. YES Prep intended to grow its school to around 700 students in grades 6 through 12 with 30 classrooms. YES and charter officials wanted state officials to pass a bill allowing schools occupying the same campus to share test scores; the bill failed.
In 2008, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates visited Lee and YES Prep.
In December 2009, YES Prep relocated all 400 students in the Lee program, and in January 2010 the board of YES Prep voted to terminate its partnership with Lee High School. YES Prep Lee is now called YES Prep Gulfton.
In 2010, Amstutz stopped being the principal of Lee but continued to be an employee of Houston ISD. Houston ISD did not state whether his departure was voluntary or involuntary. Paul Castro from Westside High School was transferred to become the new principal of Lee High School. Mimi Swartz of Texas Monthly described Castro as "popular and successful." However, he resigned after only three months, reportedly because Houston ISD superintendent Terry Grier "was dismissive of during a meeting." In April 2010 Grier announced that he had an improvement plan for Lee. Xochitl Rodriguez-Davila was promoted from Houston ISD's Stonewall Jackson Middle School leader to Lee's 18th principal in July 2010.
During that summer Newsweek ranked Lee among "America's Best High Schools."
The Houston ISD board voted to give the school its current name in 2016.
The school was featured on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, and principal Jonathan Trinh gave an interview on that show.
In 2019 Michelle Wagner became the principal.
In 2022 there were conflicts between students of Afghan origin and those with origins in Latin America.

Facility

In 2010 Lisa Falkenberg said "The Lee of today, with its crumbling façade and graffiti on nearby buildings, is far from the glistening school on the prairie that opened in 1962 to relieve overcrowding at prestigious Lamar High." As of 2010, one of the brick façades outside one of the entrances had bricks missing. Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle said that it was "left to gape like a toothless mouth for the past eight years." After Xochitl Rodriguez-Davila was hired as the Lee principal, she arranged a campus facelift.
During that year, Houston ISD reported that two distinct portions of the 49-year-old main school building's foundation are sinking into the ground at different rates.
However, with the passing of the 2012 Bond Proposition, Lee would become one of the first campuses to receive a new school building as soon as 2016. A new building would relieve many of the conflicts Lee was facing, similar to when Westside High School was established in 2000.

Student body

Wisdom High School had 2,260 students during the 2022–23 school year. They are drawn largely from its attendance zone, whose borders are Bellaire Boulevard, Gessner Road, Buffalo Bayou, and IH 610 West. A smaller percentage of magnet students come from multiple other zones within the Houston ISD boundaries.
The ethnic diversity breakdown of the 2022–23 student body is:

In 2022–23, 97% of the student body qualified for free or reduced breakfast and lunch under federal poverty guidelines. As of 2015, 96% of the students were classified as low-income.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee's student body consisted of affluent White Americans. These demographics continued into the 1980s and early 1990s, with students primarily coming from upper-middle and upper class affluent families. Some of the biggest names in Houston society attended or had children attending the school. Football, cheerleading, and country club sports such as swimming, tennis, and golf were significant draws with numerous awards, records, and All-American recognition. In fact, Lee was privileged to be one of only a handful of schools with an on-campus, competition-size swimming pool. Enrollment hovered around the 6,500 mark. Principal Steve Amstutz stated in 2003 that Lee's student body was "a sea of white faces. They all looked like me." In the early 1990s there were almost 2,500 students, and about 25% were classified as low-income.
As the school matured, the demographics of the students changed. By 1999 Lee was so overcrowded that many students had to use air conditioning units as chairs. Around that time, half of any given ninth grade class would not make it to 12th grade. Students fought in the hallways daily. The opening of Westside High School in 2000 removed the last significant numbers of White and upper-income students, causing the school to refocus to cater to its new population. By 2013 there were 1,416 students, with almost 33% being English learners and almost 80% being classified as low-income.
In 2010 Lee's Houston ISD school board trustee, Harvin Moore, said, "There is no high school in Houston that has a more unique and difficult challenge with respect to a significant portion of the children who attend there," citing the concentration of older immigrant students who come from third world countries and often lack basic education. Monica Rhor of the Houston Chronicle wrote that in 2015 many of Lee's students "are coping with problems at home." The school provides a weekend lunch program to give students meals on days when school does not operate.