re: #56 mmmirele

Fort Bend ISD was the first school district I went to in Texas way back in 1973 and my mother absolutely HATED it with the heat of a billion suns. We’d just moved from Northern California and the culture shock was severe. They “tracked” junior high school students (where you went to classes with the same students on the same academic level) and my mother thought that was inappropriate. She was particularly livid that the junior high would not enroll me in home economics, because the guidance counselor said that was for “Mexican and black girls destined to become maids.”

I hated John Foster Dulles Junior High School and was glad to leave after four months. And yeah, it was seriously racist. Not that Klein High School was much better, although the current African-American mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, graduated from Klein in 1973.

I date back to the time when boys took industrial arts aka shop and girls took home ec. I think we had to take them in 7th or 8th grade. The other grade was art for all of us. Anyhoo, when I was in senior high, as a lark I sat for the Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year* test, because my friends and I decided it was well past time to abandon gender discrimination. Long story short, I won the prize for our high school, despite never taking home ec. The home ec teacher was a tad miffed, but she said the judges weighted the essay question more than the multiple choice Q’s, and that my essay must have been pretty good.

However, I did not move on to the state level. In retrospect, perhaps I should have.

* Or whatever it was called. It’s been nearly 50 years.