Ja’Bor Brisco O’Brien will always remember the looks he would get when he represented Worthing High School at football games. Students from more opulent Houston neighborhoods called him “broke” and taunted his Sunnyside upbringing. The name-calling carried weight that had nothing to do with him but was steeped in history, built long before he was born.
O’Brien paid it no attention.
“You don’t know what I go through or what happens behind the scenes,” he said. “I live in my truth, I live in reality. I have minor setbacks to stay in Sunnyside, but other than that, it’s just like waking up. I don’t really care because it’s my reality.”
Having lost his father early in childhood and been raised by a single mother, O’Brien worked at H-E-B while attending Worthing HS. He started his junior year already enrolled in dual-credit college coursework when peers told him it would not work out, that he was not going to graduate with a degree.
This spring, O’Brien will walk out of Worthing with an associate degree, a certificate in agriculture studies, a sturdy repository of memories, and a plane ticket to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he will study sociology and cybersecurity at Macalester College.
“To get comfortable, you have to be uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t want to live in my parents’ shadow or just stay in Houston. I want to get away. And I definitely want to come back to give back to my community.”
Associate degrees and IBCs, with a long road ahead
As Houston ISD’s Class of 2026 prepares to cross the graduation stage, more than 500 seniors districtwide will do so with associate degrees, and over 7,800 students will graduate with industry-based certifications (IBCs).
Still, the school district has yet to make gains on the SAT. Worthing, along with Wheatley and Scarborough high schools, performed the worst on SAT math within HISD. The three schools earned average scores at or below 380 in 2023-24, and five students met the TSI criteria for the SAT math section last year, accounting for 3% or less of test takers.
For six decades, Worthing campus has been a landmark in Sunnyside, one of Houston’s oldest black communities, a few miles south of downtown. The school comprises roughly 750 students with a majority belonging to Black (506) and Brown (217) communities.
It is part of Superintendent Mike Miles’ controversial New Education System (NES) model, which includes a centralized curriculum, timed instruction, heavily monitored teacher performances, and targeted interventions. This model involves daily 45-minute “Multiple Response Strategies” during which principals and assistant principals visit classrooms to observe, 10 minutes of Demonstration of Learning (DOL) or mini-quizzes, and 35 minutes of follow-up teaching.
Those who master the DOL proceed to “team centers”, which were previously HISD libraries, to practice more advanced exercises supervised by learning coaches. Those who cannot master the DOL remain in the classroom for a “second teach,” during which teachers review concepts students need to grasp.
The campus has also experienced high levels of teacher separations, among the highest in the school district.
Students, under conditions of anonymity, told the Defender that frequent changes to the teaching staff and strict guidelines for monitoring them cause stress among students and instructors alike.
Principal Alexandria Gregoire explained that seniors have weekly graduation support meetings with their 12th-grade counselor about grades, certifications, AP exams, and associate degrees.
Less than 10% students in Worthing HS passed the AP exams during the 2023-24 school year.
“Those graduating with their associate degree will save them thousands of dollars; they’re entering with two years of credits,” Gregoire said. “They can immediately start working on whatever career they want to go into and save them money and time, especially if they want to go into graduate degrees…Right now we have about 150 seniors, so they’re just our priority.”
Beyond the associate degree cohort, other Worthing seniors are walking out with IBCs in fields like web design, networking, hospitality management, and entrepreneurship, or certifications that represent level-one licensing in those industries.
Worthing’s academic programming spans:
- Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
- Business, Marketing, and Finance
- Hospitality and Tourism
- Information Technology
“This school taught me life lessons”
Worthing’s student population size, O’Brien said, turned out to be its greatest strength.
He pushed back against the assumption that a majority-minority school in Sunnyside cannot compete with larger campuses across the city.
“If I went to bigger schools like Shadow Creek [Alvin ISD], I feel like I would never learn life lessons,” he said. “But going to this school, I feel like it taught me many life lessons. It bought me many more opportunities that a bigger school wouldn’t. I’d be overlooked. But this school…I can be myself when I walk in. I can ask for help without feeling ashamed. I can come to my administrators and my counselors and actually vent to them about what’s going on in my real life.”
“Life will throw obstacles, but don’t be one of those obstacles that will be thrown later on. Don’t sit there and wait for life to come and grab you.”
Ja’Bor Brisco O’Brien, student at Worthing High School
His message to younger students in Sunnyside who doubt whether college is for them is to persevere despite the obstacles posed by their circumstances. He recalled the times his peers told him he would not graduate as a freshman.
“Life will throw obstacles, but don’t be one of those obstacles that will be thrown later on,” O’Brien said. “You will go through things in life. You have to live in your truth. Do not look back. Don’t sit there and wait for life to come and grab you. You gotta go…that’s what I’m doing.”
Other Worthing seniors also took up the school’s Career and Technical Education offerings.
Ezekiel Scott is heading to the University of Houston to study computer information systems, armed with certificates in web design (HTML and CSS) and networking.
Yordi Carbajal, who took hospitality management and marketing courses, earned a general management certificate and plans to major in hospitality at the University of Houston.
Scott, whose CTE teacher Nina Bradley Jolivet-Gronski offered a hands-on curriculum, said the classes gave him an edge before he even arrived at college.
The people behind the degrees
Assistant Principal Brittany Jackson, who is also the 12th-grade AP and Dean of Science and CTE, discussed the importance of helping underserved students pursue higher education, particularly STEM degrees.
“Our kids, usually in a lot of minority communities, you have to make that connection of instruction to real life, whether they are 100% aware of it or not,” Jackson said. “
Jackson added what it takes to serve a community like Sunnyside holistically.
“Sometimes kids don’t eat, we feed them,” she said. “As far as resources and clothes, we have that. We also have some really cool teachers that do cool things like get them opportunities to get their hair cut, to get their hair done, because expression of self is really important, and how our kids see themselves and present themselves is also really important…So whatever gap they have, we are always trying to fill it.”
Kenya Lee, the 12th-grade counselor, who calls herself the “crying counselor”, is a New Orleans native who came to Houston after Hurricane Katrina. Lee started her career with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before entering education.
“I am you,” she tells her students. “My mom was a single parent. I put those same expectations on the kids. Within them, they have absolutely everything they need to succeed. Even when you don’t feel that way, that’s okay. I’m going to remind you daily.”
