HOUSTON - Inside buildings it shares with a church, the Lawson Academy teaches about 150 middle school students.
Drums and pianos playing in one of the classrooms echo through the hallways from one classroom. In another room where students are learning math, they can hear the dialogue from a movie dramatizing a congressional vote during the Civil War.
“We’re about the business of educating kids,” said Marthea Raney, the academy’s principal. “And why not? We’re doing our community a great service by helping to educate and get our students to be productive citizens.”
The academy bears the name of Rev. William Lawson, who’s arguably Houston’s most respected civil rights leader. He credits his late wife with dreaming up the idea for the school.
“It has done a very good job with these children because it doesn’t cherry pick,” Lawson said. “It doesn’t pick the best students. It picks any students who qualify and who are low-income.”
Now the academy’s leaders hope to expand it into not just a middle school but also a high school. So they want to buy a piece of vacant land for a new campus.
That’s why Houston city council is considering authorizing $4.7-million in federal grant money to help the academy purchase a 5 ½ acre piece of property on Scott Street, a short drive away from St. John’s Episcopal Church, where the school currently holds its classes.
The deal faces a looming deadline. Every year, Houston gets a pot of community development block grant money from the federal government. If Houston doesn’t appropriate the money within a certain time, Washington takes it back.
“We’re coming up on the deadline to expend a lot of these dollars,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner. “I think it’s April the 16th. And so we don’t want to return the dollars back to the feds.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Houston appropriated federal funds for a charter school. The mayor’s office pointed out at least two other charter schools have received community development money in the last five years.
A curious point about the proposed grant popped up in documentation provided to councilmembers, who were advised the Department of Housing and Community Development’s contact for more information is Lawson’s daughter, Roxanne, a longtime city employee.
“Would you believe that the idea didn’t even come from my daughter?” Lawson said. “She has been as much aloof from this as possible. It was a friend who told us that the city has a housing and community development department and they could help you with the money.”
If the federal grant dollars come through, Lawson hopes the first classes on the new campus will be taught in modular buildings by next January. The high school classes, he said, should begin within two years.
Houston City Council is scheduled to vote on the grant proposal Wednesday.