Why Houston and the Texas Panhandle
By TSU Program Team · · 2 min read
On paper, Texas Southern University and West Texas A&M University make an odd pair. TSU is a historically Black university in urban Houston, serving a city of 2.3 million. WTAMU sits in Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, serving a region measured in counties rather than neighborhoods. Six hundred miles of highway between them.
The partnership works because the gap it addresses is the same in both places. Civics instruction is thinnest where school budgets are thinnest, where a single teacher covers three subjects, where there is no funded professional development in constitutional history. That describes an under-resourced Houston middle school and an under-resourced Panhandle high school equally well.
Despite our geographic differences, we both serve the underserved.
So the grant runs two cohorts in parallel — 75 urban teachers and 75 rural teachers over three years — and connects them. Regional roundtables happen in Houston and in Canyon. Online forums put the two cohorts in the same conversation. A teacher in the Third Ward and a teacher outside Amarillo end up comparing how the same primary text landed in two very different rooms.
That comparison is not a side effect. It is one of the more useful things the program produces, and one of the few ways a federal civics investment can reach both of Texas's underserved edges at once.