DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say, right here in Jackson County. Now settle in, because this one starts with a teenager and ends up changing the whole state of Texas. The Little School of the 400 was an educational project — and friend, I want you to feel the weight of that modest little name, because what it accomplished was anything but modest.
The program had a simple, elegant idea at its heart: teach Spanish-speaking children a vocabulary of four hundred essential words, just four hundred, enough to let them walk into first grade and actually talk to their teacher. Actually talk to the kid sitting next to them. That was the whole dream.
Now let me tell you how it got off the ground. In the spring of 1957, a seventeen-year-old girl named Isabel Verver, a student at Ganado High School, picked up an issue of Texas Outlook Magazine. In it, she read about a man named Felix Tijerina — a successful Houston businessman and, as it happened, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC.
Tijerina had expressed his desire to see exactly this kind of program exist. Verver read those words, and she didn't put the magazine down and move on with her day. She contacted Tijerina directly.
Now here's the thing that gives this story its spine: both of them, Tijerina and Verver both, knew firsthand what it felt like to be a first-grader who couldn't communicate with their teacher or the children around them. That wasn't an abstract policy problem to either one of them. That was memory.
So they set about trying to remove that language barrier for good. They needed a curriculum, though, and that's where Baytown educator Elizabeth Burrus comes in. Burrus had spent years teaching bilingual students, and from all that experience she had formulated a list of exactly four hundred vocabulary words.
She supplied that list to Tijerina, and now they had the bones of something real. That summer — the summer of 1957 — Isabel Verver taught the pilot class right there in Ganado. And when the fall school term arrived, she had produced sixty graduates.
Sixty children who walked into first grade with those four hundred words ready to go. LULAC watched that, and they didn't hesitate. For summer 1958, they established similar classes in towns across the region — Vanderbilt, Edna, Sugar Land, Aldine, Brookshire, and Wharton.
The little school was multiplying. But Tijerina and the members of LULAC had their eyes on something bigger than a summer program that depended on private funding and the goodwill of volunteers. They worked for passage of House Bill 51 during the 56th Texas Legislature.
That bill established a state-sponsored program — preschool instructional classes for non-English speaking children — and when it passed, it eliminated the need for the privately funded Little Schools altogether. The state of Texas had picked up the torch. And then the 1960s arrived, and Head Start and other federally-funded programs eventually took the place of even that state-sponsored program.
So the Little School of the 400 gave way to something larger, and that something larger gave way to something larger still. It started with a magazine article, a seventeen-year-old in Ganado, and four hundred words. Sometimes that's all it takes.
What the marker says
The Little School of the 400 was an educational project developed to integrate Spanish-speaking school children into the mainstream public school population. The program sought to teach these children a vocabulary of 400 essential words to enable them to successfully complete the first grade. Isabel Verver, a 17-year-old Ganado High School student, read an article in a Spring 1957 issue of Texas Outlook Magazine that expressed Felix Tijerina's desire for such a program. Tijerina was a successful Houston businessman as well as the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Verver contacted Tijerina and expressed her desire to implement such a program. Both Tijerina and Verver knew what it was like to be a first-grader unable to communicate with their teachers or fellow students, and hoped to remove that language barrier. Baytown educator Elizabeth Burrus supplied a list of 400 vocabulary words to Tijerina that she had formulated from years of teaching bilingual students. Verver taught the pilot class in Ganado during the summer of 1957 and produced 60 "graduates" in time for the fall school term. Seeing Verver's success, LULAC established similar classes in towns such as Vanderbilt, Edna, Sugar Land, Aldine, Brookshire and Wharton for summer 1958. Tijerina and members of LULAC worked for passage of House Bill 51 during the 56th Texas Legislature. The bill established a state-sponsored program called preschool instructional classes for non-English speaking children and eliminated the need for the privately funded "Little Schools." Head Start and other federally-funded programs of the 1960s eventually took the place of the state-sponsored program. (2009)