Partnership Principal
Franklyn Wesley

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      When Franklyn Wesley was a young man, he decided he couldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps as a Baptist minister, but he still wanted to help young people. Thousands of Houston youngsters are grateful for that decision.

      “I didn’t think I had the skills to be a preacher,” Wesley, principal of Houston’s Booker T. Washington High School, recalls. “But I love being involved in students’ lives and seeing them achieve. It’s a privilege to have something to do with making young people into productive citizens.”

     He has had ample opportunities to do that since becoming principal of Washington High in 1969, and his track record is strong.

    Washington, the oldest traditionally Black high school in Houston, today has 1,200 students. Seventy-seven percent are African-American, 17 percent Hispanic and five percent Caucasian. Those students have earned a reputation among some of the nation’s top universities as academic all-stars and have also won their share of athletic and band awards.

   The school includes a magnet engineering school of about 400 students that grew out of court efforts to desegregate schools.

    “In 1975 the courts ordered Houston ISD to establish a school that would attract Anglo students to a predominately Black campus and at the same time address the need to bring more minorities into engineering,” Wesley recalls.

     The engineering magnet quickly established a reputation as one of the nation’s strongest academic schools with its graduates going to high quality engineering schools such as MIT, Rice University and the University of Texas. The school awards approximately $4 million in college scholarships annually.

    “Those colleges came to recruit our engineering students just like football coaches would come to recruit athletes,” Wesley reports. “Still today we are sending many of our graduates to some of the top engineering universities in the United States.”

    His engineering students have compiled a long list of accomplishments. They were the first school in the nation to have two scientific experiments carried on space shuttles. The first came in 1998 and the second five years later.

    They also participate in national robotics competitions where they must design and construct robots that compete against creations of other high schools, and they have been national champions in those events.

    Washington students also benefit from summer internships with such corporations as Exxon, Shell, British Petroleum, and others.

    “What I like most about those partnerships is that our students work as interns for two or three years, get a scholarship for college, and then come back to permanent jobs with these companies,” Wesley says.

    His students also succeed in co-curricular programs. Members of the school band were recently selected to perform with Kanye West in the sound track for the upcoming movie Mission Impossible 3.

    The Washington sports program has also collected its share of honors with the football team being a frequent participant in state playoffs and additional success in swimming, baseball, and soccer. He is especially proud of a recent sportsmanship award the school received from the Downtown Touchdown Club of Houston.

    “Ours is a well-recognized and respected school that is producing productive citizens,” Wesley says

     Wesley believes that The Principals’ Partnership is helping him and other school leaders solve the many challenges they face.

     “There are so many issues that schools face today, such as dropouts, which is a problem across the country,” he says. “The Partnership allows principals to come together to discuss solutions to those issues. Also, The Partnership allows us to do research which isn’t supported by any other organization. The Partnership is making us better school leaders.”

     More information on Washington High School can be found at www.btwashington.org, and Wesley can be contacted at [email protected]; 713-692-5947 or fax 713-696-6657.

Past Focus Principals:

Focus - Magdalena Gutierrez
Focus- Kent Bergum
Focus- William "Rick" Johnson
Focus- Ken Ball
Focus- Dan Tenuta
Focus- Charlesetta Deason
Focus- Rene Posey
Focus- Stuart Baker
Focus- Paul Smith
Focus- Christie Gestvang
Focus- John A. Butterfield
Focus- Janie Hill Hatton
Focus- Steve Warmack
Focus- Glen Clark
Focus- William Dunn
Focus - Richard Pemberton
Focus- Dr. Anthony Spivey
Focus - John Weigel