Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewee
Between evenings, weekends and vacations, students spend far more of their waking hours outside school than in it — and Angie Wedlick’s mission is to help Houston students make the most of that time.
Since June 2023, Wedlick has served as executive director for Breakthrough Houston, a nonprofit that provides free summer and weekend programs for hundreds Houston-area students across several local districts. Wedlick previously spent over 10 years working as a teacher, then as an administrator at two local charter schools.
Each year, Breakthrough Houston runs summer programs that blend academics and extracurricular activities for roughly 300 highly motivated rising seventh and eighth graders from lower-income families. Many of those students continue into mentorship programs with the organization that last until students graduate from college, Wedlick said.
Summer learning programs can give students an academic boost and prevent students from forgetting material from the previous school year, according to the National Summer Learning Association. But despite the benefits, a 2024 RAND Corporation study found enrollment has lagged nationwide in recent years, a challenge Wedlick’s program has addressed through tabling at community events and proactively reaching out to families recommended by school counselors, she said.
Breakthrough Houston, one of roughly two dozen Breakthrough programs across the country, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, the Houston Landing spoke with Wedlick about the state of afterschool and summer programs in the region, what has or hasn’t changed since the Houston ISD intervention and how families can plug into the organization.
The following interview has been condensed for brevity and lightly edited for clarity.
What does the ecosystem of afterschool and summer options look like for families in Houston? Are there affordable options? Where do they go to find them?
Yeah, a ton of afterschool activities. And I think what I’m seeing more of now is that districts are also providing their version of learning opportunities outside of the school day. I think those are fantastic. I think there is a wide variety depending on a student’s interest. So whether that’s arts, whether that’s sports, whether that’s academics, I think you can sort of choose a lane and find those. They range from camps, like things that families are going to pay for, to maybe more community-based opportunities that are less costly. So I do think that one of the great things about being in Houston is that you can find areas and outlets for your kiddos to participate.
If I were a parent interested in those sorts of options, where would you recommend I start?
For us (at Breakthrough Houston), what we try to do is make sure that counselors at schools know about the programs. I have tons of friends who are school counselors, and they really do invest time and energy into finding those spaces for students. So, I’d always encourage parents to reach out to the school counselors who might be able to point them in the right direction.
If you’re attending community events, a lot of our programs will have tables or pop-ups at those that you can find, like the specific applications and resources, but you get a chance to talk to the people leading those programs as well. And so if they’re at community fairs, and those types of events that are often hosted by Precinct 4 and Harris County (constables), I think they’ve all had events that we’ve attended. And there have been other programs out at those available for families to resource.
In terms of HISD … does Breakthrough Houston in any way formally partner with the district? Or is it more informal that counselors might refer students to it?
In years past, Breakthrough had a formal relationship with HISD that was supported through (pandemic stimulus funding). That funding has gone away. So I think the specific, formalized partnership also has gone away.
But what it hasn’t changed, and so this is where I’d be careful in segueing, is that it doesn’t mean that we don’t support students from HISD. Because our program isn’t funded in a fee-for-service model, we don’t generate service revenue. We’re 100 percent philanthropically funded. That means that we get the opportunity to support students from anywhere across the board, HISD included. So, many of our students are HISD students.
What we love about the program is that you might be an HISD student and you’re in a program sitting next to somebody from Spring Branch and somebody from Fort Bend, and so you really get the diversity of, hey, I’ve had different learning opportunities and different experiences in classrooms. And then those kiddos come together, and they sort of create this little microcosm of learning that is Houston Metro-wide, versus specific to a district. And we really think that that’s important for kids to experience.
And so we love our HISD partners, they’ve been incredibly supportive of Breakthrough over the years in a multitude of logistical ways. At some point in time there was space support, transportation support, all of those types of things that HISD, when they were able, have been very strong partners for us.
What was the nature of the work that Breakthrough was providing previously in HISD?
There was an HISD-specific site that was a Breakthrough HISD site. So it was only for HISD students, and it was hosted on an HISD campus. When that sort of relationship, really because of funding, when that funding went away, I think the dynamic or relationship design maybe changed a little. That was all pre-me (working at Breakthrough). So, I don’t know how confident I’d be in explaining it.
As you mentioned, there was the ending of Covid-19 relief funds. And then, related to that, there was a choice HISD Superintendent Mike Miles administration made to limit the number of outside contracts. Did the Miles administration talk to Breakthrough about what the reasoning was there?
I don’t know that it was directly connected to the change in leadership. … I think that with the ending of the funding, it was probably at that point that you’re going to come back and reassess, ‘Hey, how are we spending our money?’ And I don’t know what conversations transpired, if any related to the potential to restart the partnership under a different layer of funding. I don’t think that happened. If that makes sense, right? I don’t think somebody came and said, “Hey, (pandemic stimulus money) is ending. Let’s figure out how we might re-establish this partnership under a different budget line item.” To my knowledge, that didn’t happen. It could have been for a host of reasons, related or unrelated to that sort of change in leadership, but my guess is, as things were being edited, it was easy to just say, “OK, when things end, let’s let them end.”
Zooming out a little, when students come to y’all, whether it’s the summer or in the high school programming, what are the most common needs that students have, like academic, emotional or basic needs?
What we have are really incredible kids, but kids are experiencing the world around them in very different ways, and so we find that we end up supporting kids in some really specific areas.
Academics, you named as one of them, particularly in terms of what we see as our goal is to get you ready for what’s coming. So most of our kids are academically on grade level. What we’re thinking about is, how do we elevate the learning experiences that you have, which means that we’re trying to expose you to teaching and learning in a way that might be different than what you get in a usual classroom. Because we have that opportunity. Our class sizes are very small. It’s like 10 students per teacher, which means that we can really create lots of project-based designs. It means we can really do a lot of hands-on learning. We can offer additional extracurricular things like robotics or debate in ways that seem different than what a kiddo might get to experience in a regular school day.
The second bucket that I would name is really around social and emotional support. So we talk to our kids about things like imposter syndrome. Our high school students are coming in, they’re about to go off to college. What does it look like to be a student of color in a predominantly white institution, and how do you navigate that? And so what are the things that might come up that we can pre-support you with, if that makes sense, around going out into the world. We also have a really great partnership with the (University of Houston Adolescent Diagnosis Assessment Prevention Treatment Center) program, and they offer mental health services, counseling support for our students and families as well. So we are grateful to them, and we get to support students in that way.
Then I think the third area that we really try to focus on is what is the financial runway for accessing college. How do you find a financially friendly institution, and what does that mean for you and your family? So we spend a lot of time talking to kids about applying for financial aid, applying for scholarships, doing really direct support for those types of things.
Those are probably the three big lanes where we say, “Hey, we’re going to make sure you’re academically ready. We’re going to make sure that you thought about who you are as a human and how you’ll show up in the world, and how you should celebrate your brilliance. And then we’re going to make sure you have the financial resources to unlock the spaces to show that brilliance off.”
That’s so important. So now it’s been 30 years that Breakthrough has been doing this programming. How has the organization seen the needs or the opportunities for students evolve in that time?
Yeah, this is the painful part of the work is after 30 years of Breakthrough, unfortunately, some of that is still the same. … When things look the same after (my two decades working in education) and a pandemic, we’ve got to start to ask ourselves, “What is it that our students need, and how do we make sure that they can access the resources in post-secondary spaces?” Houston is a great economic engine. You’ve got aerospace, you’ve got medicine, you’ve got energy, you’ve got education, and you put all that in a spot, we’re so lucky. What we want to do is make sure that our students here in Houston are able to contribute to and be part of that broader economic engine. For us, that means that we’re addressing each of those needs in a personalized way.
Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Find him @by_ash_ls on Instagram and @small_asher on X, or reach him directly at asher@houstonlanding.org.
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