Houston Heights Schools by the Numbers, Ratings Cited to the Issuing Body

Which line does this page mean by the Houston Heights?

The Houston Heights is a neighborhood rather than a city, so it has no city limits and no single official boundary. Two City of Houston lines come closest, and this page uses the tighter of the two: the three historic districts City Council designated, Houston Heights West in December 2007, Houston Heights East in February 2008 and Houston Heights South in June 2011. Every campus named below comes off that line. Woodland Heights is a separate district in the same City layer and is not part of it.

The other City line is the larger Greater Heights boundary its planning department publishes, recognized in March 2000, and it reaches well past the three districts. An address inside it can be zoned to campuses this page does not list, Waltrip High School among them, so a house a few blocks north or west of a district boundary is a house this page cannot answer for.

The City attaches a caveat to both of those boundary layers, and it is a condition rather than a formality: the data is prepared and made available for general reference purposes only and should not be used, or relied upon for specific applications, without independent verification, and the City neither represents nor warrants its accuracy or completeness. The layer carrying the Greater Heights boundary adds that it is subject to change.

A historic district boundary and a school attendance boundary are drawn by two bodies for two purposes, so one cannot be read off the other. The district boundary decides whether exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness, and Houston ISD's attendance maps decide the campus.

What do the two figures on this page measure, and how often does each change?

The Texas Education Agency issues one overall A to F letter for each district and for each campus it rates. On its own page explaining how the ratings are decided, read in September 2026, the agency says accountability ratings are based on three domains, Student Achievement, School Progress, and Closing the Gaps, and describes the campus letter in the words below.

The agency reissues those letters every year, so a letter reads a single year rather than describing a campus for good. It released the 2026 preliminary ratings on 12 August 2026, the date its own appeals timeline gives, and the workbook that carries them holds a summary sheet for every year back to 2018 beside the current one.

GreatSchools publishes a rating of its own, on its own scale and by its own method. Its page explaining that method, read in September 2026, describes the number at the top of a school profile as a number from 1 to 10 that provides a snapshot of how a school is doing compared to other schools in the same state. The same page says the number is not a percentage and not a grade of the kind a report card carries, that a 5 means a school is performing right in line with the state average, that it is calculated from up to three themed ratings weighted by the research behind each measure and by the data available, and that GreatSchools does not rank schools against one another. Each campus page carries its own date, and the seven read for the table below are dated 29 May 2026.

Both figures attach to a campus rather than to a street, a block or a district boundary. Which campus an address is zoned to is a separate question, and Houston ISD answers that one address at a time.

What did each body publish for the seven campuses?

Houston ISD's own letter for 2026 is a B, read off the Texas Education Agency 2026 Statewide Multi-Year Ratings Spreadsheet in September 2026. Across the seven campuses whose attendance zones cover the three historic districts, the 2026 letters run A for five campuses and B for two.

Beside each letter the table carries that campus's figure out of 10, read in September 2026 on the campus pages GreatSchools publishes for Houston ISD. All seven campuses have one.

The table lists the campuses alphabetically, so a reader can find one, and never in the order of either figure. It covers the campuses inside the three districts and no others.

A row is two separate readings of one campus. The two bodies publish on different scales and by different methods, so the letter and the number out of 10 are two readings rather than one figure stated twice, and each carries the date its own publisher put on it.

Will those 2026 letters still be the letters in December?

They are preliminary until December. The agency's 2026 A-F Accountability Ratings Appeals Process and Timeline opened the appeals window on 12 August 2026 and closed it at 5pm on 11 September 2026, and it sets the final release for 11 December 2026, when, in the timeline's own words, the outcomes of all appeals are reflected in the final ratings and year counts update.

The same timeline attaches one more condition to every figure in that file: ratings and year counts are subject to change due to the results of an audit, compliance review, or investigation. A letter therefore records what the agency published on a date rather than what it will publish in December.

The agency links its own campus lookup from the same page it explains the letters on, under Find Schools, and the timeline says the public websites are updated when the final ratings are released. That is where a current letter for one campus comes from.

Which campuses do Houston ISD's maps put inside the three districts?

Four elementary zones cover ground inside the three districts, Harvard, Love, Field and Helms. Two middle schools cover it, Hogg and Hamilton. One high school covers all of it, Heights High School. That is what the district's 2026 to 2027 attendance layers return for the ground inside the City's three district boundaries, read in September 2026.

The shares in the first table are shares of that ground rather than counts of houses: each one is how much of the three districts a campus's zone covers. Helms Elementary School's share is the small one and it is not an artifact of two agencies drawing a line differently, because the sample points inside its zone reach 67 meters inside the district boundary.

Two of the four elementary zones run to both middle schools depending on the address, so an elementary campus does not settle the middle school. The district publishes a feeder layer that prints the chain for a piece of ground as a single string, and inside these three districts the same ground splits into the six chains in the second table.

Which elementary zone leads to which middle school here?

Six chains, and two elementary zones appear twice. Harvard's zone runs to Hogg Middle School. Helms's runs to Hamilton Middle School. Field's zone and Love's zone each run to both, and which one an address gets is the district's answer rather than the neighborhood's. Every chain inside these three districts ends at Heights High School.

The shares below come from the same measurement over the same ground, and each elementary zone's share in the table above is divided between its chains here. They say which combinations exist and roughly how much of the districts each one covers, and the address is still the district's answer.

How does Houston ISD decide which campus an address is zoned to?

The zone comes off the district's own attendance maps, and the district's answer for one address comes from School Navigator, the lookup it publishes at houstonisd.org. It is an application rather than a document, so the record worth keeping on a purchase file is the district's written reply for the exact address.

Houston ISD also runs on choice, in its own words: it is an open-enrollment district of choice, and it allows students to apply to schools beyond their zoned campus and to specialized academic programs across the district through a single application.

Where a campus offers magnet programming, whether an application is needed depends on the type, and the district's own definitions are the difference between a seat a child is entitled to and one a child has to apply for. A Separate and Unique School has no students zoned to the campus, which means all students must apply to attend. In a School Wide Program, all non-zoned students must apply, and zoned students do not need to apply given the full school participates in the programming. In a School Within a School, zoned and non-zoned students must apply to access the specialty programming, and zoned students do not need to apply to their zoned school to access the general education program.

Of the seven campuses on this page, the district's magnet page lists Harvard Elementary School as a School Wide Program, Helms Elementary School as a Separate and Unique School, and Hamilton Middle School, Hogg Middle School and Heights High School as a School Within a School. Field Elementary School and Love Elementary School appear in none of the three magnet tables on that page.

Helms is where two Houston ISD documents disagree, and this page prints both rather than choosing between them. The 2026 to 2027 elementary layer gives Helms Elementary School a zone that covers part of the three historic districts. The district's own magnet page lists the same campus as a Separate and Unique School, which it defines as a campus with no students zoned to it where all students must apply to attend. Both statements are the district's own and both stood in September 2026, so an address inside that zone is a question for School Navigator and for the district in writing, and nobody should read a seat there as settled.

Applying carries conditions of its own, and the district states them: some programs require students to meet an entrance requirement, priority status gives eligible applications a higher ranking in the lottery process, and sibling priority is available to families applying for entering grade levels, kindergarten, 6th and 9th, who already have a child enrolled at the requested campus and will be returning for the following school year. A student accepted into a magnet school may be eligible for free transportation if they live at least two miles from their school and live within Houston ISD boundaries.

Which of these campuses is a National Blue Ribbon School, and in which year?

Two of the seven. The U.S. Department of Education's National Blue Ribbon Schools program keeps a cumulative list of every school it recognized between 1982 and 2019, and under its Texas heading that list names Field Elementary School, Houston, 2019, and Harvard Elementary School, Houston, 2008. An award names one campus and one year, so each of those records what the Department published then.

The list carries a school's own name and its mailing city and no district column, so the district was settled from the program's own filed applications. Field's 2019 application prints 703 East 17th Street, Houston, 77008-4414 and names Houston Independent School District, and Harvard's 2008 application prints 810 Harvard Street, Houston and the same district. Both addresses match the ones the state's school directory carries for those campuses.

The other five campuses appear on none of the program's lists: not the cumulative one, and not its annual lists for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 or its page of 2024 awardees, which is the last cohort it published. Four names on the cumulative list look like a match at a glance and are high schools in Ohio, and a fifth is an elementary school in Jamestown, New York. The program's own host refuses this machine, so every one of those documents was read in the Internet Archive's copy.

What should you ask Houston ISD in writing before you make an offer?

Ask for the zoned campus at all three levels, elementary, middle and high school, for the exact street address, including a unit or lot number where there is one, and name the school year you mean. The feeder chains above are why all three: one elementary zone here can lead to either middle school.

Ask two more things in the same message. Whether any of those campuses carries a magnet designation that requires an application, because that answer decides whether a seat is a right or an application. And when the answer was last reviewed, and whether a boundary change is under consideration for that school year.

Keep the reply with the file. A seller can do the same work before listing, because the question gets asked on a Heights file and a written answer from the district is the thing you can hand to a buyer. It sits beside the other address-level records a purchase here collects: the parcel's Harris Central Appraisal District account, the Certificate of Appropriateness history where the house is inside a historic district, and the flood determination for the address.

What can this page not tell you?

Which campus a particular address is zoned to. That answer belongs to Houston ISD, one address at a time, and School Navigator is where it starts.

Whether a seat at Helms Elementary School is a zoned seat. Two of the district's own documents disagree, and only the district can settle it for an address.

The campuses for an address outside the three historic districts. The larger Greater Heights line takes in more zones at every level, and a house on the far side of a district boundary is zoned by the map rather than by the name of the area.

How big a campus is, who attends it, or how it did on any test. This page carries one figure from each of the two bodies and nothing else about a campus.

Whether the 2026 letters will stand. The agency releases the final ones on 11 December 2026 and can change one afterwards on the result of an audit, a compliance review or an investigation.

Whether an application to a magnet program will be accepted. The district decides that in its own lottery, on its own priorities and its own calendar.