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Baylor College of Medicine Academy at Ryan


Baylor College of Medicine Academy at Ryan (BCMAR) is a magnet middle school in Houston Independent School District, located in the Third Ward, Houston, Texas. It is located in the former Ryan Middle School. It is in association with the Baylor College of Medicine. It is south of Downtown Houston, A press release stated that the school was to be modeled after the Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions.

On April 11, 2013 the HISD board voted to establish the school. The HISD board approved the conversion of the Ryan Middle School building into a magnet school. Jyoti Malhan was selected as the founding principal of the school.

The goal was to have at least 100 6th grade students upon its opening. Malhan used her own cell phone to personally recruit students to BCM Ryan. The school received 450 applications even though it had not yet been established; the lottery admissions process selected 250 of them. 70 students from District IV, the feeder pattern for the former Ryan Middle School, applied to BCM Ryan for that school year. This included 22 from Whidby Elementary, including 19 from Blackshear Elementary, 14 from Lockhart Elementary, 9 from Codwell Elementary, 4 from Peck Elementary, and 1 from MacGregor Elementary.

For its first year the school admitted 250 students. 11% of the students accepted to the school for the 2013-2014 school year lived in the former Ryan Middle School attendance zone. 28 of the District IV were accepted, including 10 from Lockhart, 6 from Blackshear, 5 from Whidby, 3 from Codwell, 2 from Peck, and one each from MacGregor and Thompson. The school accepted 19 students who attended charter elementary schools or private elementary schools. Based on the data, Jeffrey L. Boney of the Houston Forward Times, a black newspaper, argued that residents of the surrounding Third Ward area were being shortchanged.

Of the 250 original 6th graders, after the end of the first year 16 were expelled and sent back their zoned schools due to low academic performance. 69 of the original 250 had received academic probation during their first year. By 2015 the school covered grade 7 and the student body increased to 480. At that time it had a wait list of 900 students, and in 2015 almost 1,800 students applied to attend the school. Jennifer Radcliffe of the Houston Chronicle stated that the school, which had been ranked as the 6th best middle school in HISD, as "a rare success story among open-enrollment middle schools" in the school district.


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