West University Place Schools by the Numbers: Ratings Cited to the Issuing Body

Who publishes each figure on this page, and what does it measure?

Two bodies publish a figure about a Texas campus, and they are not measuring the same thing. The Texas Education Agency issues one overall letter, A through F, for each district and for each campus it rates. Its page on how those letters are decided, read September 2026, puts them on three domains, Student Achievement, School Progress and Closing the Gaps, and describes the campus letter this way: "This measures, for each individual school, what students are learning in each grade and whether or not they are ready for the next grade." The same row adds that the letter also shows how well a school prepares its students for success after high school.

The agency works a year at a time, publishing the method for each year in a rating manual of its own, so a letter reads one year rather than describing a campus permanently. It released the 2026 preliminary letters on 12 August 2026 in TEA Login, the agency's own secure system, and opened a thirty-day appeals window the same day.

GreatSchools is a national nonprofit that publishes a figure of its own, on its own scale and by its own method. Its page explaining that method, updated 11 May 2026 and read September 2026, calls the number at the top of a profile "a number from 1 to 10 that provides a snapshot of how a school is doing compared to other schools in the same state", says the number is neither a percentage nor the sort of grade a report card carries, and says a 5 means a school is performing right in line with the state average. The same page says the nonprofit does not rank schools in comparison with one another, and that the number is built from up to three themed ratings, weighted by the research behind each measure and by how much data is available.

Both figures belong to a campus rather than to a street, a subdivision or a city, and neither of them says anything about a house. Which campus an address is zoned to is a separate question, and the district answers that one address at a time.

Which campuses is a West University Place address zoned to?

Houston ISD draws an attendance zone for each campus, the area whose addresses that campus serves, and publishes the zones as three map layers, one for elementary, one for middle and one for high school, each named for the 2026 to 2027 school year. Each layer's own description says it provides the boundary polygons for attendance areas for that year. Read on 18 September 2026, the three layers cover the City of West University Place with a single zone at each level: West University Elementary, Pershing Middle School and Lamar High School.

A fourth layer, the district's feeder pattern, prints the chain of campuses for an area rather than one level at a time. For this city it reads West University ES, then Pershing MS, then Lamar HS, which is the district's shorthand for the three campuses above, so the chain and the zone layers agree.

Two lines are involved here and two bodies draw them. The zone lines are Houston ISD's. The city limits are the Census Bureau's published boundary for West University Place, drawn from different records for a different purpose, so an address sitting on the city line is a question for the district rather than for either map.

Houston ISD's own letter for 2026 is a B, from the 2026 Statewide Multi-Year Ratings Spreadsheet, read September 2026. The three campus letters in the table below come out of the same file, and the figures beside them were read on 18 September 2026 on each campus's own profile: West University Elementary's, Pershing Middle School's and Lamar High School's.

The table lists the three campuses alphabetically, so that a reader can find one, and never in an order of figures. Read a row as two readings of one campus, by two bodies, on two scales, each carrying its own date.

Are the state's 2026 letters final?

They are preliminary until December. The agency's own 2026 appeals timeline, read September 2026, 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 words, "The outcomes of all appeals are reflected in the final ratings and year counts update."

The same timeline attaches one 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". So each letter records what the agency published on one day, and December can still move it.

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

The district's answer for one address is a tool rather than a document. The address at houstonisd.org/schoolfinder redirects to School Navigator, the district's own address lookup, read on 18 September 2026. It arrives as an empty shell that a browser fills in, and every zone above comes off the published map layers instead. Put the address you care about into it and keep what it returns.

One thing the layers could do here and do not. The elementary layer carries a notes field that can offer a zone a choice of campus, and across the district's 156 elementary zones it is filled in on two, both carrying the same note about a choice offered elsewhere in Houston. Nothing in the three layers gives a West University Place address a second campus at any level.

A zone is not the whole of the district's process. On its School Choice pages, read September 2026, Houston ISD calls itself an open-enrollment district of choice and says a student may apply to schools beyond the zoned campus, and to specialized academic programs across the district, through one application.

Where an application is needed, the district's eligibility page, read September 2026, says some programs require students to meet an entrance requirement, that priority status gives an eligible application a higher ranking in the lottery, and that sibling priority runs at the entering grade levels, kindergarten, sixth and ninth, where a sibling is already enrolled at the requested campus and returning the following year.

Two of these three campuses carry magnet programming, which the district files under one of three types, and the type decides who has to apply for what. Pershing Middle and Lamar High are both listed as School Within a School, which the district defines this way. West University Elementary appears in none of the three tables on that page, and the elementary zone layer records its magnet status as No.

Has the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program named any of these three campuses?

No, on the program's own lists. The U.S. Department of Education runs the program, and it publishes a cumulative list of every school it recognized from 1982 through 2019, then a list for each year after that. None of the three campuses here appears on that cumulative list, on its 2020 list, its 2021 list, its 2022 list or its 2023 list, or among its 2024 awardees, which is the last cohort the program has published.

That was a check on the campus name, and it is worth saying what it turned up. Four Texas entries on the cumulative list carry the name Lamar, in El Paso, Austin, Irving and Corpus Christi, one more El Paso campus of that name was recognized in 2021, and the two entries named Pershing are in Missouri and Oklahoma. None of them is a Houston ISD campus.

Every link in this section opens the Internet Archive's copy, because the archive is where these documents were read: the program's own address refused the request on 18 September 2026.

What should you put to the district in writing before an offer?

Name the exact street address, including a unit or lot number where there is one, and name the school year you are asking about. Ask for the zoned campus at all three levels, elementary, middle and high school, rather than only the one you need first.

Ask when the district last reviewed that answer, and whether a boundary change is under consideration for the year you named. These maps are published a school year at a time: the three layers above were created in February 2026 and last changed in July 2026, and the district still publishes earlier sets beside them, back to the 2023-2024 school year.

Keep the reply with the rest of the file. A seller is better off asking first as well, because the question arrives with the first buyer either way, and the district's own answer settles it faster than a recollection does.

What can this page not tell you?

Which campus your own address is zoned to. The district settles that for an address, through the lookup above and its written reply.

Whether the 2026 letters will stand. The final set arrives on 11 December 2026, and a letter can change afterwards on the result of an audit, a compliance review or an investigation.

What the district says about the accuracy of its own maps, because it says nothing. The three layers carry no accuracy statement, no licence and no disclaimer at the layer, the service or the item level, so this page writes none on the district's behalf in either direction.

Anything about who attends these campuses. Both bodies publish enrollment and student-group figures beside the ones above, and none of them was taken.

Whether an application would be accepted. Where a campus asks for one, the district decides that in its own lottery, on its own priorities and inside its own window.

What either figure means for a house. This page prints the figure, the body that issued it and the year, and it does not rank a campus, set one against another or read a trend into either number.