By Eva Ruth Moravec - Express-News

As an infant, Gerardo “Jerry” Aguilar was diagnosed with Hirschsprung's disease, an ailment caused by missing nerve cells in a portion of a baby's colon.
“They didn't know if I would live, and then a surgeon saved my life,” said Jerry, now 14. “That inspired me to be interested in science.”
Jerry's identical twin, Luis, shared that interest, and both spent their early years taking apart TV sets and trying to build robots.
That's why Harmony Science Academy, an open-enrollment charter school, is a perfect fit for the boys who won second place in the school's science fair on Saturday.
When it opened in August 2006 with 260 students — Jerry and Luis among them — it also became San Antonio's first Texas-Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics academy. There are now three T-STEM academies in the city, all of which receive grants to prepare students for careers in science.
Today, there are 8,900 students enrolled in 39 T-STEM academies across the state, and six more are scheduled to open next year, said Dee Chambliss, program officer for the T-STEM initiative. Harmony's enrollment has grown to 570.
“We wanted to serve a population that was typically underserved,” Chambliss said. “Most of our schools serve high-needs populations, and we've found that if you have a tight support network, you can introduce high expectations for students that haven't found success previously.”
T-STEM academies receive start-up grants from the Texas High School Project, which was started in 2005 with $110 million; $60 million from Texas Education Agency; $20 million from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation; and $10 million from Community Foundations of Texas.
Last week, the Gates foundation announced it would funnel another $2.9 million into collecting data on the academies, something it noted has not been done sufficiently from the start.
“While the small schools' work had a really promising side, we also know that in many places we didn't push a foundation for the ongoing work that needed to happen in the classroom,” said Vicki Phillips, the foundation's director of education. “We actually fell short in parts of the country.”
But data from the two academies opened before this year in San Antonio show the schools have been successful. North East Independent School District's academy opened in the fall of 2007 and earned recognized marks by TEA in 2008. And Harmony, now in its third school year, was the only San Antonio open-enrollment charter school to be ranked exemplary by TEA. The third local academy, at the School of Excellence's Milton B. Lee Academy, opened this school year.
“The parents like a lot of what's going on, but it's a big commitment from parents and students,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Milton B. Lee Academy's T-STEM program. “Even our ninth-graders are enrolled in classes at St. Philip's College, and any assignment that scores below an 80 has to be repeated.”