Josephine Houston was born January 4, 1875 in Middleton, Leon County, Texas. She graduated from Bremond High School and began her career at Bolivar in a one-teacher school.

Miss Houston's career in Austin spanned 46 years. She first taught at Bickler School from 1899 to 1926, and went on to be named principal of Becker and St. Elmo Schools. Miss Houston employed teaching skills that were often far in advance of her times. Long before schools owned buses, she kept students interested by her parent-teacher field trips to public facilities, farms and industries. Show-and-tell sessions and chicks that hatched during Easter were some of the teaching attractions which made her classes a joy.

As a principal, Miss Houston used gifted teachers to assist slow readers long before the term remedial reading became current. As one of her co-workers expressed it, individualized learning, student involvement, humanized schools, multi-aged instruction, may be "hot new ideas" today, but Miss Houston was talking about all of those things at faculty meetings in 1939 at Winn School. 

Miss Houston was also active in other areas of community life. She taught Sunday School and worked in the Wesley Service Guild of University Methodist Church. She was a member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Revolution of Texas, and she was a charter member of both Delta Kappa Gamma and the Austin Retired Teachers Association.

The official dedication of Josephine Houston Elementary was held at 2:00 pm, Sunday, March 6, 1977. The land cost for 13.09 acres was $39,270.

Josephine Houston