The Little School of the 400 was an educational project created to integrate Spanish-speaking schoolchildren into the mainstream public school population by teaching them a vocabulary of 400 essential words so they could successfully complete first grade. Isabel Verver, a 17-year-old Ganado High School student, read an article in a spring 1957 issue of Texas Outlook Magazine that expressed Felix Tijerina's desire for such a program, and she contacted him to say she wanted to put it into practice. Tijerina, a successful Houston businessman and national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Verver both knew the difficulty of being first-graders unable to communicate with teachers or fellow students and hoped to remove that language barrier. Baytown educator Elizabeth Burrus provided Tijerina with a list of 400 vocabulary words she had developed through years of teaching bilingual students. Verver taught the pilot class in Ganado during the summer of 1957 and produced 60 graduates in time for the fall term. After that success, the League of United Latin American Citizens established similar classes in towns including Vanderbilt, Edna, Sugar Land, Aldine, Brookshire, and Wharton for the summer of 1958. Tijerina and members of the League of United Latin American Citizens then worked for passage of House Bill 51 during the 56th Texas Legislature, creating a state-sponsored program of preschool instructional classes for non-English-speaking children and ending the need for the privately funded Little Schools. Head Start and other federally funded programs of the 1960s later replaced the state-sponsored program.