Lynn Walsh

As Houston school board members consider whether to close four local elementary schools, district administrators on Thursday presented them with another list of schools with low enrollment to consider for possible closure or consolidation.

The list consists of 37 schools in the Houston Independent School District, 13 elementary schools, 19 middle schools and five high schools. This is almost half the number of schools HISD included on a similar list in December.

The list consists of the following schools:

Elementary schools and enrollment:
McDade – 272
Rhoads – 320
Memorial – 335
Pagie – 348
NQ Henderson – 349
Port Houston – 352
Gordon – 355
Pleasantville – 356
Stevenson – 357
Houston Gardens – 362
Grimes – 380
Burrus – 390
Love – 425
Middle schools and enrollment:
Ryan – 329
EO Smith – 406
MC Williams – 441
Key – 486
Black – 491
Attucks – 506
Fleming – 528
Thomas – 547
Cullen – 580
Fondren – 608
McReynolds – 645
Woodson – 687
Hogg – 733
Holland – 750
Edison – 791
Deady – 872
Revere – 883
Jackson – 912
Long – 934
High schools and enrollment:
Jones – 590
Kashmere – 603
Scarborough – 758
Washington – 908
Worthing – 939

View the 37 schools HISD could consolidate or close in a larger mapThe discussion has ranged from whether to close these schools, consolidate them, or do away with extra funding they receive, to letting them be. HISD trustees are set to vote in April on whether to close four elementary schools, Love, McDade, Grimes and Rhoads.

In anticipation of losing up to $348 million in state funding next year, HISD has brought the discussion surrounding the future of small schools to the forefront. This year HISD will spend more than $10 million providing additional funding to schools with low enrollment through the small school subsidy. That money is provided to schools to cover the costs associated with receiving less per-student funding from the district because of low enrollment.

HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said 10 to 15 of these schools could easily be closed or consolidated. He said the administration created the list for trustees instead of just recommending which schools should be considered for closure. “This can get very political,” he said.
Trustees remained fairly quiet as the names of the schools were presented to them. Trustees Anna Eastman and Harvin Moore asked the administration to provide more information about the schools on the list. Eastman asked to see each school’s building capacity, state accountability ratings and enrollment trends in recent years.

All elementary schools with fewer than 400 students and all middle and high schools with fewer than 1,000 students made the list, HISD sad. Early childhood centers, alternative schools, early college schools and charter schools were left off the list.

HISD board president Paula Harris asked for the list to be updated to be consistent with the funding cutoffs for the small school subsidies. According to district policy, elementary schools with 500 students or less, middle schools with 750 or less and high schools with 1,000 or less qualify.

As Texas Watchdog previously reported, the conversation surrounding small schools in HISD involves more than just funding concerns. HISD trustee Larry Marshall said in December he believes HISD’s small schools were built to keep the school district segregated.

“They were not designed to be small. They were built to segregate,” Marshall said Thursday.

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From how to write the public record request to get the emails to tips on cutting down the potential costs of the email documents, Texas Watchdog’s Jennifer Peebles goes through it all in the March episode of Trent TV.

Watch the entire video below or on our Vimeo page.

Texas Watchdog TrentTV: Obtaining and reviewing public officials’ emails from Texas Watchdog on Vimeo.

And if you are wondering why you would want to look at a public officials’ emails, Peebles has plenty of examples of stories that would not have been possible without the email correspondence of public officials included.

Some useful websites highlighted in this episode:
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press website has information about the public information laws in your state and a public information request letter generator that is very easy to use.

The Brechner Citizen Access Project website also has information about the public information laws in all 50 states.

Have more questions about the topic discussed in this episode of Trent TV or any others? Get in touch with us: news@texaswatchdog.org, Twitter @TexasWatchdog (#TrentTV) or on Facebook.

The Houston school system will spend more than $10 million this year providing extra support and resources for schools with low enrollment — funding that has come under recent scrutiny by administrators and trustees, leading to discussions of possible closures and consolidations.

No final decisions have been made about the future of these schools, and HISD trustees will have the final say, according to HISD Superintendent Terry Grier.

It “very well could mean closing schools, but that’s a board decision,” Grier said in December. “We want to talk to the board about options and see what they have to say.”

Nearly 90 schools in the in the Houston Independent School District receive a “small school subsidy,” a chunk of money HISD gives to schools with few students so those campuses can provide the same resources as larger schools.

In December, HISD released a list of 66 “small schools” that it considers under-enrolled. The list of 66 included nine high schools that serve less than 1,250 students (including Houston’s two oldest high schools for African-Americans, Yates and Wheatley), 15 middle schools with less than 750 students, 15 elementaries with less than 500 students and seven multilevel schools (including K-7 and K-8 facilities) serving less than 750 students.

View Houston’s ‘small schools’ in a larger map

The schools on the list of 66 serve less students than what HISD and some district trustees say is needed to run a school economically.

A majority of the 66 schools also receive the small school subsidy, which is one of four pots of individual school funding the district is looking at closely as HISD braces itself for cuts of up to $348 million from the state.

Texas Watchdog has created an interactive map that shows which schools are on the list of 66 and which schools receive the “small school subsidy” but are not on the list of 66.

The schools with red icons on the map are on HISD’s list of 66. The schools with yellow icons are expected to receive a small school subsidy from the district this year, according to HISD documents, but are not included in the list of 66.

The map also includes enrollment figures, state performance ratings, demographic breakdowns and “small school subsidy” funding amounts.

As Texas Watchdog previously reported, the discussion of whether to keep the small schools open isn’t just about money. It’s also about Houston’s complex racial politics and changing demographics.

Close to half of the schools receiving additional funding because of low enrollment numbers have student bodies in which three kids out of four are black, or three kids out of four are Hispanic, HISD records show. A dozen of the schools are at least 90% black or at least 90% Hispanic. At one school, Sherman Elementary in the city’s Fifth Ward, 99% of the student body is Hispanic.

A school must fall below certain enrollment numbers to qualify for the “small school subsidy.” For an elementary school in HISD it is 500 or fewer, for a middle school it is 750 and for a high school it is 1,000 or fewer.

The map includes “small school subsidy” amounts for schools in October and December based on enrollment figures at those times. The final school enrollment numbers used to determine each campus’ funding were not complete for the 2010-11 school year until mid-November, HISD Chief Financial Officer Melinda Garrett said.

Due to enrollment changes, some campuses, like Kelso Elementary near Sunnyside in Houston, received small school funding in October but not in December, and others, like Briscoe Elementary in the Lawndale/Wayside area of Houston, which are now receiving small school funding but were not in October.

Houston school system leaders have said they want to bring outside perspectives to a committee that advises the district on the $1.6 billion annual budget.

They also said they wanted to revamp a second committee that directs a troubled construction program funded with $800 million in bond money to ensure the committee is transparent and free of conflicts of interest.

But a look at who’s on those committees doesn’t turn up many new faces.

The budget advisory committee is packed with school system staffers, not outsiders — nearly four members of out of every five are HISD employees. Meanwhile, the bulk of the members of the committee overseeing the bond program are the same people who were on the committee before the revamp — though they’ve now been certified as conflict-free.

And for the three vacant posts on the bond committee, a third of the applications Texas Watchdog reviewed came from people who already have a direct tie to the school system, such as being a district employee or former employee, serving on another HISD committee or listing an HISD official as a reference.

“All public schools are not treated equally in Houston,” said Richard Spence, a health care consultant who has applied for one of the three vacant seats. He says he doesn’t have any connections to the school system beyond being a Lee High School alumnus. “It shouldn’t matter whether you have political clout or not. These should all be very transparent decisions.”

HISD says it is allowing anyone to apply to be on the bond committee, and all applications will be reviewed for possible conflicts of interest. The district also said the two committees and their makeup are not related because they serve different purposes.

“There’s a big difference between an oversight committee’s mission and the mission of an advisory committee,” HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said in an e-mail. “It’s important to have employees (principals, teachers, etc.) on the budget committee because they have valuable insight into how money is spent at the campus level.”

Overseeing the construction projects is the Bond Oversight Committee, so named because the construction work is funded through $800 million in bonds.

School officials have been trying to revamp the committee after a 2010 report said the construction program suffered from communication problems, lacked planning and was missing budget reports.

Also last year, it was revealed that some of the proposed appointees to the committee had potential conflicts of interest, a controversy that came to light in part when the Houston Chronicle reported that school system trustee Diana Dávila had tried to get her husband named to the committee. Dávila wound up stepping down from the school board soon after.

Since then, HISD Chief Operating Officer Leo Bobadilla has worked to rid the committee of conflicts, requiring all the existing committee members to reapply for their positions. (Two chose not to reapply.) They’re also being required to verify to the district that they have read the committee rules, which include new language forbidding conflicts of interest, and to affirm that they are conflict-free, Spencer said.

At the same time, the school board also restructured the makeup of the committee to make it less insidery in the future.

For years, the committee had guaranteed seats for representatives of specific business groups including the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Houston Partnership. But the school district — partly in a move to bring in people without potential conflicts — did away with the guaranteed seats this school year, except for the provision that at least one member must have experience in engineering or building design.

However, even though the guaranteed seats are no more, most of the people who were in those guaranteed seats have reapplied for their posts. They include the man who has chaired the committee since 1998, retired Halliburton executive Bernard Pieper, who was originally appointed to the committee by the Associated General Contractors; Carroll Robinson, appointed by the Citizens Chamber; and Chris Hudson, the appointee of the American Institute of Architects.

So far, 22 applications for the three available seats on the Bond Oversight Committee have been received by HISD, of which 18 were reviewed by Texas Watchdog. (Four other people have applied since Texas Watchdog reviewed those records.) The 18 applicants included:
Four current HISD employees, including three teachers and an information technology staffer, as well as a retired HISD maintainence supervisor;
A green energy consultant who listed service in the PTO at T.H. Rogers Middle School, and a general contractor who said he had served in the Booker T. Washington High alumni association;
A lawyer who listed the principal of Lovett Elementary School among his references;
Robert L. Ford, a prominent scientist at Texas Southern University who already serves on the improvement committee for HISD’s Thompson Elementary School;
A Dallas-area man who is a member of the school board in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school system, and who offered to lend HISD his expertise;
An attorney specializing in construction litigation; a paralegal; a business manager for the local ironworkers’ union; an executive with an information technology company; a retired federal worker; and an executive with a Baytown-based construction firm.
Technology worker Nicolas Alvarado was among the current HISD employees who applied.

Alvarado told Texas Watchdog he thinks he “could bring something of a reality check to the committee and ask hard questions.” He recalled working at Debakey High School when it underwent renovations a couple of years ago: “The decisions they made seemed really flawed at the time, and the oversight of the contractor seemed insufficient. It took too long, it cost more money to get things started, and I was like, ‘Who is watching these bozos?’”

Unfortunately for him, the new committee rules put in place last year specifically ban current HISD employees from serving on the committee, along with district vendors, contractors and consultants. (Spencer reaffirmed that Alvarado would not be allowed to serve because of the rules.)

References listed by the applicants include current and former HISD employees and administrators, HISD trustee Paula Harris, former HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra, one of Gov. Rick Perry’s staffers, Houston City Councilwoman Wanda Adams and Harris County Justice of the Peace Zinetta Burney.

But not all the applicants listed an HISD connection.

“I have watched HISD go through ebbs and flows of common sense when it comes to using finances that they are provided,” said Spence, the former director of strategic planning for the University of Texas in Houston, who listed Perry staffer Terry Zrubek as a reference but no one in HISD. “The HISD brand is broken, and I want to see it improve.”

Despite the three vacancies, the committee is continuing to meet as scheduled. HISD does not have a date for when the positions will be filled, and there’s no cutoff date for applications, but the district has started meeting with some applicants, Spencer said.

Meanwhile, the Budget Advisory Committee is meeting twice monthly to provide “input and feedback” on financial matters at a time that funding cuts from the state could be as much as $348 million per year.

When Grier created the committee this school year, he told the press he wanted “outside perspectives” on it, saying he wanted to include business leaders and maybe even a student.

More than 75% of the 32 committee members are HISD employees, including 10 principals and two teachers. Only 7 of the 32 are HISD parents or members of the public at large — and of those seven, six already serve on another HISD committee, while the seventh is head of the group Parents for Public Schools of Houston.

Seven of 32 is “at least a somewhat significant representation” of the general public, Spencer said.

Harris, HISD’s newly named school board president, said she wasn’t bothered by the ratio. “If it’s 100 percent or 80 percent representation, it doesn’t matter,” she said, adding that the community meetings the district has held around the city on budget issues have been more important.

There’s also no student on the committee after all. Spencer said Grier’s chief of staff, Michele Pola, who is on the budget advisory committee, told him that “the meeting schedule didn’t seem conducive to a student’s schedule.” The committee has sometimes met on weekday mornings, when classes are in session. Instead, “there has been some thought given to a student focus group to give input on budget decisions.”

The committee is meeting twice a month now, according to HISD, and some issues discussed include ways the district can spend professional development money wisely, the role the district plays in engaging parents and HISD employee pay, according to minutes from the meetings (which can be found here).

But the advisory committee’s role is merely to make recommendations. It has no legal authority to make cuts or changes to the budget — only the elected trustees can do that.

HISD administrators on the advisory committee include Pola, chief human resources officer Ann Best, chief communications officer Aggie Alvez and chief financial officer Melinda Garrett. All of the administrators, 13 in total, also serve on a smaller, more elite panel called the Superintendent’s Budget Committee that is comprised entirely of HISD staff. (A list of members of the Budget Advisory Committee is here.)