Lynn Walsh

Missed our latest episode of Trent TV? No worries. You can learn tips and suggestions on obtaining and reviewing public officials’ emails anytime you want by watching the archived video.

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.

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.)

A framework for the possible revamp of Houston’s magnet schools is slated to be released to school principals Wednesday morning and to the general public on Thursday, a top Houston school administrator said.

The proposed magnet regulations won’t name specific schools but will include funding formulas for the district’s 100-plus magnets, said Michele Pola, chief of staff to Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier.

“People want the plan,” Pola said. “We have laid out the framework of what we think and will present it Thursday night. It will be the policy that the board will be looking at, not adopting. The policy will go up online at that time as well.”
The new magnet regulations have the potential to be highly controversial for the school system, as many anxious parents fear their child’s magnet program — or future magnet program — may be shut down or lose some of its funding as part of the revamp. Even without individual schools’ names, parents will likely parse the Thursday release for predictions of the future of their magnet program.

HISD hired an outside non-profit, Magnet Schools of America, to do a review last year of the district’s magnet programs. The group recommended eliminating almost half of them.

The school system is spending close to $17 million this school year on its magnets.

Less than a week ago, HISD administrators presented broad recommendations for what magnet programs in HISD may look like in the future. The proposed recommendations include creating a centralized lottery admission for students, accountability standards for magnet programs and equalized funding for programs based on categories like theme and type.

At that time, HISD trustees said they wanted more information.

And after hearing Tuesday from two consultants about how a centralized lottery system in Wake County, N.C., works, parents were the ones asking for more.
“I know Grier has mentioned that there are 40 schools that will either be seeing cuts or program expansions,” HISD parent Mary Nesbitt said during the Tuesday parent meeting. “When are we going to see the list of schools that will be impacted by board policy, and when are we going to see all the details?”

The framework will be given to the districts’ principals’ ad hoc committee Wednesday at will be made public during Thursday night’s trustees’ meeting, Pola said, at which time it will also be published on the HISD Website and circulated in a press release.

“I know there have been questions about, ‘So, when do we put this out?’” Pola said. “There’s always that piece of letting the board have it first, making it public or giving it to our principals. Right now we have a framework, and we are presenting that tomorrow to all of our principals.”

The funding formulas will be based on comparisons from across the country and were compiled by HISD administrators. Pola said the district did look at individual school budgets while preparing the recommendations to see what money has been spent on in the past.

Trustees are slated to discuss Thursday the 2011-12 district budget and the school closure policy.

A magnet policy proposal will be on the agenda for the trustees to consider for approval at the March 10 board meeting, Pola said.

***

Special education students in the Houston public schools lack access to appropriate technology and spend less time in “mainstream” classrooms with non-special ed students than do their peers elsewhere in Texas, an outside review has found.

The review also found that black and Hispanic students are disproportionately categorized as being mentally retarded or having learning or emotional disturbances.

More than 16,000 students in the Houston Independent School District receive service from special education programs. In October 2010, HISD asked Tom Hehir, a Harvard University professor and former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, to conduct an independent review of special ed in the district.

In general, the report said Hehir found “many aspects” of special ed in HISD to be “commendable,” but also pointed out some flaws.

For instance, the report says HISD special education students are not given access to appropriate technology. One special education official said in the report that special ed programs “received the ‘hand-me-down’ computers from general education when new computers were ordered.” Other HISD staff based at school campuses said the district is “not up-to-date on current assistive technologies, such as those afforded by the iPad.”

The lack of technology can hurt special ed students’ academic achievement, the report said.

Only two and half percent of HISD students with disabilities receive assistive technology like text-to-speech or speech-to-text communication devices and closed captioning, the report says. Almost half of those receiving AT have hearing problems, and only five percent of autistic students receive help from AT.

Hehir’s consulting firm completed a review of special education programs three years ago for the San Diego Unified School District, where HISD Superintendent Terry Grier formerly worked. That report found that black students were three times as likely as white students to be labeled as emotionally disturbed.

The HISD report also found that around half of special education students in district spend at least 80 percent of their day in a mainstream classroom setting — a figure lower than the state average of 66 percent. Special education students who spend more of their day in a mainstream classroom setting tend to score higher on national tests, the report said.

“While it is not necessarily illegal or inappropriate to serve students with disabilities outside of the general setting, the majority of students with disabilities can and should be served in mainstream settings,” it says. Some campuses work hard to move special education students into mainstream classroom environments, but most campuses in HISD “do not appear to be taking steps to appropriately integrate students with disabilities into mainstream settings,” according to the report.

The head of HISD’s special education department, Sowmya Kumar, said in a press release Monday she was “pleased” with the report. “The report will guide our work to create a culture of high expectations, to improve the quality of instruction, and to produce better outcomes for students with disabilities. I believe we are well-positioned to forge ahead.”

Other findings in the report: (View the full report here)

African-American students in HISD are four times more likely than non-African-Americans to be categorized as being mentally retarded or having emotional disturbances.
Overall, Hispanic students are under-represented in special education categories in HISD but are more likely to be categorized as special ed in schools with lower Hispanic populations. The over-placement is linked to the general educational programs, specifically weak instructional programs in subjects like reading and language, especially for those who speak English as a second language. School discipline and behavior policies also could be to blame, the report says.
HISD school staff found the needed special ed paperwork confusing and were not sure where or who to talk to for clarification.
Parents of HISD students with disabilities did not feel they could access the choice system and specifically felt unwelcome at district charter schools. “Charter schools in HISD tend to have lower proportions of special education students than non-charter schools in the district,” the audit says.
The recommendations and findings in the audit will be presented to HISD trustees this week. The district has scheduled a public meeting from 3-4 p.m. Friday, March 4, at the Hattie Mae White Building, 4400 W. 18th St. in Houston.

***

The Houston school system has followed through with its promise of greater transparency and online access to details about its $1 billion building program.

The Houston Independent School District’s building program — which will build more than 20 new schools and renovate 130 others — has been beset by financial errors and budget planning problems. In October, HISD’s general manager of construction and facilities, Issa Dadoush, told Texas Watchdog the district planned by the end of fall to post online budgets for all the construction projects associated with the voter-approved bond program.

Those worksheets are now all online and can be viewed on a new HISD website here.

The projects are organized alphabetically by school campus name and can be viewed by “project type” (new schools, renovated schools) “school type” (elementary, middle, high) HISD regions, HISD districts and construction company involved.

Project details listed include the approved project budget and an estimate of how much of the project is complete. The information on the site will be updated quarterly, Dadoush said, and for more recent approved funding information, Dadoush points people to the minutes from the bond oversight committee posted here.

Texas Watchdog obtained copies of the construction worksheets through state public information laws and published all of the worksheets online here before HISD’s website was ready so the public could view them.

Ending contracts with “low-performing” teachers in Houston schools has cost taxpayers $3.7 million, according to a recent investigation from Fox 26 News.

The Houston Independent School District ended its year-long contracts of 47 teachers last summer, leading to cash payouts for the former employees ranging from $45,000 to $73,000, according to the story.

HISD’s chief human resource officer, Ann Best, told Fox 26 the teachers were let go because they were not high-performing:

“‘We looked at past track records of success so I can assure that these were teachers that were low-performing,’ Best reasoned.”

Best also told Fox 26 that the teachers were let go to help implement the district’s Apollo 20 turnaround program for low-performing schools in the district.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, told Fox 26 she doesn’t believe that:

“’Ann Best is lying on that!’ Fallon countered. ‘Quite simply these folks did not have bad evaluations; these folks were in schools that weren’t functioning well.’”

At an HISD trustee meeting Thursday, the district announced there were 89 displaced teachers with continuing contracts next year, and the cost to keep the teachers on the payroll next year is $5.7 million.

HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said the district can’t afford to spend $5.7 million on non-budgeted teaching positions next year.

HISD trustee Harvin Moore described the situation as “a potential rubber room in Houston,” referring to suspended teachers in New York City who continued to be paid despite not having teaching assignments and spending months doing nothing.