HISD to reverse on changing leader
At retreat, trustees reportedly seek unity after contentious board vote
Trustees are expected to announce Monday that interim superintendent Grenita Lathan will remain at the helm of the Houston Independent School District, an attempt to defuse fallout from a contentious 5-4 vote last Thursday that was marked by shouting matches and accusations of racism from board members.
After a six-hour discussion during a weekend retreat Sunday, trustees and Abelardo Saavedra — who led HISD from 2004 to 2009 and was to return Monday as the district’s new interim leader — mutually agreed that he should withdraw, Saavedra said.
“It became apparent to me that the dysfunction is not at the superintendent or leadership level. It’s at the board level,” Saavedra said, adding that he was unaware the move to hire him was going to catch some board members by surprise.
Lathan is expected to return as the interim leader of the nation’s seventh-largest school district while a search continues for a permanent superintendent. District officials said late Sunday that trustees would “discuss the recent vote to make changes to the interim superintendent’s position” at a 5 p.m. Monday news conference, but offered no further details.
State Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, who spoke Sunday with a senior Texas Education Agency official who attended the HISD retreat, cheered the outcome.
“After pressure from the board and him reading the climate and the tempera--
ture of the board members, he backed off,” Miles said of Saavedra. “Cooler heads have prevailed. The most important thing is the schools are back in the hands of somebody who has proven to be good at what she does. It’s all about the kids.”
Trustees reached for comment Sunday offered no details on Monday’s announcement, though board president Rhonda SkillernJones said the group had “decided to go in a different direction.”
Some hinted at a move toward unity.
“All of us are working together for the betterment of our kids,” said trustee Wanda Adams, who opposed replacing Lathan.
Trustee Sergio Lira, who supported the switch, echoed that, saying the board had been “hashing out a lot of things” during its weekend retreat.
“Hopefully it’s going to be for the best interest of all of our students,” Lira said.
Saavedra was to be HISD’s third leader this year. Richard Carranza quit in March to lead the New York City public school system after less than two years in Houston. He was replaced on an interim basis by Lathan, previously HISD’s chief academic officer.
Observers of HISD said the contentious Thursday meeting — trustees spoke openly of a “race war” and at least one citizen was removed by officers after cursing at trustees — again cast doubt on board members’ ability to manage Texas’ largest district. It’s a critical time as state authorities have already placed HISD under observation and could, if some schools continue to fall short of performance standards, shutter those campuses or take over the board.
Carranza told the stateappointed monitor observing HISD that he had grown increasingly frustrated with the board, saying trustees “didn’t have the stomach” to make reforms. The thendeparting Carranza, the monitor wrote, complained that some trustees were politically motivated, overstepped their governance role and failed to carry out meaningful conversations about issues.
Bob Sanborn, CEO of the nonprofit Children at Risk, said he believes Lathan remaining in her role is good for students, but he said the damage that has been done cannot be reversed by the trustees simply standing together at a news conference.
“Nothing has really been defused. You still have this divide on the board — racial, political or otherwise, it’s a clear divide — and they’re going to have to work through it if they want a good superintendent, whether it’s an AfricanAmerican or Latino or any other turnaround leader,” Sanborn said. “They’re going to have to put aside some of these differences and make it work or our schoolchildren will be the ones to bear the brunt of their dysfunction.”
Still, some political leaders said they viewed the reversal as a de-escalation of a situation that had seemed only to be worsening.
“This is a good outcome for today,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a statement late Sunday. “But our children need a board with trustees working together, harmoniously, for the good of the children now and in the future.”
Turner called the trustees’ vote “unacceptable” on Friday. A crowd of local, state and federal leaders from the black community gathered Saturday to call for Lathan to be reinstated and vowed to take legal action to achieve that outcome.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, who led the event, called the swap in leaders “unprovoked, arbitrary and, we believe, unlawful,” repeating concerns that trustees who supported Saavedra’s hiring may have violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.
The motion trustee Diana Davila made to hire Saavedra surprised some colleagues, in part because it was listed on the meeting agenda only in vague terms, without his name.
Not only did the public meeting notice likely need to be more specific, said Joe Larsen, a Houston attorney with expertise on open meetings laws, but if the supporters of the move agreed on their plan before the meeting, their conversations could constitute a violation of the act.
Davila, in a Sunday text message, said no laws were violated.
“Just (because) the HISD school board has split votes doesn’t mean laws were violated, (it) just means we didn’t agree,” she wrote.
Miles — who was among those who had called for legal action on Saturday — expressed relief that Sunday’s developments had made those concerns moot.
“The last thing we wanted was a black and brown race war,” he said.