What ails Houston ISD isn’t just about money
The school board must engage in better planning and collaboration
It’s true what they say about being unable to avert your eyes from trains that are close to colliding. I’ve been watching the spectacle of the Houston ISD school board now for two years. If it doesn’t change course, the district is quickly approaching a major crash.
Late last month, HISD’s Board of Education approved the budget for the 2017-2018 school year. While the budget includes much-needed raises for teachers and school support staff as well as funding for long-awaited special education positions, its 11th-hour passage and nearly $107 million deficit are stark indicators that something is wrong with governance in HISD.
The new budget, which will require the district to dig deep into its reserve funds to keep schools operating over the next year, is just the most recent symptom of a school board that has struggled to demonstrate strong, constructive leadership and effective advocacy.
Watching school board meetings over the past two years has often felt like standing in front of a burning house and seeing firefighters intermittently stop their work to argue about who gets to hold the hose. Though the board has managed to implement a few policies that will move the district forward, each positive step is followed by weeks — even months — of inactivity, public blame-throwing and unrealistic demands of a superintendent, who, it seems, is somehow expected to solve years of turmoil after nine months on the job.
It should be noted that much of the budgeting problem stems from a broken state funding system. Each year, our public schools are forced to do more with fewer and fewer dollars coming from the state. And several trustees have made repeated calls for the board to adequately prepare for the difficult road ahead. Sadly, those calls were drowned out by political grandstanding and the drumbeat of deep-seated ideological battles.
Those of us who attended the eight-hour public hearing June 22 (and into the wee hours of June 23), witnessed what seemed like an illustration of how governing can go very wrong. A lack of long-term, meaningful discussions and the apparent obsession of one trustee to pick political fights at nearly every turn left them with no other viable options than to approve the budget. And while the children of this city slept in their beds, the adults, who have been elected to make decisions about their education, passed a budget that will likely bring the district dangerously close to insolvency by the end of next year. This district cannot survive another year in which any of our elected leaders refuse to collaborate with one another.
With dozens of schools classified as “Improvement Required” by the state and fewer than 1 in 5 HISD graduates meeting national college- and career-readiness standards, we do not have time for the persistent posturing, name-calling and mud-slinging that seem to have served some trustees well on the campaign trail. Our children deserve better. When it comes to governing, school board members should spend their time measuring progress toward district goals, working with — and not against — each other and the administration, and pursuing proven policies that will set our district up for success.
This is not a sweeping indictment of the entire school board. Indeed, several trustees acknowledged the extensive work that needs to begin in August to prepare for the years to come, and eight of them supported a formal request for an external review of our budgeting process. More than anything, this is a wake-up call for our city. Conversations about public education and local school boards should be at the forefront of political discourse. We cannot continue to ignore the actions of the people who control a $2 billion budget and who approve policies that affect the lives of more than 215,000 children.
We must set the expectation that trustees have a working knowledge of how a governing board should operate, a willingness to collaborate with one another and a commitment to serving all children in this city. We must vote for highquality candidates and then assess their performance, not by the catchy one-liners they post on social media, but by the measurable improvements they make to our system.
Speaking to the board just before midnight — yes, midnight — one concerned citizen and HISD employee said it best: “You need to do your homework before you get here.” Moreover, residents of this city must be very clear that we will be grading the board’s work.