HISD Board Hears Another Round of Complaints About A/C, Buses, Landscaping, Libraries and the Bond Issue

After Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles asked for a moment of silence to recognize the Marshall Middle School student who died this week after a medical emergency, public speakers at Thursday night’s school board meeting lined up with their latest round of complaints most of which had to do with A/C and buses.

Specifically: Poor or missing A/C in the classrooms, a new bus routing system gone awry and the intersection of the district’s two biggest problems according to its call-in centers with the lack of A/C on some of its buses.

Parent Teisha Mayes said several classes at Crockett Elementary, which is a new New Education System school this year,  have reached 82 degrees, forcing , for instance, her daughter dance class to move out into the hallways where it is cooler. “During ‘Meet the Teacher’ we saw new spin bikes. Why weren’t these funds used to fix the A/C?”

While Miles tried to focus on the “quality instruction” that he said was taking place from the first day of class this past Monday, even he had to admit that what was going on with the new school bus transportation system contracted with EduLog was inexcusable.

For a superintendent who prides himself on systems and efficiencies, the absolute mess that has resulted from a money-saving consolidation of routes with fewer bus drivers is particularly hard to defend, although he assured those present that the route rollout is getting better each day.

As of Thursday, some parents are still waiting for their children’s bus routes to be assigned. Others received some other child’s information. Some got two sets of route instructions – one right, one wrong. Instructions to parents that their children should get on any bus that comes along just added to the confusion and frustration. And the fact that parents are reporting that some of the buses have no working A/C hasn’t helped matters.

Thanks to being named a District of Innovation, HISD was able to start school two weeks earlier than it had before. But with that comes more weeks of higher temperatures for school kids.

During the first week of school, in some of the schools children were being shuttled to other parts of their buildings as temperatures mounted above the 82 degree mark that Miles has decreed is too hot for students to learn and teachers to teach. He said they start monitoring classrooms when they  78 degrees.

And he pointed out again that many of the district’s schools house aging HVAC systems.

The district’s new defined autonomy policy also came under fire. In it, A and B schools are given far mor leeway on budgets and instruction than the C, D and F-rated schools.

As speaker Lisa Robinson put it: “The defined autonomy policy is separate and unequal. A fourth grader at Pew is bored to tears while reading slide decks while his cousin at River Oaks visits her school library to check out a book of their choice. A freshman at Westbury only reads short passages in English class while her neighbor at Lamar discusses full novels in preparation for college level work.

“A first grader at  Longfellow sits in a sterile classroom in the name of ‘limiting distractions’ while his brother at Twain enjoys the benefits of a warm and nurturing space,” she said calling the earned autonomy approach “morally wrong.”

The deletion of librarians and libraries from HISD schools at Miles’ direction continued to be a source of many complaints as well as criticism about the lack of landscaping and mowing at some schools.

Bellaire City Councilwoman Jackie Georgiou questioned HISD’s commitment to her city and compared the grounds maintenance at Bellaire High School to its across the street neighbor Episcopal High School.

“Episcopal High School across the street from Bellaire High School shines like a shining beacon next to the negligence of HISD. It has come to my attention there was no running water on Bellaire High School fields for some time and there were a couple days here recently where classrooms were at 85 degrees or higher. These are health and safety hazards and we are unacceptable.”

Miles, for his part, said he thought academic instruction was far more important than the grounds outside the district’s schools. He once again pointed out that HISD has 274 schools and that after the derecho storm, Hurricane Beryl and the days of rain that followed that it was difficult to tackle everything on all the grounds that needed doing.

But as in other meetings, many students and parents are not excited about Miles’ New Education System with its daily timed testing. And one student was unhappy about being sent to the Team Center for extra worksheets after scoring well on the daily tests and about the requirement in NES schools that elementary students carry orange traffic cones with them when they are going to use the restrooms.

“I have always loved school and I was very excited to start on Monday,” student Laney Piper told the board. “But now I’m not excited anymore because now school feels rushed and not fun. The timers are stressful and distracting and the Team Center is boring and it makes me want to get bad grades on my DOL [Demonstrating of Learning quiz) so I don’t have to go. The bathroom cones are very unsanitary. How do you know if everyone’s washing their hands?”

“The bathroom cones are very unsanitary. How do you know if everyone’s washing their hands?”

tweet this

Once again, throughout the meeting public speakers said could not support the $4.4 billion bond proposal the board approved at last week’s meeting because they did not trust Miles and his administration to make good use of the money. The proposal which is the largest bond proposal ever for HISD will go before voters at the November 5 election.

Sheila Whitford told the board she has voted in favor of every HISD bond proposal since 1990. “However currently  I do not see a fiscally responsible board. Library books removed from how many schools. Where are the books? Where is the paper trail for these books?

“I want to apologize to the children in Houston schools who need this bond but I will vote no. Our children do not have responsible people handling their money.”

Complaints also continued about the mass exodus of educators from HISD in the past year – said to include some 4,700 teachers. Some left because they did not want to work under Miles’ New Education System requiring daily testing and others because they were given the choice of resigning or being fired.
Several speakers also objected to giving Miles and his administration the right to sell off HISD property, saying once sold, the land could never be returned to HISD.