Houston ISD is looking to lessen its reliance on external news media and instead lean more on its own internal news team, according to the 2025-26 District Improvement Plan obtained by Chron. The shift comes amid mounting community frustration over transparency, ongoing staffing cuts and broad district changes.
The internal plan outlines HISD’s intention to prioritize its in-house news platform, HISD Now, citing challenges posed by misinformation and the viral nature of social media content.
HISD, led by Superintendent Mike Miles, sent the plan to the District Action Committee (DAC) ahead of its Tuesday meeting. The DAC is composed of a diverse group of stakeholders, including parents, teachers, campus staff, community members, and business leaders. The 2025-26 document lists 36 members.
The plan cites the evolving media landscape as a driving factor, noting that “the viralness of information—especially misinformation—has grown exponentially.” It warns that “people seem to be more willing to believe almost anything that supports their point of view regardless of the facts,” complicating the district’s ability to communicate effectively.
“Our efforts to persuade and inform in this type of media environment have suffered from the immediacy of misinformation and entertaining social content,” the document states.
In response, HISD plans to prioritize its own media platform, HISD Now, over traditional news outlets. At the time of writing, the district’s live news channel had yet to air a live report but aims to be fully operational by the 2025-2026 school year, with goals including 50,000 YouTube subscribers and consistent weekly coverage in local media.
The district’s communications plan includes hiring a mobile news crew, building a two-month content calendar and marketing HISD Now beyond employees and parents—signaling a major shift away from traditional media toward district-controlled messaging. It does not provide details on the cost of hiring a news crew to expand the platform.
The district’s media push follows news of the district cutting nearly 450 employees amid ongoing enrollment declines.
Here’s an image from the story that I assume comes from this District Improvement Plan. I’ll discuss the goals on the other side:
Just curious, but I wonder what happens if they don’t meet those goals of 50K subscribers and HISD Now being “repeated (whatever that means) in local print or television media 5 times a week”, or the number of parents who believe the district is headed in the right direction increases by fifteen percent? If any of this is tied to Mike Miles’ next incentive package, we ought to know that. Well, first we ought to know how much this is costing and how many of those recently terminated employees could have been retained if the district wasn’t doing this. Maybe we’ll read a story about that on HISD Now. I’ll blog about it if that happens. Will that count towards the five-times-a-week goal? Who knows? Is this a dumb idea? That one I think we do know.
First, they need a copy editor…