Miles’ record on the HISD budget

A closer look from the Houston Landing.

In his first year, Houston ISD’s state-appointed superintendent, Mike Miles, ushered in several changes that sparked massive media attention and community pushback — but another important set of shake-ups took place largely behind the scenes.

Facing a roughly $500 million budget deficit, Miles made dramatic cuts and rearrangements to HISD’s central office, reducing the number of employees not assigned to campuses and classrooms from about 8,300 employees to 6,800, records obtained by the Houston Landing show.

The shake-up has reshaped how HISD staff deliver services to students living in poverty, develop the curriculums used in classrooms and clean up campuses, among other key tasks.

In February, Miles touted the reorganization as his fix to long-standing “dysfunction” in HISD operations, shedding dead weight and redundant spending. HISD Communications Chief Alexandra Elizondo called the transformation “one of the most important and necessary” changes made by Miles during his first year, allowing the district to invest more heavily in classrooms and teacher salaries.

“For decades, HISD’s bloated and outdated systems prevented the district from meeting the needs of its students, limited its ability to pay teachers a competitive salary and perpetuated more than 100 failing campuses across the district,” Elizondo wrote in an emailed statement.

But some critics of Miles argue the cuts have hindered HISD’s ability to provide needed services, including keeping campus grounds trash-free and providing assistance for families lacking basic needs like food or clothing. Even with the cuts, HISD still projects it will run a deficit of $130 million in 2024-25, dipping into its “rainy day” fund to cover the balance.

To evaluate the extent of Miles’ central office overhaul, the Landing compared HISD payroll records from March 2023, a few months before the Texas Education Agency’s takeover of the district, and early October 2024. While Miles initially overstated his administration’s cuts to central office in the months after his arrival, the records now show major changes to some departments. Other departments, meanwhile, appear largely intact.

HISD administrators did not directly respond to several questions sent Friday about specific aspects of the central office overhaul. Elizondo said the district would need more time to conduct a full analysis due to antiquated recordkeeping, but she did not contest any of the Landing’s findings.

You should read the rest for the details. A couple of points:

– The first three items listed are “Fewer custodial, maintenance staff”, “More top-dollar administrators”, and “Cuts to staff helping students in poverty”. Without knowing anything else, does that sound to you like a good way to approach how HISD spends its money? It sure doesn’t to me.

– The story doesn’t get into how much each of the eight items they list cost or saved, so we don’t know what the overall effect was on the budget. That may have been too difficult to tease out, or maybe it’s something they’re still working on for a future story. I hope it’s the latter.

– Also not mentioned is the cost of the expansion of NES schools, which is both a big investment in resources and a huge ongoing source of controversy and dissent. It’s not hard for me to imagine that the current $130 million shortfall would be a lot smaller if Miles had been more modest in his NES ambitions.

– The outlook going forward is also unclear. Some of these cuts seem unsustainable to me – I mean, campuses need custodial services, and sooner or later skimping on that is going to cause a problem. There seems to be a belief that the state will come through with more funding, which at least has some possibility if Greg Abbott finally does achieve his voucher dreams and thus stops holding the extra funding that the Lege had provided hostage. That could of course be a very double-edged sword, but it’s too soon to know and is way bigger than this post to get into. What we can be sure about is that the district’s rainy day fund can only do this so often.

– And once more, with feeling: An elected Board of Trustees would feel some pressure to deal with these issues. All we have here is The Mike Miles Show. I will not be placing bets on the fiscal situation improving in the short term.

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