As Houston ISD families returned to school Tuesday after the holiday weekend, many said they were shocked by the district’s plan to close or consolidate 12 campuses next year. Some rallied, and many demanded answers, especially about transportation for their children’s new campuses.
At Port Houston Elementary, several dozen parents carried signs Tuesday morning to protest the proposed closure of their school, which serves about 250 students and is among those slated to be shut down pending board approval.
While state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles recently promised not to close schools next school year, he reversed course last week, citing lower-than-expected enrollment and aging facilities, and asked HISD’s Board of Managers to approve eight campus closures and four relocations.
Parents and community members said the announcement — made right before a four-day holiday weekend — caught them off guard as opposition grows ahead of a board vote in less than two weeks.
“Miles is on the record in November saying, ‘We’re not going to do any of this.’ And it’s dropped like a bomb on Thursday night,” said Don Macune, with the local community advocacy group Neighbors in Action. “There are so many objections on so many levels.”
[…]
Trustees and elected officials are calling for “meaningful” community input and said this announcement should have came earlier, ahead of the board’s vote in two weeks. HISD elected trustee Plácido Gómez, separate from the state-appointed board, said if the district needed to consolidate schools, it “should make the case to the community and ask for meaningful input before making final decisions.”
Gómez called the lack of community engagement by the appointed board “unacceptable.” His district includes several schools slated for closure or co-location, including Cage, Briscoe and Franklin elementary schools.
But change is good, said Hobby father Willie Green, who also was surprised by the announcement. He thinks his twins in pre-K will be alright in a different school environment. He is concerned, however, what will happen to the building. He wants HISD not to leave the building at Hobby Elementary empty, and instead rebuild it as an educational center or use it for after-school community programs.
The district could sell the property and may have chosen campuses to close based on their sale potential, said community member Joseph Berck. His brick-and-mortar business, Bloom Handcrafted Beauty Products, sits across the street from Cage Elementary School, which would move and be co-located with Lantrip Elementary School. Berck said school closures drag down property values and hurt businesses.
“Communities die when schools close,” Berck said.
He urged people to voice their opinions at the Feb. 26 board meeting, when the state-appointed board will take a final vote on the proposal.
“People think that it’s already been made, which, technically, with the standing board that we have, of course the decision has been made. Mike Miles is running everything,” Berck said. “But on the 26th we can voice our opinion. We can show them that we care and that we don’t want these schools closed.”
See here for the background. If you’re on Instagram, be sure to see Trustee Plácido Gómez’s explanation of how this happened. Again, it makes sense that some schools may need to be closed or co-located. Nobody likes that, for good reasons, but sometimes it can’t be helped. What can be helped is the level of community involvement in the discussion, which is greatly abetted by a good level of trust with the school administration. Which is obviously not the case here, and surely a big part of the reason why Mike Miles is trying to speed-run this. We can at least yell at him for that.
If the previous elected boards had been doing their jobs, schools would have been closed and consolidated in the past. But they let politics get in the way. HISD had no problem closing Stevenson Elementary in Cottage Grove but didn’t have the guts to close schools elsewhere.
I agree, if the previous school board would have not been playing politics, all of this would not be happening.