Houston ISD’s Board of Managers voted Thursday to close 12 schools next school year, despite emotional pushback from parents and public officials who begged for more time and warned the move would destabilize communities and harm students.
The vote came two weeks after state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles proposed the closure plan and marks the most sweeping round of school closures in HISD in over a decade as the board continued nearly three years of voting in lockstep with the administration.
Miles said the district had to close eight campuses and relocate four others because enrollment fell short of projections and aging facilities — despite the district’s previous public commitment not to close any schools in the fall.
In a room packed with families and public officials, dozens of people pleaded with HISD’s state-appointed leadership to delay the vote and gather more community input, raising concerns about transportation, special education services and other aspects of the plan.
“When you close a school serving special education students, you are not reassigning them. You are destabilizing it,” said Aubrie Barr, an HISD student whose sibling is autistic and attends pre-K at Ross Elementary. “You are asking children who struggle with changes to absorb the biggest challenge possible. My brother is not a statistic. He is not an efficiency problem.”
Several noted that the vote was happening under the state takeover, with unelected leadership, and asked board members to still listen to people’s concerns even though they don’t answer to voters.
HISD held parents-only meetings over the last two weeks and did not publicly post the times or dates. HISD’s Chief of Staff Monica Zdrojewski said about 700 families attended 25 campus-based meetings.
“To be clear, these are not public meetings,” HISD’s press office told the Houston Chronicle after multiple requests to attend. “These are closed meetings for members of the school community directly impacted by the closures.”
Several elected officials and their staff had trouble finding and joining the sessions.
Elected HISD Trustee Dani Hernandez said the meetings over the last two weeks “were not community meetings.” Hernandez said she was denied entrance to a meeting and had to make calls to get in, even though her child was zoned for the school slated to close.
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At the meeting Thursday, Miles said he had “resisted” closing schools for three years, which drew interjections from the audience who pointed out it was the district’s responsibility to maintain schools. Miles pointed to the district’s efforts to fix heating issues every winter, starting repair efforts at 4:30 a.m.
“There’s over 40 schools facility-wise that could possibly be closed,” Miles said. “If we did it just by the numbers, just by the data, but we’re not doing that.”
Parents and community members said they felt blindsided by the sudden announcement — a frustration many repeated during the meeting Thursday.
“The first communication that we had with the district about our co-location with Cage was in a school meeting yesterday evening,” said Kelsey Gilmore-Innis, who has two children at Lantrip Elementary School. “The speed of this is alarming. It is suspicious, and is what you do when you are doing something shady.”
See here and here for the background. The issue is not the closures themselves. As we’ve noted before, this has been a long time coming, thanks to a variety of factors, some of which – like HISD’s declining enrollment – have been exacerbated since the takeover. Objectively, closing or combining some schools makes sense.
The issue, as always, is with the complete lack of communication and engagement. Never mind the sudden announcement, after having previously announced that there were no imminent closures, or the lightning speed with which HISD went from announcement to ratification. The lack of parent engagement sessions, which not only were not open to the public but at which an actual parent and elected official was initially denied entry to is just bonkers. To borrow from Linus Van Pelt, of all the Mike Mileses in the world, he’s the Mike Milesiest.
I wish I knew what else to say, because this is all just so goddamn frustrating. I’ll close with this video from the Chron in which some of the elected Trustees had their say prior to the Board vote.
Houston ISD’s board trustees, a group of eight elected representatives, plead with the state-appointed Board of Managers to halt the vote on the proposed closure of 12 schools in Houston, including 8 in Northeast Houston.
— Chron.com (@chron.com) February 26, 2026 at 9:35 PM
I cannot wait to get this guy out of our city.