“TEA go away!!”
“TEA has got to go!”
“No more sell outs”
These were the chants of the Houston NAACP, the Houston Federation of Teachers, Houston Urban League, along with a growing crowd of community members who rallied in front of Delmar Stadium during the third installation of Texas Education Agency community forum on the Houston ISD takeover process.
People held up signs and shouted as TEA Deputy Commissioner Alejandro Delgado began to speak. A long cue of educators, concerns parents, and community advocates stood in front of a microphone and began to ask questions that hoped they would’ve asked TEA Commissioner Mike Morath who wasn’t present after several demands for him to attend.
“Where is Morath?” one person shouted.
“Why change the forum location if he (Morath) ain’t coming?” another said.
Delgado struggled to answer several pressing questions of the audience, but he did respond to a few below:
Is Commissioner Morath using a search firm to select the next Houston ISA superintendent?
Delgado: He is looking nationwide and he’s going to announce the Superintendent at the same time as the board of managers. Similar to searches happening also in school districts those are usually kept private. Commissioner Morath is making the decision.
What are the three criteria HISD has to meet in order to get out of takeover?
Delgado: The first one is no multi-year D or F schools. Second one is improvement on special education practices, processes, (and) systems to support students with disabilities, and the third is overall improvement governance processes and systems in the district.
What is TEA’s plan of action for handling an urban and diverse school district?
Delgado: The TEA has appointed board of managers in seven other districts. Some of them small, some of them majority white, some of them not majority white. And of those, six of the seven showed improvements in scores and one of them Beaumont, the scores were flat. We all know what matters in education, really strong, well-resourced schools, well-resourced teachers, supported principals, whole child education, all of that matters and that is what we are going to expect the board of managers to seek feedback from.
According to the application, as an appointed member of the board of managers, a member can be removed at any time for any reason. What does that mean?
Delgado: The Board of Managers is going to run the district. There will be divergent opinions, and I can tell you TEA and Commissioner Morath is not running the district. They don’t have to get every decision ran by him.
If HISD was a B rating, why are you taking over school district?
Delgado: There are a lot of good things happening in Houston ISD. In 2019, there was a campus that had more than five years underperforming. That triggered a law and there were two districts that were impacted. In one of the districts, we appointed a board of managers and that was Shepard ISD. HISD went into litigation for the next three years, and then in January, the Supreme Court said you can now intervene.
Are the elected board members eligible to be managers?
Delgado: They are not eligible? They will continue to be board of trustees and the board of managers will hopefully be working collaboratively with them.
Houston NAACP President posed a question to Delgado asking him if a “B+ equal a winning grade” in terms of the HISD rating, Delgado response was “it’s not an A.”
“Since according to this representative of the commissioner, only an A is satisfactory, then why aren’t you closing every other school district that earned less than an A?” Dixon said during the rally. “That’s called discrimination.“
Last week, TEA hosted forums with HISD parents, teachers, and advocates pushed for answers regarding the state takeover. Despite the outcries from the community, the state agency’s plans to replace Houston ISD Superintendent Millard House II and the elected school board officials with a nine-member board of managers is still in effect for June 1.
Applications for the board of managers are still ongoing and must be completed and submitted by Thursday, April 6.
The final community forum will take place at Kashmere High School March 30 at 6:30PM.
