As rumors continue to roil the Houston ISD community, or at least the portion of it that includes the most intense critics of Superintendent Mike Miles, it’s difficult to sort the real from the misperceived. What actions are those of overzealous administrators, which ones are critics’ exaggerations and which ones fall under the heading of plausible deniability?
Thursday night’s special meeting was a case in point as about 25 speakers addressed the board with questions about the district’s bathroom policy for students, its sudden decrease in the teacher ranks and how to get an answer when they have questions about district policies.
“What is the attendance policy? There’s so much rumors,” said parent Anita Wadhwa. “I don’t want to get enraged and proselytize about a rumor. I’d like to know is there an attendance policy? What is it? Are people denied FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act]? What’s true, what’s not? Can parents opt out of STAAR [State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness]? How many schools are going to NES [New Education System]?
A text making the rounds earlier Thursday said that any teacher missing 10 days or more from school is going to be terminated. Reportedly written by a principal and sent out to a number of New Education System and NES-Aligned schools, the text may be wrong about the number of days — policy says 15 not 10 lead to termination — but that may not be what teachers are being told by their individual principals.
One person explaining why this might be happening said that principals are under a great deal of pressure to keep absences down and may be passing that pressure on to the teachers who report to them. Miles has made it clear he expects teachers be in class without too many absences.
The question of restroom use by students surfaced several times. Parent Melissa Yarborough said this past week teachers and students at Navarro Middle School were told that students were not allowed to use the restroom for the first 45 minutes of class. That leaves about 20 minutes remaining in the class that students are allowed to go. “Students are not allowed to use the restroom during transitions or during lunch. Some students have classes with like 50 kids in them.
“If you do the math, a child has about a 13 percent chance during the day to use the bathroom.”
Another speaker, librarian Brandie Dowda, criticized Miles’ removal of libraries from the NES schools. “Separate is not equal. The Supreme Court decided this in 1954 in Brown vs. the Board of Education. Why in 2023 are valuable community resources being removed and polices and practices that frankly are shameful being implemented only in schools that serve primarily black and brown students. Libraries which serve not only students but the community and are staffed by teacher-librarians that have been shuttered in favor of Team centers.. Students are heavily restricted in their bodily autonomy and are heavily restricted in their restroom use. When they are permitted to go, they must carry traffic cones.
“If it wouldn’t happen in River Oaks, why are you allowing it to happen in the Fifth Ward?”
Besides the speakers, most of the meeting was taken up with a lengthy training session for board members on how to be better board members. This was played out to an increasingly diminishing crowd. Board member Paula Mendoza arrived just before the last public speaker was addressing the group just minutes before 6 p.m. for the meeting that began at 5 p.m.
On an odd note, the public speakers were denied access to the microphone in the front of the room, told it wasn’t set up to work yet by Board President Audrey Momanaee and to go to the mic in the back of the room. But when board trainer Ashly Paz began addressing the board she spoke from the front microphone which seemed to be working just fine.
The next board meeting and final one of the year is scheduled for next Thursday, December 14.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
