Barring any sudden change of heart on the part of Houston ISD’s Board of Managers or its superintendent, the graphic design magnets at Kashmere, Northside and Heights high schools will begin shutting down next school year.
The reason? The assessment that this career path doesn’t pay as much as other jobs and there’s not a huge market in the Houston area for people to enter those occupations.
The board was set to vote on this as part of their consent agenda at Thursday night’s meeting but that item was pulled at the last minute and will come up again at the January 15 board meeting. Any major changes to magnet designations in HISD are supposed to be preceded by community input and a series of community meetings has been scheduled.
One public speaker commented, however, that the upcoming meetings aren’t for community input but to tell the public what HISD has already decided to do.
The Board did vote on two other contentious issues proposed by Superintendent Mike Miles and his administration. The first, which came at the end of the meeting after board members returned from executive session, was sale of five different properties totaling about 230 acres. Several speakers said any such action should wait until an elected board was back in charge and that selling these now to cover operating costs was short-sighted.
“Selling public land during a state takeover without elected oversight risks the permanent loss of community assets that belong to our students and our neighborhoods,” parent Maria Benzon told the board. “Selling assets to cover operating costs is not only unsustainable, it is fiscally irresponsible.”
The other was HISD deleted the board policy that manages how charters within the district operate their charter programs, specifically under Senate Bill 1882 which provides incentives for partnerships between public school districts and charters.
They tabled the overarching board policy change for all in-district charters without adding in the 1882 provisions.
HISD is justifying the abrupt call for sunsetting these programs saying that parents and students are about to make their school choice requests and they need to know what’s available for the next school year. If approved, the graphics design program at Kashmere, Northside and Heights would not be available to incoming freshman next year, but would continue the program for those already enrolled until it is finally shut down completely in 2030.
Several speakers lined up at Thursday’s board meeting to decry the proposal, saying that this will deal a significant blow particularly to Kashmere and Northside and that graphic design is a viable path for CTE programs and the students who are passionate about engaging in it.
HISD isn’t the only district considering changes like this. Under a weighted formula from the Texas Education Agency, public school districts get more state money if Career and Technical Education students are in programs leading to what are considered to be high skill and high wage jobs.
In fact, the entire Arts, Arts, Audio/Visual Technology and Communications category that the graphic design course of study is a part of, has been found wanting HISD’s Chief Academic Officer Kristen Hole told the board.
According to the district’s data analysis, it cannot guarantee that it will lead to jobs that pay at least $22 an hour which HISD considers a living wage.
Miles has for some time pushed the district to move to four career centers distributed throughout the district. Barbara Jordan would be updated and three more centers would be built.
The district also plans to move several programs to the Barbara Jordan Career Center which is part of the continuing debate over whether it is better to bus students from their home skills twice a week to centers set up to handle specialized courses or to continue at their home schools without losing time in transit. And in some cases the district has already spent a large amount of money outfitting those campuses for specialized instruction in areas such as culinary arts.
As far as career technology centers go, Miles said: “We’re behind the curve. Dallas has four. state of the art career tech centers. ” In terms of the programs, Miles said the “experts” who did the data study on careers would be at the next board meeting to explain their data and reasonings.