Chants rang out, and signs flew up as community members and elected officials gathered outside the Hattie Mae White building on Saturday morning to protest Superintendent Mike Miles’s recent decision to do away with libraries at his New Education System schools and many of his NES -Aligned schools.
Houston Independent School District students, parents and former employees in attendance also spoke out in support of teachers and other staff terminated across Miles’s NES campuses.
Sophie Rojas, a student entering fifth grade at Pugh Elementary School – one of the NES schools that initially lost 28 teachers – said she felt nervous that having new instructors would confuse her and her friends.
“I feel like half of my heart is broken, it’s lost or hurting really bad and I really want my teachers,” she said. “You (Miles) took my second grade family away from me, my best friends and teachers. You also took the library away. You’re thinking that we are bad kids. We are not. We are wonderful, kind and smart.”
Jessica Campos, Rojas’s mother, condemned Miles’s evaluation and removal of most of their schools’ teachers and questioned why he couldn’t instead work with them to provide the resources needed.
“He’s torn apart our school, it looks horrible to me and it looks horrible to my kid,” she said. “She’s going to go into school not really recognizing any faces because even the front staff is replaced.”
Campos also questioned why, if Miles’s priority is to teach students how to read, he was choosing to instead convert libraries specifically at NES schools and several of the 57 NESA schools that voluteered to be part of his new program to “detention centers” or spaces where students who face disciplinary issues can attend class via Zoom.
Cheryl Hensley, a former librarian at Lockhart Elementary School who lost her job due to the school’s library closure, encouraged parents to visit their children’s libraries and check to ensure they are open and librarians are available to students (not enrolled in NES schools).
She said shutting down these institutions closes students to other resources such as 3D printers, drones, SIM cards, robotics, LEGOs, and digital books. Offerings that these children may only have known they had access to with a librarian’s guidance.
“It’s not just about checking out books; the library is more than that. Libraries are your community; libraries are the heart of the school,” Hensley said. “I am the center part of that school. Libraries nurture relationships, and they give students a choice when they come in.
Campos suggested that Miles should instead rely on teachers who know how to handle children who might need the extra attention and fill vacancies with instructors who will learn about their students’ backgrounds and home lives – as former Pugh elementary teachers did. Not opt to single these students out and place them into these Zoom classrooms, which may affect them emotionally.
Miles, for his part, has said that the Zoom rooms are meant to be a vast improvement over the traditional In School Suspension where students are just handed a bunch of work sheets to do or placed before a computer for the day without teacher guidance. This way, he says, students can remain part of their usual class by observing the day over a camera system instead of being completely separated from it.
These explanations have done little to change the minds of those opposed to the Zoom rooms and the absence of libraries.
When Campos turned to ask her daughter if she felt heard and appreciated amid Miles’s recent actions, her daughter shook her head.
“I would just say it’s really disrespectful that he (Miles) has to come in and take away the teachers, principals and the library,” Rojas said. “It’s really messed up that he has to do that; he’s supposed to make the school happy, not sad.”
Organizers of Saturday’s rally invited all of those in attendance to the next HISD board meeting on Thursday, August 10, as they are hosting a “read-in” and asked for participants to bring a book as they will start by reading it in the lobby and then continue to do so throughout the night in the boardroom.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
