Let's see here. Good evening. The this meeting is now convened at 05:02PM. I would like everyone ask everyone to, please silence, all cell phones, including my own right here. It would be bad if mine rang. We'll now be joined by a member of the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp to lead our pledges. I'd like to ask Board Member Marty Goosen to introduce tonight's pledge leader. Thank you, President Campo. Cadet Lieutenant Colonel Adam De Los Santos. Cadet Lieutenant Adam de la Cento is a senior at Cesar Chavez High School.
He is Commander of the twenty first Battalion overseeing 196 cadets in the program. He has been active at Army JROTC since he was a freshman. His hobbies include playing airsoft, paintball, going to the gym and spending time with his friends. When he graduates, he hopes to attend Texas A and M University to study engineering. Welcome and congratulations on your service, Cadet de Losanto. Thank you. Please stand for a moment of silent meditation. Please remain standing for the pledge of allegiance and pledge the Texas flag.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic of which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Now honor the Texas flag. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the Texas, one State under God, one and indivisible. Thank you. Oh, yeah, sorry about that. Thank you, Casette de los Santos. We will now hear from public officials and speakers who identified themselves as HISD students or parents. Please note that Spanish live captioning is available for those viewing the meeting via live
stream, and live stream Spanish interpretation is available in person in the auditorium. Public comment during School Board meetings will only be available to those persons who have signed up to speak prior to the meeting time per our current protocol. Verbal and other disruptions by persons during the School Board meetings are not acceptable as they inhibit the Board's ability to conduct business and the public's ability to observe those processes. Persons who participate in such behavior will be given one warning and if the behavior is repeated,
they will be asked to leave the meeting. As I said last Board meeting, we can agree to disagree, but we can do it in an agreeable manner. And I think we're an example of civic discourse and civic discussion. And so we need to be I really believe this good examples to our students and to the community and how we conduct ourselves. So thank you for that in advance. When we do listen, when someone has an issue or a problem that we can solve immediately, our team over here connects with that person and then deals with what the issues
might be. So we do listen, we appreciate what you have to say here tonight. We have 71 registered speakers who will be limited to one minute each per board policy. As we have more than 30 people signed up to address the board tonight, we ask that you stay on topic and refrain from naming individuals, especially students, as they identify as their identity is protected under law. But you may name your own child. I ask that you please respect our procedures and that and the other speakers and end your comments promptly when your time has expired and the timer rings.
We'll start with public officials. Will HSC Board of Education, Trustee Savant Moore, you're up first. Thank you. Thank you. Up next is Trustee, Placido Gomez. Welcome. Today is my ninth wedding anniversary and the first anniversary that my wife and I are celebrating with a child. And it turns out that we don't always agree on how to raise our little munchkin. And even in moments when she's criticizing how I'm putting him to sleep, and even when I think I'm right and she's wrong, it would never occur to me to tell her haters gonna hate in response to
any criticism that I have. Much less when I post a blog titled haters gonna hate on LinkedIn with a photo of a scoreboard that says, 56, Norma zero. Never gonna happen. For one, I wanna stay married, my top adult outcome goal if you will. Number two, if she and I actually kept score, she'd be way ahead. And number three, and most importantly, she and I are on the same team when it comes to raising our child just as the superintendent, board of managers, and the HISD community should be on the same team when it comes to shaping the minds of 176,000 HISD students.
And we'd love to see more evidence of that here in this boardroom. Thank you. Congratulations and thank you for your service. Next, we will hear from speakers who have identified themselves as HISD students or parents. Speakers, please state your name and topic when you step up to the microphone. Ms. Smith, you may call our speakers. We have student Nora Esinger. So I'm Nora, and I'm in eighth grade, and I'm an expert in history. And you've been teaching us directly false info on purpose. For example, in this assignment, it says that the
train the troops at Valley Forge when actually it was and I was interested in that. So I found copies of Tiques from three years ago, and it has correct info. It says that was the one who trained the troops because he is. So that is what's gonna change the topic a lot. So this isn't misinformation. This is disinformation now. This is intentionally false. And, he was handpicked out of the curriculum, which I've been informed, to by, ATA at a different school. In Lafayette's own words, he came here to learn not to teach. He was a 19 year old who had never fought,
and was and was actually aide de camp to his own king. He He was very important and You can continue. Thank you. You can keep going if you want. We'll we'll give you yeah. Absolutely. Go ahead. Give a little deference to our students for sure. That's okay. Put your mic back on with you. Anyways and Sorbon was the one who wrote our drill book right here as in as as you can see Baron von And Washington himself, if you won't take it from me, take it from George Washington who wrote his own address on why was the one
who trained our troops, not Lafayette or anyone else. I want to know why this historical figure's name is blocked out on a different historical figure's name is put in for his actions. This is intentionally false information, and I can't think of any reason why you would come to this conclusion or how you were. I would try and see the, sources you have listed and HISD has on their selves, but HISD sources are not open to kids. We cannot access that information. And my teacher also cannot access that information.
So I would not know. I just have my own sources. But I don't think it's fair that this historical figure was just taken out of the HSC curriculum even though America would not exist without him. So hang on. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Ileana Gottlieb. Any other students, please come to the front row. We'll wait for you. Go ahead. Hello. My name is Elianna Gottlieb, and I am a ninth grader at HSPDA. Last week, my parents received an email saying I had failed two STAAR tests, but I had not failed. I'm in advanced classes and took those tests a year early and did quite well
on them. Hundreds of other high performing HISD students received the same incorrect notifications. Our school emailed parents explaining that HISD was, quote, investigating. The next day, HISD sent a quote correction, but it was still wrong. Our school had to tell families to disregard that message too. It's been over a week. We've heard nothing. No explanation, no apology, no correction. This administration emphasizes data driven decisions, but you can't track which students took which tests or their scores. If you can't get this right,
how can we trust any of the data shaping our education? Fix your systems, communicate transparently, and show us that accuracy matters as much as the scores themselves. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other students in person? We now have students on Zoom. Suhani available to speak? Maria Benzon, is adidas Sage Bittner available to speak? I've had to explain to multiple unknowns here. Sorry. One second. This is Suhani. Go ahead and say your name first, please. This is Suhani. Yes. Go ahead. I've had to explain to multiple unknowns here the purpose of a good education.
It gives you the knowledge to obtain scholarships in college, which means that you don't have to pay if you want to have as many years of it as you need so that you could get a doctorate and intern a better job in life. Mike Miles only cares about showing more having a quote unquote good education. With our law of trust, that won't change our life positively like what they're trying to prove. But stress teachers angry cats, AI curriculums, libraries taken away, and a focus on tests instead of the individual students or fine arts programs, I think that's proof of a bad education.
But, of course, it's totally ethical to spend millions of dollars more on a propaganda channel than on actually good learning resources for us. Thank you. And before we bring the next one in, I just want to make sure everyone realizes that we do have three board members that are on Zoom tonight and they're up there at the top of the screen. Thank you. Maria Binzon, is Adida Sage Bittner available? Go ahead. Hi. My name is Adida Sage Bittner, and I'm a sixth grader at Young Women's College Preparatory Academy. I want to talk about why schools should hire certified teachers. Certified teachers know how to teach kids and make learning fun.
Uncertified teachers might not know the best ways to help us learn. My fifth grade math teacher and science teacher was amazing. She was certified, knew about social emotional learning, and knew what it was like as a kid. She wasn't the kind of kid to sit still when she was in school. She knew how to make things stick. In math, I remember it so much, and everyone loved the songs that she played. Teachers like her make school better for everyone. Every student deserves a teacher who knows how to teach, not someone random that you not someone random. Thank you. Thank you. And we'd like to call all HISD parents to the front row,
please, beginning with speaker number one. Speaker one, go ahead. My name is Lauren Zents. I have three children in Landtripp Elementary. I just find it funny that when you send your evaluators into our schools and they provide bad grades to our teachers for whom the curriculum has just been flipped upside down without consultation or permission from anyone, that your evaluators refuse to provide any feedback, refuse to explain why they've given the grades they've given and refuse to provide any sort of suggestions for improvement, it's almost as if our teachers have been set up to fail. And it's pretty funny that the people who have been brought into HISD to provide
this new life changing curriculum literally have no idea how to grade and give supportive feedback. You know what it sounds a lot like? Your entire educational model. The total brain killing crap that you're stuffing down all our kids and teachers throats. It is clear that your only curricular and political goal is for people to obey you so that when you ride off into the sunset out of here, you can leave communities destroyed but get your millions of dollars more on top of the millions of dollars of wealth you already have as you sell your OBE curriculum to get more hungry power power hungry. Thank you.
Next speaker, two. My name is Trey Comstock. I'm a Durham parent, a former teacher in DCPS, and hold a master's in special education. Our data at Durham did drop 6% overall and 13% in our weakest area closing the gap, moving us from a b to a c, earning us the special focus designation and meaning that some kind of change is needed. However, in your shock and awe implementation, you missed the growing consents among consensus among education researchers that the disruption from high teacher turnover has a negative impact specifically in student achievement,
even controlling for the relative talents of that teacher as summarized and extended well in Ronfelt et al twenty thirteen and Gibbons et al 2021. At Durham, we have seen 25% turnover since August the first and 75% turnover in our third grade team specifically from the implementation of your special focus designation. This is putting at jeopardy student achievement. This change is excessive and hurting our children. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Kristen Sullivan. I am the parent of a student at Bel Air High School, and I am the president of the band booster board of Bel Air Band.
As you may know, the Bel Air High School Band is the first band in the history of HISD to have been invited to perform at the Western International Band Conference, which they will do in November in Seattle. The members of the band have put in countless extra hours of practice and rehearsing for this concert band performance on top of their marching band performances, and often their high academic curriculums that these students are doing. So the band boosters, we could not bring any students because they are right now rehearsing for this,
concert. But we would like to cordially invite all of you, and I have invitations for all of the board members, to attend the pre concert that the students will do on November 20 at 06:30 in the Bel Air High School. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Mark Garcia Pratt. I'm a parent of students at Landtrip Elementary. HISD's recent leadership choice to blame the media instead of admitting its actual problems should be a major red flag for this board. In two years, my kids have had three executive directors, three principals, four assistant principals,
multiple SPED teams, nearly 40 teacher changes, including three this year already, and lost 25% of its total enrollment. Two years. But, yes, it's the evening news's fault that parents don't trust the school. Art, music, counseling, and magnet program have all been replaced by special focus, except no one has one spot to explain the families at that school what that even means. But, yeah, it's Houston Chronicles thought that trust isn't built. Our community's history, relationship, and values have been belittled and replaced by a narrow obsession with test prep, but, yeah, it's viral Facebook posts that are causing a lack of trust.
This board doesn't have a media problem, it has a leadership problem. You can't build trust when you refuse to communicate Thank you. Hi. I'm Jesse Dugan, HISD parent. For two years, I've been asking the school board to reinstate autism services for special education that you gutted under the order of Greg Abbott and his discussing state takeover of our public school district here in Houston ISD. Forget the bare minimum, fundamental educational services you cut for my autistic kid. I can't even get any of y'all to utter the word autism. And why would you bother saying the word autism?
You were never elected. Some billionaires bribed Greg Abbott to send you here. You stole these school board positions from people who were elected. And if I could get you to say the word autism or even use it in a sentence to question superintendent Mike Miles about how he's violating special education laws, then I hope you will become more prepared than he did at city hall when you are eventually questioned by our city and state officials. Thank you. Alright. Any good piss any good business person knows the best advertisement is word-of-mouth. You don't need millions. We celebrate our kids and our teachers.
We don't believe it's because of you. We have filed various TEA complaints that have been substantiated by, with educational violations. These are violations at an a rated school, so I don't think an a raised a rated school should have TEA violations, which makes me question ratings. First day of school, my son came home and said his test didn't grade correctly. Five out of five, graded an eight 88. My other child, I have asked to see tests and that were failed and was refused. So when Miles talks about gains, it makes me take pause. Floyd is currently shutting out parents,
media, and anyone that doesn't follow suit. Even our local leaders took him to task. Both of my children are in special education, and I thought my through my experience, I feel many students are being left behind because of how difficult the process is for our children to receive services and the poor support HISD provides to its schools. Children don't have the luxury of time, so Thank you. Good evening. My name is Robbie McDonough and I'm a parent in HISD. Board of Managers, if you put people in the dark, they will see monsters. I urge you to not approve the proposed annual operating budget board policy change.
Ending quarterly reports that compare actual spending to approved budget would make it harder, if not impossible, to see how district dollars are really being used. Confidence in HISD is already low, reducing transparency sends the wrong message. Accountability begins with openness and quarterly financial reporting is a basic safeguard that ensures money intended for classrooms actually gets there. If we're serious about rebuilding trust in the district, we should be expanding transparency, not limiting it. The board must reject this change and instead commit to restoring public tools like the
annual HISD budget book so our community can once again see how every dollar goes towards student success. Thank you. My name is Audrey Nath, and I'm a pediatric neurologist and mom to a third grader at Memorial Elementary who has an IEP for his dyslexia. And I wanna start with something positive, which is this week he had a fantastic IEP meeting. His room teachers and special ed teachers and the principal all knew him very well and were able to make a great plan for him moving forward. I also want to bring up something concerning that I've heard, which is that HISD is no longer paying for an interpreter for parents at IEP
meetings. And I'm concerned that this may disproportionately hurt schools in area where, one, there's a high proportion of parents who need language services. And two, schools in under resourced neighborhoods where there isn't a PTO that can kick in extra money to handle this sudden change in budget. So for these reasons, I hope the board will reconsider this change in policy and continue to fund interpretation services at IEP meetings that are required by Federal law. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. My name is Neely Stewart, and my daughter is a Durham Dalmatian.
Thank you for having me back to the dog and pony show. I just wanted to say, Floyd, you're right. I'm not a professional. You're supposed to be the professional. I'm what you called a parent. I don't think that gets more personal than our own children. So I'm here to remind you that we aren't going anywhere. We're just getting stronger and louder about the fact that you don't care about our children. All you care about is that you, Morath, and Abbott, are financially benefiting from the failure of public education. We are here to call you out for reassigning Durham's nurse part time to another
school. How does that help kids students or teachers? We're here to call you out for canceling a prominently Hispanic elementary school's field trip to the zoo. Now who's picking on the black and the brown children? You are all complicit. You should be ashamed. Oh, Floyd, I heard you like musicals. To quote Hamilton, history has its eyes on you. Thank you. Ellen Walter followed by three students who've joined us. Students, if you'll make your way to the front row. Okay. In the board self evaluation this year, you guys gave yourself a 15 out of 15 for, agreeing that student outcome goals are influenceable by the superintendent and are the first priority
for resource allocation. What I've noticed is that HISD Now was spending $2,000,000 this year, which could be the equivalent of two ninety four school librarians. Surveys by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation show that 83% of students get books by using the school library over any other option. Studies in 14 states show schools with certified librarians consistently score better on standardized reading tests. For me, that sounds like maybe you're not using the priority of resource allocation because if you
were, you'd be providing libraries and certified librarians. Thank you. Archie wants to do it now, but she didn't sign in. Is that okay? I'm sorry? My kid has signed up but didn't sign in. Is it okay if she does her speech? If we're doing any Sure. But then k. Here. The afternoon. Yeah. Keep coming. I think the schools should have nap time because, I don't think think we get enough sleep if we put food to to do our work in the morning. Thank you very much. Good
job. Paulina Bautista and Emiliana's Aubrey Barr. Hello and good afternoon. I'm Paulina Bautista. Getting straight to the point, I shouldn't be here right now, but here I am. We have these students aren't engaged like we used to be. Getting asked how was school went from it was good to boring. The new education system is disengaging us students who just wanna have fun along with going through our educational journey. Every class and lesson is the exact same, and it's annoying because it's the same routine that keeps us disconnected. We walk into the class,
do the do now, sit through about an hour of HISD slide shows that often have mistakes, write SCR cards, and give our partners, thumbs ups and acknowledge them. And finally, we get on with the DOL. Everything this new education system does controls what goes on in our classrooms, and many students like me and the students here today don't like it. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Emily. I go to Northside High School. And relevant to my speech, my grades are in the range of 90 to a 100 on my transcript. I received an academic leather jacket of which you can only get if you have
four point o for both semesters. I do volunteering. I join programs. But when I do interviews with programs last year, I had to explain why I had NGs. NGs that were placed because last year, I had surgery. That surgery made me miss school for three days. When I returned, I did the work. I went to tutorials. I made the grade. And I turned in my excuse notes from my doctor explaining why I was gone. I had NGs at the end of the day, and I was furious because it was targeting everyone in my school. Students who no matter the grade, time in tutorials, or excuse notes from medical professionals still had NGs.
When I went to recover my NGs, nearly half of not all students who go to Northside were there. When I completed that removal week, my NGs were still in my transcript. And other students reported the same thing. When you implemented this system Go ahead. Keep going. When you implemented this system, you didn't think about the students who are sick or have family problems or even sick family members. My peers work for the grade. They work for the credit. So it is unfair that they are only allowed two absences before they get an NG. Thank you. Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Aubrey Barr. I'm a student at Northside High School. I came here to say what a lot of students already know. The way the district is forcing teachers to teach us is not helping us, it's hurting us. You've turned classrooms into scripted slide shows with timers, and you've turned teachers into robots. But guess what? Students aren't robots. We don't all learn this learn the same way. Some of us need more time, some more explanation, or one on one help, but our teachers can't give us that anymore because you've tied their hands behind their backs. And then on top of that, you're firing teachers, mass firing them at a time when we need we need more teachers,
not fewer. The the very people who actually know how to reach us, connect with us, and teach us, you're pushing them out and it's like you're gutting the very heart of our school. Let's be real. This is an education. This is control. This is disrespect, and it's destroying the trust between students, teachers, and the district. You say this is for kids. If it really was for kids, you'd listen to us. And to the teachers who've been in the classrooms longer than some of you have been making these decisions. Right now, the message you're send You bitch. Okay. I do. Sorry. Right now, the message you're sending is clear.
You care more about the power you care more about power than people, more about appearance than actual learning. And that's just not and that's not just a failure for students. That's a failure failure oh my god. Failure of leadership. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Zachary Youngblood, and I'm a student at Northside High School. Let's be honest. This new AI curriculum is a a mess. You're turning classrooms into computer labs and teachers into robots who read off the slides. You call it innovation, but it's just control.
Students aren't learning better. We're zoning out while teachers can even teach their own way. You're replacing real learning with fake progress. AI doesn't understand students. It doesn't care when we're struggling, but our teachers do, and you're taking that away. So stop pretending this is helping us. It is not the future. It's a disaster. Bring back real teaching, real connection, real education because we're students, not test data, and we deserve better. Thank you. Thank you. We have the remaining parent speakers on Zoom. Maria Benzon, you may begin.
Hi. I'm going to get Doctor. Maria Benzon. For achievement and district effectiveness, consider the six levers in PA's effective district framework. Number one, planning and performance. Continuous improvement means asking the right questions. Are we measuring what matters or what flatters? Number two, talent. Why has HISD lost 8,000 teachers and twenty four thousand students in just two years? Would any business call that success? Student support is number three. When staff are disrespected and students panic under pressure, how is that a culture of safety?
Number four, academic experience. AI written error filled curriculum is not rigor. Would any professional be praised for that work? Number five, leadership. Leaders who can't teach without leaders who can't teach shouldn't judge teachers. Where's the real capacity building? Finance and operations, bloated administration, broken ACs, and cuts to school program. Is that effectiveness or dysfunction? Board of managers, please find Houston a leader with the wisdom to lead, the humility to listen, and the heart to serve our children and educators. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Christine Hurley, you may begin. Great. Our scores are up. What kind of delusional person are you, Miles, to think that's that's all that matters? Families who can leave are fleeing any of us. If it was this wonderful educational system you claim it is, wouldn't those same families be hammering down the doors to go to school in HISD? Or are you saying that all the families leaving are bad parents too stupid to know what's best for their own children? It's absurd that you, Rick, support this nonsense, assuming you're the great businessman that everyone claims you to be.
Houston's future workforce is fleeing, and those who stay will be ill equipped to handle the rigor of college, of vocational schools, and careers, or of employment. I don't know how many more thousands of families leaving it'll take for y'all to understand that Mike Miles is ruining the largest district in the state, and you are all enabling it. We didn't elect you, but you're all we've got. To the love of God, please listen to us. I am not just noise. I am a mother who is very tired of seeing my children and their friends and all HIC students suffer.
Thank you. Dana Ladner, you may begin. Dana Ladner, please turn your camera on. You may begin. Hi. This is Dana Ladner. I'm here from Durham Elementary Hispanic Heritage Night, and this is a night that we use to celebrate our time with our children. This night has been Durham's ratings have dropped. We asked for collaboration to fix. Instead of thoughtful student focused support, Miles' agenda caused disruption and confusion for elementary aged children in the most chaotic way possible. Durham was named the state school of focus, and now five teachers have left.
Make no mistake. They were pushed out. Our kids lost trusted educators. The teachers who remain feel demoralized, undervalued, and micromanaged. Teachers are living leaving because the HISD curriculum is not good for our kids, and the instruction given to our teachers is absolutely toxic. The years of experience that these teachers have and have left our schools should alarm everyone and speak volumes. The library was dismantled to make a team center hold rows of desks so that eight year old didn't I'm done. It's a case. Thank you. Case Mundy,
please turn your camera on, and you may begin. Say again. Case Mundy. Please go ahead. Ma'am? Yes. Okay. So teacher retention is a huge problem being made worse by NES here at HST. When we treat teachers as widgets, force feed them in structural content and style, they won't stay around. Professionals don't stay where they're guilty of not respecting. Durham High School had two additional teachers re resigned since the last board meeting. We've had 20% 25% turnover in our teachers since the start of the year. This is driven by poor leadership,
flawed system, and an assist insistence on a culture of fear. Miles gets in one of his moods when we, say that we want certified teachers. He thinks you don't need skills to follow his AI generated teaching system, but HP two removed the exemption for uncertified teachers in elementary schools in '26 and '27 and all schools in 2728. One in four HIC teachers are uncertified. Where will the replacement come from? Miles' next bonus structure must have a requirement to outperform surrounding districts as well as large districts and teacher retention. Thank
you. Abby Stargell. You may begin. My name is Abby Stargell, and I'm speaking tonight from Durham LMS Hispanic Heritage Night, where we're honoring the cultures and resilience of our students. We agree with you on the necessity and importance of closing gaps and helping all students succeed. This is actually why we're most worried. What's happening now is not about equity. Real equity isn't something you do to communities. It's something you build with them. What we have now are families being shut out of decision. Materials from the district are not in families' home languages.
Community concerns are dismissed and silenced, and students notice. When families are excluded, students feel excluded too. They hear the messaging and they internalize it. Top down decisions are not equitable. They breed mistrust and fear. The very students you claim to support, mister Miles, are actually being heard the most. Our experience shows that when policies are top down, families who restore to fight back are the Thank you. Jill Tucker, please begin. Phil Tucker joining you from Durham Elementary's Hispanic Heritage Night,
a night of joy and celebration. But behind the celebration is a harsh truth, students' early feeding. Parents are withdrawing their children because they no longer feel confident in the school's direction. Durham has already lost dozens of students this year, and every student who fewer coaches, and less stability for those who remain. Students here are feeling the change. They noticed their classrooms were emptier. Only a part time nurse, a part time counselor, impact that programs are disappearing, and volunteers are here no longer. Will we have less funds for pupil each pupil? We're not opposed to change, and we wanna improve our scores for all kids. The narrow focus of changing f's to a's with a rigid one size fits all
test prep curriculum and a culture of fear and isolation is doing more harm than good in our community. It did not have to be this way. We know that time will tell, and we will not stop fighting because Houston kids deserve better. We are off to enjoy what is left of our community. This change is excessive and it's hurting our kids. Thank you. Doctor Anita Wadhwa, you may begin. Nearly three quarters of HIC teachers are women, yet the majority of the HIC Board of Managers is male. And the majority of those who show up for the board meetings, run PTOs and fundraisers,
advocate for student schools, are women and gender expansive people. So when decision making is centralized and it becomes discretionary for the superintendent to meet with teacher unions, for example, employee voices are optional. And those most affected, women, caregivers and classroom professionals, are the ones who are pushed aside. And giving the superintendent sole authority over HISD intellectual property, materials that are created with public funds, risks turning public work into private opportunity. These policies undermine trust and silence the very people who hold our schools together.
Please reject them. Thank you. Melissa Yarbrough, please begin. Hi. I'm urging you to pull item 23 from the consent agenda and vote no. It deletes board policy on instructional goals and objectives, saying that they are outdated and not required. I ask you, what part is outdated? Is it the part that says curriculum must reflect current research, best practices, and technological advancements? Is it that the district provides well balanced curriculum, providing for, oh, for special populations, the necessary modifications and methodologies,
pacing, and resources? Is it that schools be responsive to their communities, providing parents, members of the community, teachers, support staff, and students with formal structured input and decision making? Is it that students demonstrate an understanding of course subjects through a variety of meaningful assessments, such as project based learning, portfolios, and everything? Is it that the central office turned the traditional management pyramid upside down and become a dealer rather than an enforcer? Are there parts that says to lower student and adult ratios and provide Thank you.
Your time is up. Each student. Thank you. Thank you. Kyle Tucker, please turn your camera on, and you may begin. Hi. Could you all see me, hear me? I'm gonna hope you can. Go ahead, please. Hate hate that we couldn't be there at the board meeting in person tonight, but we are out at our beautiful elementary school, Durham Elementary, celebrating Hispanic heritage night. An event that is fully funded, organized, and hosted by a PTA that is rapidly dwindling in number. We're losing parents. We're losing students every week because of the aggressive,
poorly planned, and even worse executed strategy going on in our campus. And I do wanna share just one thing in the very brief amount of time we're allowed to give public comments. If it hasn't already been addressed before by other parents or members of the PTA at Durham, We lost a full time nurse this week. She was dropped down to two days a week. And the reason we were given is so that we could afford a counselor also part time on campus. At the same time, we hired two learning assistants that are uncertified teachers to babysit in
the, whatever you call it, the the team center. So I guess the message we're getting is those roles are more important than the mental and physical health of our students. Thank you. That concludes speakers and grouping. Okay, that concludes the hearing of the public officials, HIC students and parents. So before we get into the meeting business, I'd like to invite Board members to share their reports. If you have any if it's the last Board meeting or any comments you'd like to share? Anybody? Okay. I know there's been a lot of tours of schools and continuing to go out
there and see what's going on. Any Board members on Zoom? Would you like to Board Member Arnold? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Can you hear me okay? Yes, go ahead. I I just wanted to share, mister Chairman, members of the board, that I had an opportunity since our last board meeting to visit, two Sunrise Centers and six campuses, including the Barbara Jordan Career Center. I know some of you have had a chance to visit that, but this is my first visit, and I feel that it, coincided pretty nicely with the goal progress monitoring we're doing this month.
I mention it because if you haven't had a chance to visit as a board member, I encourage you to. There's a lot of really exciting things that are happening there, and I just wanted to add to to the administration for all of the really wonderful things happening on that campus. It was really exciting to see the confidence of the students, on that campus with the skills that they are learning, both those that are, students in the tenth and eleventh and seniors and those that are in the ninth grade, learning these skills there. So, if you can visit, try to make some time to go.
It's an exceptional campus. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Any other board members on Zoom? No? Okay. Great. Jeanette. Oh, Jeanette, go ahead. Sorry. Jeanette, we aren't able to hear you. Your sound is on. Sorry about that. Here we go. We can hear you now. Can you hear me now? Yes. You may begin. Okay. Yes. We can hear you now. You were unmuted a minute ago. Go ahead and unmute again. It's it shows that it's muted. Okay. Go ahead, Marty. Yes. I was with I want to report on a similar visit to a Sunrise Center. We went to the West Orem YMCA Family YMCA
Sunrise Center and we met there, Barbara Shelby Roberts, who is the leader of that organization. It's amazing what she's doing in that community and what she's what that community is doing, I think, through the Sunrise Center itself. My wife happens to be very involved with and is on the Board of the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation. And we've connected Barbara and I think others with the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation. They will be hopefully working on arrangement, they will be delivering books for distribution to communities to all eight Sunrise Centers.
And so what we saw from Barbara, she has shelves in the Sunrise Center where families are free to come in, take books, take them home. And the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation has overload of books that they've been donated over the years. And I'm hopeful that in the next few weeks, we're going to work on an arrangement where every one of the eight Sunrise Centers will have free books available for families in their neighborhoods. Okay. All right. So next up, we're going to do recognitions and the superintendent's reports. So Superintendent Miles, you have the floor. Yes, sir. I'd like to call our division chiefs to the microphone to recognize Houston ISD's
Teachers of the Year. Alright, good evening, Superintendent Miles, President Compo, and Board of Managers. I am excited to kick off our teacher recognition this evening, for starting with the central division. Teachers, when your name is called, if you will please stand to be recognized. For Division Elementary Teacher of the Year at Memorial Elementary School, Jimmy Perdon. For Division Middle School Teacher of the Year at Hogg Middle School, Nina Flores. For division high school teacher of the year at Challenge Early College High School, Wilson Juarez.
And we did have a few HISD Teachers of the Year for various departments, including the HISD Special Education Teacher of the Year from Atherton Elementary School, Ashley Thompson. HISD ESL Secondary Teacher of the Year from Project Chrysalis Middle School, Christian Holland Burrows. And HISD CTE Teacher of the Year from High School for Law and Justice, Donna Clark. Good evening. I think the North is up next. So, I'm so proud to be able to, congratulate these folks for the, Division Elementary Teacher of the Year.
It's Andrea Sutherland from Durkee Elementary School. For the HISD, Special Education Teacher of the Year, it's Tyrone Laden. For the HAIC bilingual teacher of the year, it's Celia Sosa. For the, Division High School Teacher of the Year at Scarborough High School, it's Byron Aroba Briery. And last but not least, I wanna celebrate the, HISD 2025 Secondary Teacher of the Year, Laura Klein. She's got back to you. Good evening, Division Chief, Himmel de la Huardia. I wanna, congratulate, we're gonna start with our first honoree,
Cynthia Guerrero from Fondren Elementary, as you can see her. She was our HISD 2025 Elementary of the Year. Next, we have Gloria Leonard from Hartman Middle School, division middle school teacher of the year. Next, we have Julian Eagle Planton, Energy Institute High School, and that's division high school teacher of the year. And last, we have Tina Offment, Grissom Elementary, HISD special education of the year. Congratulations. Good evening, West Division chief, Casey Bailey. First up, we have division elementary teacher of the year from Elrod Elementary,
Raymark Presquito. Next up, we have division middle school teacher of the year from Revere Middle School, Denisha Calloway. Division high school teacher of the year from Sharpstown International, Katherine Mathis. For our high HISD Special Education Tea of the Teacher of the Year in the West from Westside High School, Raylan Tufas. And HISD Elementary ESL teacher of the year from McNamara Elementary, Latoya Curtis. If we can all just stand and give a round of applause to our teachers of the year. Teachers because they work tirelessly. They put their effort in.
They Okay? Board President Rick Campo and members of the Board, we also had a celebration for the teachers and the Teachers of the Year, a week ago, Friday, and was I think we had over 1,000 people there. It was really a good evening and honoring our teachers. And I think we also revisited the principal of the years as well. Last month, I announced to the Board the Houston Promise, which is our commitment to 100% of HISD's campuses being rated A or B by
August 2027. And as part of the Houston Promise campaign, I am thrilled to share that all 64 of our C and D rated campuses have been adopted by community members, local business, and other organizations. Our collective support for our HIC students matters as we aim to reach this ambitious goal of all A and B campuses by August 2027. And we're grateful to those organizations and the community support for the teachers and the
students of those schools because they definitely deserve it. This year will be our best year yet. I want to go over a few of the district's achievement. I know last time I went over some of the accountability scores. We talked about the zero F schools. We went from 56 F rated campuses two years to zero. We went from 93 and B rated campuses to 197. But there's a lot more data and you've received some, but I just want to highlight a few things.
So, I'll just go over individual graduation committees, teacher effectiveness, and closing the gap analysis. So, the individual graduation committees, just so you, maybe the newer board members may not be familiar with this. In 2015, Texas Education Agency created the Individual Graduation Committee, for those students who did not pass an EOC, end of course exam. There are five of them in high school Algebra I, English I, English II, Biology and U. S. History. And so,
for the students and a rare exception if a student didn't pass one of those exams or two of those exams, they could take what's called an IGC, an individual graduation committee program in order to pass. This is supposed to be rare, and even with an IGC, they're supposed to show proficiency. Unfortunately, and across the state, but especially in HISD, this section of the Education Code was abused in the sense that we had way too many kids who didn't pass their EOCs,
then given a chance for an IGC, and well over ten percent of the students passed or graduated not passing their exams within IGC. And in many cases, those students lacked proficiency. I think you would agree that when twelve percent of the students graduate with an IGC, that is not rigorous. That's an attempt to raise the graduation rate without the requisite proficiency. So, yes, we want to raise graduation rates, but we don't want to do it in a way where kids graduate and that
diploma doesn't mean anything. And that was happening up into twenty two-twenty three or through twenty two-twenty three school year. I'm proud to report that now that IGC rate is 5% for the District. That's a decrease of seven percentage points. You'll notice that the District is even under corrective action from TEA because so many schools, 20 campuses, had over 10% of their diplomas given through an IGC. Some of our schools, Sharptown High School,
was at 47%, almost one in two, every other kid graduating from Sharpstown in 2023 had an IGC, did not pass their end of course exams. And Liberty High School also had a 52%. So we were noted, investigated by TEA and put on a corrective action plan, and so we're now down to five percent. This is a graph. So, you can see it wasn't just twenty two-twenty three. There were all these students who graduated with an IGC.
And not only that, you would expect, because one fear that some high school principals have, and that's the reason why there were IGCs is, they want to get their graduation rate up. So, if a kid couldn't pass their EOCs, they gave them this committee diploma and that way they kept their graduation rates up. Well, I'm here to tell you that when you raise expectations, the kids rise to that level of expectation. When you don't make excuses for passing the EOC and you give them high quality instruction, the kids will rise to level expectations. So the graduation rate,
even though we have fewer IGCs, way fewer, only five percent, our graduation rate went up. So in 2021, it was eighty five point seven percent. In 2023, it was eighty five point one percent. And in 2024, the graduation rate was eighty six point six percent. So, even though we brought down the IGCs, our graduation rate still went up because the kids passed their EOCs and we got them to pass their EOCs with good quality instruction. And you can see this is more this is graphically,
more data on these IGCs. And here's the improvement. So, every school this is the change. In other words, if you look at Liberty High School, they decreased their IGC percentage by 40%. And you can see all the other schools. Do we still have a little bit of work to do? Yes, because we have a couple schools. Austin High School still is a little bit too high, it's above 10%. And Golfton, is also above 16%. So, we still have some work to do.
We have 45 high schools, so just to have a couple or a handful over the 10% mark is huge. And like I said, the average is 5%. So, we did this by good remediation, and we retested the kids. Instead of saying, you're going to go get an IGC, no, you're going to pass the EOC, the end of course exam. We're going to retest you. And we're going to give you some intervention and remediation. We also made it, clear to the principals, we're not going to just throw kids into an IGC path. Your job,
principal and teachers, is to get that kid the proficiency they need to pass the EOCs. And, you'll be happy to note that we have submitted the requisite documentation and we expect to be out of this Corrective Action Plan this year. Next, teacher effectiveness and retention. I've said from the beginning that the most important piece of data is not so much the retention rate, but it is whether or not you're retaining the most effective teachers. That's one piece of data we need. And the second is whether or not teachers are willing to come,
to Houston. Those two things are what you need. And so, on the first part, it's effective teachers, and the question is, are we retaining our most effective teachers? And the answer is, definitely yes. So, what you see on the graph before you, on the left hand side, that is the rating for the teachers, the evaluation of teachers last year. So, you can see we had seven zero one actually seven ninety one Exemplary I teachers, and eighty nine percent of them returned to the district. Eighty nine percent. The average retention rate in the state is somewhere between 7880%.
Most districts lose about 20%. In this district, HISD, prior to the intervention, it was about the same, 20% to 21%, 22% left the district in any given year for a number of reasons. Example one teachers are saying at 89%, proficient two at 88% retention and, proficient one teachers at 85%. So our most effective teachers, we call that proficient one and higher, are staying but even progressing two, which are close to proficient they're not proficient, but close, are sitting at 75%.
And yes, we're losing quite a few progressing, one, that's by design, and also our unsatisfactory teachers we're losing, that's also by design. So we are doing a great job keeping our most effective teachers here. PUA teachers the data now is PUA and NES, you'll see, also keeping their highest performing teachers are staying at higher rates And NES, same thing, actually even higher for NES teachers, who are staying at, you can see, in the 90s there, for the Proficient two Exemplary. Certified teachers,
yes. Teachers, working towards certification, we have about 1,800 of the teachers out of the 10,500 teachers are teachers working towards certification. And you can see here that, progressing to and above is the predominant majority of the teachers. There weren't as many exemplary teachers. This is the number of teachers in each category. So, even our even our teachers moving towards I'm sorry. I'm not following. So can you explain I'm not following who are in these script. These are all of our certified teachers only?
Teachers moving towards certifications. So they're uncertified? Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. We we we say teachers moving towards certification because, some have one year of certification under their belt. It takes two years, and then they're working on their second year, and some have just started. But anyways, of those teachers, you can see, only 23 were exemplary, 91 proficient, and you can read the rest. So, we have a number of teachers working for certification who are proficient or higher and, the greatest number is progressing two, whom we keep.
We try to get to retain them at the end of the school year. Progressing one teachers, half of those we try to retain and the other half, no. So, even though those teachers are doing quite well. The other point to make here on retention is that talent grows talent, meaning this. If you look at this graph right here, the principal evaluations are on the left hand side. So, the higher the evaluation of the principal, the more, Proficient I, Proficient II and Examity I teachers they have. So,
a good principal, an effective principal, is holding on to and coaching and growing their teachers more. The less proficient principals are not doing so. And of course, that ties into their retention rates. So, the more effective principals you see there again on the left, that's the principal evaluation on the left hand side there, the y axis. The Examity one teachers principals are holding on. They retain 81% of their teachers and you can read the rest.
So, the moral of the story here is that talent keeps talent also. More effective principals, the more effective you're going to retain exemplary teachers or good effective teachers. The other the last point I would make about retention, remember I said there's retaining effective teachers and the other is teachers coming into the district. This year, we had only two vacancies at the start of the school year. 10,500 teachers, only two vacancies. We actually had about 80 to 100.
We call them excess teachers, but they're not excess because we hire them purposely. In each division, they have about 20 to 25 additional teachers at the start of the school year, anticipating that we will have some people who leave during the first couple of months and they will fill them. Or, because of leveling, there might be a need for a different certification, etcetera. The two positions that we couldn't fill were specific CTE, I don't remember if it's welding or something like that, but none of these other 80 to 100 teachers could fit those two vacant positions.
We're the only large district with that low vacancy rate. Last year was 28 at the start of the school year and the year before it was zero. So, we're at consistently low and again, just to put it in perspective for especially for the new board members, the year before the intervention there was five forty four teacher vacancies at the start of the school year. Most of them only half of them or so could be filled by, substitute teachers. Finally, tonight, I want to just talk about closing the gap. This is the domain three.
Board members, you got a short bit of that last, last Board session, special session, on the Domain three, which is Closing the Gap Score. And you know that's kind of technical in how they how TEA counts it, but overall, counting several different categories, TEA gives you a number that says, this is how much you close the gap. This is the point that equates with closing the gap. So a positive number means you've been closing the gap, Negative number, of course, means you're not. And this is taken off of,
texaschools.gov. So anybody can go to TEA's website there and look at the Closing the Gap score. And notice that, the state or the districts that are large districts had a decent year that is positive. Domain three, in other words, improvement in closing the gap. Fort Worth is the closest one to us, but HIC had 16 difference, the largest of any medium or large urban district in the State of Texas by
far. You know, previous Fort Worth for 10 points, but nobody else comes close. But PUA did well with five point, similar to Dallas and similar to State, the State average is five points, but nobody ever is going to get 26 points gap change like the NES schools. That's a model that works to serve underserved kids and it's closing the gap, by far. Again, this is just NES, PUA and overall. So, the District did well overall, 16 points,
well above anybody else. And this is important because one of there's only two things in the vision statement, for this intervention that I announced two years ago. One is significantly narrowing the achievement gap. And two, getting kids ready for the year 02/1935, world and workplace. And so, when we close the gap, that means opportunities for kids. It's important to look at it. All means all. So, we're proud of our schools that have done well and continue to do well. We're proud of those schools.
We're proud of our special and unique schools. We're proud of our A schools. And you know, at the last meeting I showed that even our high performing kids are growing in achievement in the last two years. But that would not be enough if everybody grew in achievement, but the gap remained the same, which is huge in some cases. But you can see that we're closing the gap, and that's a testament to both our teachers, our principals, but also the kids doing the hard work that it takes to do that.
That's all I have, sir. Any other questions? Can we go back to the slides? Quick question about EOCs just so that we have clarity. I'm curious about where EOCs come from. And my real question is, like, within a campus, is it the same from class to class? And then from campus to campus, is it the same? So I'm just wondering what is the EOC and how does it, like, measure across? Do you do you mean the IGC? No. When we were talking about the EOC, the The end of course exam that they couldn't pass when we're so since they
are now passing it. But I was just wondering, is this an internal teacher test? Is this the school test? Is this the district test? So that they're not passing the EOC. If they don't pass the EOC, there's a committee, created by the principal and the school. No. I I got all that. My question is we are pushing them back to passing the EOC because we are not doing it by committee. Like, I got I understand the reform. My question was, this EOC now that that the kids have to deal with, is this a school only EOC?
Is this a cross school? Like, what does it constitute to, like, get the the algebra one EOC is the question. It's it's the state EOC. It's just that we push them around. So let's say a tenth grader, doesn't pass the biology, or the English II EOC. Well, we we, we will It's a it's a state. It's the state that they It's a state for biology, for algebra one. And English two. I just wanted to clarify what we were talking about. Year. Yes. To do it. That that that was my only question. Perfect. Then my other question about the teachers and and how we are retaining our highest
performing teachers, and then we have the exit exit of the lowest, performing teachers. Just in kind of future planning and thinking about what it looks like, So in a couple of years, when this system is not new, would you suspect then that because we have this this system and this momentum that we would not be seeing that same level of unacceptable and progressive one that have to exit? Or do you expect that that's just kind of the way you see the flow
of people making the grade or not? Yeah, so, over time, you should see greater proficiency rates. So, that will be the case, progressing to and higher. You'll see more teachers like that. Having said that, we are in an age of, teacher shortages and lack of certification. We will always, at least for the foreseeable future, in the next several years, just like every other district in Texas and in The United States, every large district, will see, the need to hire teachers without
certification or who have to be working for certification. They have two years to get that. So we're going to see we're going to continue to see teachers without certification, and new teachers. And that group will continue to be probably about the same as the graph you saw. You're going to see a lot of progressing to teachers. That's the biggest bar. And then you're going to see some progressing ones and unsat. I don't think you're going to see much of a difference in the percentage of teachers without certification and the ones that are unsat and progressing one.
And so tell me if this is how the theory is working. So a teacher, as they both a good leader knows how to support and train teachers, and the teachers progress as they learn this and move up. But we're always, because of the facts of education, going to have new people entering the model. So we need a model where people can enter and get skilled up. That's But if they enter and it's not their thing, we have the model for them to find some is that That's absolutely right. So the the reason why we've been successful even with a a number of teachers
without certification is because our model is designed to grow teachers quickly. Teachers who've never been in a classroom have to grow quickly in order for the kids to do well. And that has been happening. Last year, we had, you know, 1,500, 1,600 teachers without well, 1,700 teachers without certification, and yet we had some of the highest growth this district has seen. Why? Because the principals, the, the executive directors of instruction really help teachers grow quickly.
Thank you. Thanks. Any other questions? Board member, Paula Mendoza is here. Thanks. Great. Good to see you. Thank you. Okay. No other questions. Try my audio again. We have some up here. Go ahead. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thanks again for this presentation. I appreciate the opportunity to ask another terrifying question about teacher retention. The district level information that we just saw seems reasonable, and positive. One thing I'm wondering is, are these retention, numbers, are these averages targets that we're aiming for? What would be some key indicators that these numbers are,
moving in a in a direction where, you know, cautious about. It's it's hard to tell at that district level. So I'm wondering about what you're thinking there, especially as we move towards what I'm assuming is a phase of more stability in in the district. Right? We've had two years of of transformation. And I wonder if as you look at these numbers over time, what are the targets that you might, hope to see, across the the different groups? I have another question, but I can pause there. Yes. So, my, sense is that if we hit 90%,
that's a really good retention rate. I mean, people move we have a mobile society, there's retirements, the baby boomers are have already started to retire, but the rest are going to retire soon. So there's always going to be some turnover. And especially, you know, we don't need to apologize too much. In HISD, this is a tough place to work because our standards and our accountability and our expectations are here. And so, to hit 90%, any district would want that, for their most effective teachers. And we're already pretty close.
So 90% at a professional level would be would be great. Thank you. The second question I have is, again, looking at the this information at the district level is one view. But as your team analyzes this data, maybe by some other different slices, what would this indicate if you look at it, by division, by school, by feeder pattern? Are these things that, that our our team is looking at? And, are there indicators there that may, help us understand better, maybe some of the the the challenges that we hear about from certain,
certain parents or or community members at certain schools? Yes. So, I think the district data is very similar across, divisions. Different schools in different areas are you know, have different retention rates. That's a fact. And there's lots of different reasons. So, for example, if you're in an area of town where the enrollment is going down, and that's in the kind of the East Central part of the District, and you have enrollment going down, during leveling, you're going to lose teachers. So you will not have retained as many teachers.
In some schools that are new to the transformation or they're just now getting a principal who's holding people to a higher level of expectation, you're going to have some teachers leave because they're, not willing to do what the principal wants them to do. So, there's specific schools that will always have that, but, I think on the whole, looking at the District or the Divisions and the District as a whole, this is indicative of what the District is looking at.
Thank you. Superintendent, can I assume that when we put in the Houston Promise and we get hopefully to that goal of A and B schools in 2027, that gap that you're talking about will, by definition, have had to close substantially even from today, right? Because that's going to require those students that are falling behind for whatever reason will have caught up and those schools that are and those particularly those schools that are challenged with that sort of population will have to have really improved their gap and closed it. Yes,
sir. So you cannot get to an A or B year after year without significant growth and meeting the achievement bar, meets and exceeds. We've been growing in both meets and exceeds, which is proficiency, grade level of proficiency. Way more kids can read at grade level today than ever before. Way more kids can do math at grade level than ever before. We've been doing that for two years in a row. But, we've also been growing kids who may not be proficient and move from, you know, approaches to needs or unsat to approaches.
And we've been doing that as well. In order to get to an A, once you've grown, like we've grown, you've got to keep growing and you have to hit what we call domain one. You know about domain one, achievement. So, the answer to your question is yes. Here's the footnote. Our kids started about 35 percentage points behind on proficiency, as far as the gap goes. Is that because that's what you're asking about? So, our white students are here. Black and Brown students are here. And that's when we started. We just closed the gap by about eight to 10 points,
so which is incredible, but that still puts us at about a 20 to 25 proficiency yet. So, yes, still though, we're going to if we go another couple of years and close it another eight to 10 points, depending on the exam, then we'll only be about 10 points behind to 15, in two years. So, yes, we will narrow the gap significantly. We will not catch up totally in two years. Anybody else? Okay, great. We'll now move on to the Board monitoring update on Goal three and progress measure
3.2. Good morning or good evening. It'll be morning soon. That's how it feels sometimes after a long day. So we're gonna talk about progress monitoring today. So today, we're gonna talk about goal three. Skipped a page. The percent of students graduating Texas success initiative ready with an industry based certification will increase from eleven percent from '21, 22 graduates to twenty six percent for the 2627 graduates. One of the progress monitoring measures within goal three is GPM 3.2, which focuses specifically on tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders who are on track to achieve CTE completer status by graduation.
Just a quick reminder of what CTE completer status is. In CTE, students have to progress through a coherent course sequence. So in ninth grade, they take a health focused course. In tenth grade, they take a more advanced health focused course. Eleventh grade, more advanced, etcetera. So they have to get four courses in the same program, and that progresses over time. So when we're looking at completers, we're looking at, students who took three of those all four courses. So this is looking at those who are on track. But they typically won't be on track until twelfth grade because,
again, they're taking that sequence. So what we actually show here is that, at the end of last year, we far exceeded our target and met our goal, which was 36%, and we met that at fifty one percent for end of year of 'twenty four-'twenty five. And then we already have our beginning of year data, and it's at 41%, which is higher than we were at BOI last year. So that also shows that we are on track to continue with this progress. We also look at it by grade because the overall target combines tenth through twelfth
grade. And when we look by grade, we also see an increase from end of year last year to end of year this year for each of the grades, which also indicates that we're on track to continue progress. And then we also look by our student groups. So here, we're seeing across all student groups, we're seeing an increase in the percent of students who are improving their completer status over the course of their high school trajectory. And then we're really looking at the root causes. And we think a lot about how to do this and how to make this happen. I'll first draw attention to what we have been previously focused on.
One of the things that we have done is, across all of our comprehensive high schools, we implemented what we called our foundational programs of study. So these are four programs that the data shows lead to high wage, high demand jobs, and we ensured all of our comprehensive high schools had one. Another thing that is really Can I stop your what are those programs? Yes. They're networking, distribution and logistics, entrepreneurship, and health informatics. We also pay a lot of attention to scheduling. So as you can imagine, if you have to progress in a course sequence, ensuring that students who start in their first course,
are accurately scheduled into the second course, third course, and so on. So we play a lot of attention to how students are scheduled to ensure they can continue in their progression and deepen their expertise in a career space. And then, lastly, we actually look a lot about how we integrate post secondary opportunities and college credit into our CTE pathways, because we do believe students can pursue both the college and career path. So what this looks like is integrating dual credit courses into our CTE courses so that students are progressing in CTE and, obtaining college credit at the same time.
Do these students still have to pass their five EOCs? Yes. That's that's a graduation requirement. And that's Even though they're going out into maybe an industry specific role as opposed to going on to college, Yes. They still have to pass their five EOCs. Unless they're going the IGC route, but yes. Yeah. Yeah. I get that, but I mean, I see. Okay. Yes. So, so here, we are, we're really, though, looking at helping them, receive college credit while they're also getting their CTE industry based certifications. Going forward, we are continuing all of these strategies and staying focused on,
high wage, high demand programs, scheduling, and building in dual credit pathways. But we've also done more to standardize what the core sequences look like. There's actually a bunch of different permutations you can do within one program, but we're further standardizing to make sure we can give better training and support to help students progress. And then we're stacking industry based certifications. So a student, even in tenth grade, might be able to get a certification, and then by twelfth grade, get a second, even more rigorous certification. And so that standardization and sequencing, it will really help students progress at a more advanced level by the time they
graduate. The other thing we are doing is investing in career and technical education upgrades. And so this is even, looking at Barbara Jordan, looking at the careers there and ensuring we're building and pushing more state of the art equipment, and experiences for students. So, we think about automotive, where you're not just doing the typical motor car, you're also looking at hybrid and electric. Welding, it's not typical welding machine, it's also the laser welding, and things that push the more advanced, movement in the industry. And so really investing in those upgrades, for our career and technical education programs so students are ready to enter the workforce
based on what the workforce needs at that time. And then the last thing that we're focused on this year, is paying really close attention to students after they take their industry based certification exam. And if for some reason they're struggling, giving them deep targeted support so that they have another chance to actually pass and get certified before the end of the year and into summer. So those are the new enhancements in the strategy for this year. Mr. President, I just want to remind the board, in the budget, we talked about money to upgrade Barbara Jordan from the maintenance tax notes.
And so we're that's progressing. We'll give you a report at some point on how well we're doing there. And then also, the programs of study were put in place at the end of the first year, so we're well on the path and then we're going to do even more, and, we'll brief you on that soon. Can you go back to your year over year change in that the bar graph slide in the beginning? Yeah. This one. Do you do you have the, actual numbers, like, the whole number that these represent?
I I believe we did put this in the appendix. Let me just check You did. The encounters. You did. You did. Yes. So so can you just brief it really quickly, like, from 22 to 25 the number of students who now, have this certification skill? Yes. So what we see here is in 2223, our total volume of students in tenth through twelfth grade was almost 40,000, a little bit shy. And so we had 13,000 students who were on track. And then by the time and then 'twenty three, we increased almost 3,000 students for students who were on track.
And then in 'twenty four, 'twenty five, we're increasing a little shy about 2,500 students who are on track. So the volume of students, is significantly increasing each year for the students who are on track to receive their, their completer status. Right. So I read that as a net change of about 5,500 students, right? And Yep. Right. Exactly. And the quality of those, 18,700 is increasing because of reinvestments we've made. That's something you just briefed. I just think that this is incredible, Right? When we see the bar graphs and the lines, you know,
not everyone enjoyed statistics class in high school or college. You can sort of you can zone out a little bit. But, like, what you what you cannot dismiss is the fact that, you know, 5,500 more students and 18,746, students in total are better prepared for an actual career in the real world making money for themselves and their families. Like, that's incredible. Right? That's incredible. And, you know, again, it's 51% and someone may say, why not the other 49?
But, like, that's incredible. 5,500 more humans in HISD are better able to provide for their families because of the investments, that we all are making. Right? We all are taxpayers. So I I just wanna celebrate that and and just pause and, you know, the bar graph can be, like, a little little numb, but but this is, like, real people, you know, improving their future. So I I just wanna celebrate that. Yep. And I thank you for that because part of why this is so important and part of why this goal is so important is that when students leave us, we we want them to be post secondary ready,
meaning being able to be successful with a career, with a living wage job, or be enrolled in higher ed, and really or be enlisted in the military. And so, we have when we started this work, we have only about 50% of our students who matriculate into higher ed, which actually tells you there's a huge population of our students who really need to be prepared to get that living wage job. Can I ask you a question just so parents, you know, the fifth grade, the sixth grade parent I know when we were talking about this I don't remember
if it was six six months or a year, but we were talking about how you were scaling this from the middle school up so that it was gonna feed and all that? Where are we with that? And just, like, to preview for parents what this looks like. And even for other like, my kids are four years out, but it was so different, so I'm trying to conceptualize this versus, you know, what it looked like when they were in high school. So can you kind of Yes, ma'am. One of the things we're doing is really focusing on exposure, particularly in middle school. So throughout the middle school, journey,
two years ago, we started in eighth grade. So every couple weeks, we built into the curriculum a lesson that either highlighted one of the four programs of study, highlighted what dual credit was, highlighted what AP was, so that students are starting to get exposure to, the different things that are really important to understand when you're entering ninth grade. And so we built that in, two years ago into our eighth grade curriculum. And then this year, we actually built it in starting in sixth grade. So in sixth, seventh, and eighth, they're getting a progression of exposure to, both different career industries and to college experiences,
and we're embedding some experiences into their day, throughout middle school. And that goal is by the time they're getting to high school, they understand the different career programs that are going to be available to them and the types of jobs that those lead to so they're better prepared to make a decision. And can I also add? We're also going to be piloting next year a couple programs where the actual experiences are more geared to the high school programs of study in the afternoon for many of our kids. Let me give you a real live example,
that just happened in the last week or two actually on Friday. Last Friday I made a I was part of a group at the GHP that did the State of the Port Of Houston and we highlighted a Stephen F. Austin student. And I met this student and I heard about him at the graduation ceremonies we did for our maritime program at Austin and the Port Of Houston has had a maritime outreach program for a long time and they have eight high schools that they operate in, one of which is Boston. And at that meeting or at that we were hanging out certificates and little gold
things, yeah, the Coast Guard there was really an amazing event. But, they talked about we had the kids that had graduated from those programs and there was this one that we highlighted on Friday. They graduated from Austin, went to with a Maritime Certificate, went to San Jac, got another Maritime Certificate and a couple other certificates from San Jac, was hired by Kirby Corporation. His starting salary was in the $60,000 $70,000 range and today he is a captain of the first plug in hybrid tug that
pushes barges in the ship channel making 6 figures. So that's a great example of the reality of what we're talking about when you get these numbers you're talking about 5,500 people, 1,500, 300 kids. At the end of the day, there are real live jobs out there that can be had if we do this right. The other thing that Port Houston has just started doing is they have started moving into middle school. So they have a big program at San Jacq I think coming up in the next week or two that HISD is part of and they are trying to they're
doing this with parents and students to educate them about the opportunities in maritime industry and it's not just being a captain of a tug or something like that. It's a broad logistics and all kinds of different jobs that are out there. What's happening and this is happening in a lot of our construction areas and a lot of other sort of jobs like this is the population is aging out and we don't have enough people replacing those folks. And so, this is a huge opportunity for us. May I add, sir? Last week I had a meeting with the President of Baylor College of Medicine and
we've agreed to start a health science program of study starting in elementary school. So on and there's many other examples we can give you. This is the second part of that vision I was talking about, getting kids ready for the year 02/1935. We can't just wait till CTE programs in high school. We have to do middle school, that's what you're talking about, and even elementary in some cases. I didn't put this as a strategy, but I should have. One of the other things we're doing is, building in work based learning experiences into the programming so that in twelfth grade,
typically, they're doing more of a practicum. It might be an internship. It might be an externship or more experiences directly with that employer, and they can build that into their experience them for putting things kids through apprenticeships and not focusing them on eventually going to college, but in an apprenticeship. Singapore, where I lived for years, streams kids from sixth grade, seventh grade knowing that this is where their their main capabilities are going to be in that area or not. And we compare ourselves often to some of these foreign countries, but they actually do targeted work at this. But I think it's impressive that these students, if they're going to maritime programs,
still have to pass the five AOC courses. In other words, they're getting a liberal arts education at the same time they're getting an industry specific education at a high school level. They still have to do math, Henry, for sure. President Campbell, Board Member Arnold has signed. Yes, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. President. Chief Hoell, thank you for the presentation. During my visit to the career center, week before last, in talking to students, one of the things that juniors and seniors students told me is that they wish they could have started in their program of study earlier.
And, younger students, let's say ninth and tenth grade students had such confidence in the skills that they were learning. You know, based on the conversation that we are having, I understand that part of our overall strategy is to, provide capacity and access to students much earlier. Is that correct? That we're trying to build access for students to start in these programs earlier in their trajectory of maybe ninth grade to middle school? Yes, ma'am. And there's two parts to that. Two things I'm gonna say. One is,
actually, at Barbara Jordan, we only used to have students start at Barbara Jordan in eleventh grade. And so they were having a very compressed experience in eleventh and twelfth grade. We changed that last year so they start in ninth grade, and they get a lot more exposure to the spaces, the equipment, the practice over a longer runway. And so the students, if they were twelfth graders, they actually might have gotten that compressed eleventh or twelfth grade experience, but we've already changed that this year. So you'll see, younger students at Barbara Jordan. So that's, I think, the first part. And then the second part,
I think, speaks to what Mr. Miles said, which is looking at what programming is available, across middle schools, not just for curriculum exposure, but actual elective courses that tie to programs of study. And so that actually is happening in multiple of our middle schools. Thank you. And so as a, follow-up here, so an additional bonus to that, of course, would be that we are likely to see more of a completer status for these students if they are starting earlier in their high school journey. Correct? The students who are starting later were still progressing quickly,
but I still do believe that, yes, we are gonna continue to see an increase, because we're very focused on ensuring that all ninth graders are on one of the paths, whether it's college or career or both, and ideally both. But no ninth graders are falling through the cracks, and we're really committed to that. And that will help us ensure that students are continuing towards this trajectory. Wonderful. Thank you, Chief Hall. Do I have anybody else? One more. Go ahead. Sorry. We you know, we have so much movement. What happens if someone shows up in the district as a junior or a senior?
One, what are your goals for them? And two, how does it shift numbers when people are are coming in late? That's a great question. So that was actually one of the reasons when it whenever we even launched the foundational programs of study, where if we had mobility within the district, there would be a set of programs that there would be some continuation on if they moved from one high school to the other. So that helps. If they're coming from another district, the programs of study are defined by the state. And so the first thing we can do is say, hey, if you've started a program of study at your other district,
what program was that? And can we help you continue in that program at a campus at HISD? If for some reason that's not true, there are paths there are escalation path to this, but it is hard. It does actually require you to take significant number of coursework. And if you're starting that late, it depends on what else you have to do to meet your graduation requirements. But there are ways to make it happen and to support students in continuing what they've started. Board member, Garcelender, you're up. If you wanna demute, unmute. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate, again, everything that I've heard so far,
and thank you so much for this presentation and answering our questions ahead of time that we submitted. What what I, appreciate the opportunity to highlight is, I wanna make sure I understand when we look at the, bar chart, GPM 3.2% of tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students on track for, completer for CTE completer status. That visual drop from eleventh to twelfth grade is is dramatic to me. And I'm I would appreciate, hearing from you, chief Cole, just to make sure I understand. Explain that drop,
please, from eleventh to twelfth grade. What's what's going on there? Yes. There's a couple things. One, the overarching metric is focused on students who are on track. And so when we're looking at tenth graders and eleventh graders, we define that as students who are concentrators and completers. And so a concentrator is somebody who has one less course. There's three courses instead of four, and then that completer has four. When we get to twelfth grade, because they're in twelfth grade, we narrow that definition to say you actually must be a completer in twelfth grade.
So the definition of on track changes between eleventh and twelfth, which will account for some of it. If a student isn't fully progressing to become that completer, that will account for it. The other thing that happens is in twelfth grade, we actually really do need to make sure all students are meeting all graduation requirements. And CTE is not a graduation requirement in that way. Right? If you haven't taken certain courses, you actually need to make sure you're fulfilling your courses. And so the way to improve and make sure that that doesn't happen is really focused on ensuring every single student has a graduation plan,
at the and they have that plan. They started off at the ninth year, and they revisit it every year. And that helps ensure that they're not getting into that twelfth grade year, and they don't have the credits that they need to graduate. Because at that twelfth grade year, really getting them over the finish line is important, and that can compete if they still have a course to take. Thank you for explaining that. Because I think some some questions from the community were were, highlighting that I think that's a confusing thing to interpret as we see the eleventh to twelfth grade drop on the on the chart. What role or how how big of a role,
can you help me understand our focus on on high quality instruction and and instructional materials has on increasing the completer status as well? In other words, as I look at the strategy, the the strategies, and improvement strategy next step slide, What jumps out at me is is access primarily, making sure that students are getting access to these courses, and that the sequencing is appropriate and and that we're making sure that they're aligned to high demand jobs. But, I'm wondering,
I I'm a little surprised maybe why I don't see something about our focus on high quality instruction and materials and how that may play a role, in our students maybe not achieving that status that that we hope for them to achieve as they move towards twelfth grade? It's a great question. We think we're thinking a lot about curriculum in CTE. And if you can imagine, we oversee 40 programs. Each of them have four courses. That's a lot of curriculum that's out there. And so we typically purchase curriculum through our, through TEA publishes an approved list of curriculum for every program,
and we purchase that curriculum. However, we have started to, in some places, write our own. So in our foundational programs of study, in particular, we started to write our own curriculum so we could ensure it meets the bar, and is, built in a way that's really user friendly for our CTE teachers. One thing in CTE in particular is you have a lot of teachers that come from industry and have deep industry expertise, so they really need coaching and support for how to be a great teacher, and helping them build that skill set is critical too. So that is also a focus of the team.
That's been a focus from day one, both ensuring that we could support them in becoming, even better teachers, and then also starting to build out even more resources around curriculum that will help support them. Great. Anybody else? Sorry. Now I have a follow-up to that. Okay. So who is in charge of this group of like, who's training this group of teachers? Because it is this specialized thing. So who is who's leading that charge in making sure that they are getting their supports in terms of pedagogy and all that stuff? There's a really close partnership with us and the chief of schools.
The actual teachers are teachers on a campus and so report to the principal. So the principal is responsible for the quality of instruction in in all of their classes. We also have a set of specialists at central office, one or two, that focus very deep on on a program. So we might have a health care specialist, a welding specialist, someone who understands the ins and outs of all the TEA requirements, the industry requirement, and they can push in to really help pull all of the welding teachers together
and give them coaching, in that space. So it's really a strong partnership. But at the end of the day, the principal is going in and ensuring there's they're giving job embedded coaches to all teachers on their campus. Are we done now? Okay. Great. Well thank you so much for the presentation. We appreciate that. Thank you. Okay. So next item we are going to, talk about the Audit Committee. Board Member Garzalinda, do you want to do this from on Zoom or do you want me to? I can I can do the the report? Up to you then. Go ahead. Yeah. If if you can hear me again, I know my audio was challenging.
Yes. Of course. Thank you. If if I may may I proceed? Yes. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of our audit committee, I I appreciate, being able to share, this information, which is item number two, acceptance of our report from, from the board audit committee chair, me. So the last audit committee meeting, was held Thursday, September 25, and our auditors provided an update on the follow-up of the twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five internal audit recommendations. They stated that there are a total of 41 observations. Of those, 11 are closed,
30 remain open, and 12 are ready for a follow-up testing. Our auditors stated they've found administration management to be very proactive on their recommendations. In addition, two of our twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five internal audit projects have been moved from, I'm sorry, two, fiscal year twenty twenty five, twenty six. Those are the information technology incident report I'm sorry, incident response tabletop exercise and the IT internal penetration testing.
The other projects for fiscal year twenty twenty five, twenty six include the employee selection and onboarding maintenance and repairs project, the post award contract administration and vendor management project, the ProCard program, and the IT cybersecurity governance and policy assessment. The final audit reports are published on the Board and Governance page of our HISD main website. With that, I'll appreciate if there are any questions or comments from my colleagues.
Before the questions, I just wanted to add that Board member Mendoza has joined the Audit Committee as well. There are three folks on the Audit Committee. The Audit Committee is a committee that makes recommendations to the Board and ultimately board members can attend the audit committee as long as we don't have five members there if you're welcome to come. Any questions? Okay. Great. Next item up is the, Budget Actual Report. Superintendent? Yes, sir. I'm asking Jim Terry to approach the mic.
Good evening, Board. Thank you for this opportunity to present to you the first quarter of the year financial statements. Our fiscal year began July 1, and so these are the numbers through September 30. What I'd like you to do is to move over to the column, to the far right with the numbers. Don't think this has a pointer on it. So, you can see it's labeled projected end of the year. In order to understand where we are this year,
please understand where we're closing out the end of this year. And if you go to the bottom line, and that bottom line is our fund balance. And, the outside auditors, we Weaver and Associates are about ready to, finish up their financial audit. We will bring the annual, comprehensive financial report to you in November for you next month. And you can see, if you look at that bottom line of $779,000,000 and then look to the column just to your left,
you'll see that it's 799. And that difference is, is $20,000,000. And that, column that you're looking at, the 799,000,000, is the budget amendment that we brought to you at the June, way before the books are closed and the we've gone through the audit. It looks like that we are going to, use about $20,000,000 more in the fund balance, and that essentially is due to, what's called recapture. If you look at on the far left,
it it's got numbers there. Those are the function, codes, and those are the functions and the way that you have to approve, the budget when we bring it to you in at the June. And, that is recaptured. There's this money is essentially, given back to the state for collecting more money than what they considered us entitled to. And then the other 14,000,000, which is the difference on the real estate, and we had 15 properties that we thought we would be able to close, before the end of this,
last fiscal year. We were unable to close on that. That money will now move over into the current fiscal year. So now if you go to that column all the way over to your left, the last column of numbers, that is the budget, that you approved, in in June. And the next column over to your right then is essentially our revenue and our expenditures, and we're pretty much on course as to where we think we should be. You can see that the total expenditure is approximately
17%. So, we think that, this is, we're doing good, and we're on schedule. You will see that the the next, this is the debt service. Our debt service on the far right Jim, could you go back to that schedule one more time? Would you talk about the change between the $267,000,000 projected change in fund balance and the budgeted $14,000,000 Yes, that is for properties. We No, I'm talking about the $267,000,000 million dollars so your fund balance net change in fund balance was a negative $267,000,000
projected June 2025, right? Right. And we're projecting a negative 14,000,683 million dollars That's what I want you to talk about. Okay. We're we're doing really well. We have really tightened up our, expenditures. The state has also helped us, in terms of what they're providing us. And we are making a proven we think that that $14,000,000 of use of the fund balance by the end of this current fiscal year is certainly doable. And of course,
as your CFO, I'm hoping to do better than that. So So clearly going from a $267,000,000 deficit in twenty twenty twenty twenty four, 2025 to a $14,000,000 deficit of which you said you just mentioned that you think it likely to be a breakeven is a huge improvement in our stability of our finances at HISD? Yes, that is correct. And in fact that 14% represents less than 1% of our total expenditures.
And when you're dealing in the $2,000,000,000 $2,500,000,000 1% is you know, pretty hard to zero in on. So we think that that we will be able to reach that number. And that's what we'll be working on. Thanks. Anybody have any questions on this schedule? Okay. Go ahead. You can keep going. Okay. The next is the debt service. And the only remarkable thing here is to look over on the right, and in that projected number, and you can see that that number changed.
Debt service is pretty well constant number, and we already have that scheduled out, for the for the next, twenty years. The difference is because we did refinancings, in which we were able to save the taxpayers, approximately a half a billion dollars in in debt. It cost us a little money upfront, but, the overall effect saves the taxpayers, probably $50,000,000 in taxes. The next one is the nutritional services. Nutritional services again in the projected amount,
is better than, what we had brought to you as a, budget amendment. You can see on the left side that this, we think, is certainly on on target. I don't see anything remarkable about that. And, the rest of this report are the same numbers, just giving you a different view. And you see on the far left, instead of your function codes, you have object codes. So, you'll see this is the general fund. This is the debt service, and then that was nutritional service and just another way to look at it.
Any questions? Questions? So we're on track and our finances are stronger this year than they were last year? Yes. Good. Thank you. Okay. I think we are now at the point where we're going to hear from our remaining speakers, first in person and then those on Zooms. We'll call speakers, to the microphone in groups beginning with the speaker numbers one through 10. We have seats in the front row reserved for the next group of speakers, so please occupy those seats. If you're up next, please come to the microphone, in your numbered order and state your name. Smith, you can manage that. Can I have speakers 35 through 45 to the front row?
And we also have a student who's joined us, Luca Candida. Hi. My name is Luca, and I am eight years old. Many schools don't have a library anymore. How are kids going to improve their reading and learn to love books if there's not a library or someone to help them find good stories? In my school, we still have a library, but the librarian that was there for many years left. Starting starting the school with a new librarian we started the school with a new librarian, and we're on to the second one. And it's only been two months. What you guys are doing is wrong.
If it were good, people would want to stay. Start treating people better. Thank you. Thank you. Before our next speaker, I wanna give a special shout out to our student guests from Rice University today that are here with their professor Doctor. Brenda Rangel, Assistant Dean of Rice Glasgow School, with her students in her course Contemporary Issues in Education. Thank you for joining us tonight for this real live education discussion. Next speaker, go ahead. We have another student who's joined us, Micah Gavey.
One second. We have a student who's joined us, so we're going to ask her to go first. Good afternoon. Today, I wanna talk about how unders how uncertified teachers are hurting schools in HISD. Since TEA took over HISD in 2023, many many certified teachers have left. To fill those spots, the district started hiring more uncertified teachers, which are people who haven't completely trained for their certification. Since 2023, the number of uncertified teachers rose from 12% to nearly 25 in just one year.
This this may solve a short term staffing problem, but it creates long term damage. Uncertified teachers often lack classroom management skills and teaching experience. That can lead to lower test scores, less engagement, and more frustration from students. In the end, quick fixes like this lower the quality of education. HISD needs to focus on keeping and supporting qualified teachers so that every student Thank you. My name is Diana Candida. I'm an HIC parent. I'm angry about what Mike Miles is doing to our schools.
He clearly has no understanding of education or what children truly need to succeed. His decisions are hurting all students, but especially the ones who need the most support. Teachers are doing everything they can to hold things together for our children despite the chaos Mike Miles is creating. It's heartbreaking to hear about teachers crying and suffering from panic attacks just two months into the year, and all the extra time they have to put in to correct an error riddled curriculum and make thousands of photocopies. Our children deserve better. Our teachers deserve respect.
Our voices deserve to be heard. Private school owners are benefiting through higher enrollment, but Houston as a whole is suffering, and the effect will be felt for many years to come. Mister Gore, by believing the pretty graphs, not independently analyzing the data, and ignoring the test testimonies of teachers, parents, and students, you're complicit. And you and the board are complicit in the destruction of HIC. Listen to us. Thank you. Kelly Bickley. Kelly Bickley. As a graduate from Northside High and a parent, it is disheartening to see these kids not have equal access to laptops.
We talk about not falling behind, closing gaps yet. We take away laptops. Students at Northside and NES school and other NES schools should have equal rights as any other student in other schools to have laptop to take home. As of now, they don't. While the none NES schools have and also affluent schools have one on one laptop distribution. Disadvantaged kids are in more need to have the basic resources to be able to do their homework and readings at home. And up to now, we're in October. Kids are at at Northside, still don't have one to one laptop distributions.
Even worse, not even textbooks to do their homework, especially for kids taking dual credit or AP classes. Teachers are left giving only a few students textbooks. Even far, these, even though kids get priority, I am here. All kids get priority. I am here for all students whether they are in AP or not, dual credit or not. Thank you. I don't believe miss Muncio is here, so we'll start with number 36. Speaker number 36. Good afternoon. My name is Barbara Garza. This is Ivan Garza. He goes to Park Place Elementary. So recently, we just got, we've been waiting for the principal at Park Place Elementary to call us for an
incident. It's already been a month. We have not respond. Nobody has not respond back. I'll call HISD Parent Center, get nobody to answer back to us. Recently in May 2020 this year, he they accused him. They're, terrorizing him at 12:00 in afternoon, all eight to 03:00 in afternoon. I got a phone call saying that he was in front office. Did a police report. It was a police report. Did a police report of our HISD. Never gonna respond back at all. So I don't know what's going on with HISD.
He's not respond back to us and everything. So we need to do better for our kids and are better for our future. He's a fifth grader. He's getting bullied. I got pictures of a kid slapping him off my Thank you. My name is Contrano Garza, and Ivan is my grandson. And he got bullied at the Patterson School. He got pinned in the bathroom and slapped and kicked in his middle part, and we cannot get anything done. Park Place Elementary School too, they did not do nothing.
They've been bullying him since third grade, and he's in fifth grade now. So somebody needs to go out there and check because they don't do nothing at all. Nothing. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Lisa Robinson, retired media specialist and former trust and estates attorney. 35 out of 40 items today are on the consent agenda, including changes to the intellectual property policy so that employees can use HISD materials for their own projects. Last month, 33 out of 35 items were on the consent agenda.
This is an abdication of your governance and fiduciary responsibilities. Your fiduciary duties include the duty of care, which requires you to make informed and diligent decisions. You cannot make informed decisions if you are voting for over 30 items in one fell swoop at each board meeting. I doubt this is how you run your own businesses and law firms. Each of you are Houstonians, unlike Miles. When Miles moves on, you will still be here. Do you want a failed school district to be your legacy? Start doing your job,
pull items from the consent agenda, and Thank you. Good evening. My name is Anne Eagleton. I'm here as a tax payer, and I'm trying to understand some of the expenditures that are happening. On the weekend, I found out we're gonna spend $2,000,000 on NES infomercials. I don't understand how that helps our students. All it does is benefit mister Miles so that he can sell his services and the curriculum and his charter school. Now in the butt in the agenda, there's an item to allow an employee to utilize HISD equipment and resources to create
their own product and go sell it. Now why as a taxpayer am I investing money so that someone else, an employee, can leave and go make money off taxpayer investment? That is inappropriate, and you need to start really realizing what these policies mean and what the implications are. There are unintended consequences, and it's your job to look into it. Thank you. Thank you. I usually talk about finance, but tonight, I just couldn't believe Miles about teacher retention. Read between the lines. Once he's completely cleaned house of all the teachers that were here when he arrived,
that he did not hire and indoctrinate, performance will improve. Until then, he considers it a good thing that teachers are leaving. Miles claims a negative metric. What nearly every speaker comes up here to rail about is really good news. We are living in the upside down. The reason there are few vacancies is because of Miles' enrollment drop off. In Miles' world, bad news is really good news. And no, Miles will not stop firing teachers in a couple of years because performance will not improve because he said he will use a force curve,
rank and yank, a debunked and abandoned management theory. Without that, he cannot continue to manage by fear and intimidation enough Thank you. Speakers 45 through 55, please move to the front. Speakers 45 through 55, please move to the front row. Do we have speakers Kevin Miller, Charles Collins, Angela Kelly, Artrista, Bishop Watt? Okay. My name is Angela Kelly. And for over a decade, I poured my heart into Durham Elementary as one of the highest rated teachers on campus before being removed from the very campus that I attended and cherished.
My neighbors were my students. They ride their bikes to my house every weekend and ask if I can come back. The illiterate that remain now call going to school, going to prison because you ensured that you the joy was stripped from the campus. Durham has lost 10 staff members and more than 30 students since becoming a school of focus. I was replaced by someone uncertified. The nurse now splits her time between two schools. A school of 500 children no longer have immediate access to a health care provider.
Is this what you define as support and health and safety? Board of managers, I beg you. Go beyond the stage walk throughs. Talk to the teachers who are barely hanging on for the children. At the end of this year, you'll see the damage. Record high turnover and clock twenty four hour and Thank you. Good evening. I'm Trista Bishop Wott with Houston GPS. First, I want to commend the Board and HISD administration for the meaningful progress in advancing post secondary readiness. It's encouraging to see more students across all student groups on track to complete a CTE program of study. Expanding access to advanced CTE courses helps students build real world skills that translate into
opportunity and economic mobility after graduation. Every student deserves to graduate high school prepared to pursue college or a career that provides a living wage. Strong practices like HISD's foundational programs of study and automatic enrollment in advanced courses move us closer to that goal. Tonight's vote to remove EA local offers the board an opportunity to replace an outdated policy with one that reflects HISD's current research backed approach to postsecondary readiness. Codifying these practices will promote consistency across campuses, increase transparency for families,
and ensure that this progress continues through future leadership transitions. We would love to continue this conversation and support effective policy. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Beatrice. I'm an advocate for Houston Parent Action Network and the parent of an eighth grader at Patrick Henry Middle School. He's already taken algebra and biology and has had talks with the school about his future career plan. Getting him excited about school was tough, but now he wakes up ready to go because he knows he's already taking classes that prepare him for a good career.
He now talks about college and what job he wants. He says he wants to be an engineer. The emphasis on CTE is being felt even before high school. It has helped him find his interest and sense of purpose. I only wish this could have been for other opportunities for my other children. When students see the future that connects to what they're learning today, their attitude, confidence, and drive changes, I've seen it in my child. Please keep investing in programs like this. They really do make a difference. Thank you. Thank you.
Good evening. My name is Michael McDonough, and for nearly two decades, I was a successful principal in this district. I regularly had the chance to observe and coach teachers, and I know what high quality instruction looks like. Recent directives from the chief of schools focused on two elements. First, she told campus leaders to on the side of too fast rather than too slow. Then she told them to lose productive struggle. Through personal experience, I can say that productive struggle for kids, really anyone, is often the only way we get stronger. Productive struggle is when students actively work through challenging problems and concepts that are just
beyond their current understanding, leading to deeper comprehension. It's how we build stamina, resilience, and the ability to self advocate. Bottom line, productive struggle matters. The decision to dump this core learning strategy in the interest of speed is confirmation that the superintendent is solely focused on the short term, the immediate star score. I urge this board of managers do not sit quietly while sound Thank you. Hi. Renee, miss Allison Chapin. I am a former HISD teacher who left shortly after. It's good to be back.
On 06/02/1863, Harriet Tubman led the Union Navy up the Combahee River in South Carolina, liberating over 750 enslaved humans who ran to the boats en masse, ignoring the plantation owners' warnings that the Yankees would sell them to Cuba and ordering them to hide in the woods. The plantation owners were shocked. It reminds me very similarly to what happened last night at the second listening session for the commission on the state takeover. Teachers,
students, and parents shared gut wrenching stories of the district's abuse of teachers. They were all the same from across the district in all regions and at all grade levels. Administrators berating teachers in front of students with multiple accounts of teachers immediately picking up their belongings and walking out of Thank you. Thank you. Your time is up. Elementary school children terrified that somehow they will mess up when Miles comes into the building again. They will lose another teacher.
Doctors telling teachers that their serious, in some cases, life threatening health conditions are being caused by their toxic work environment. High school students who have lost eight teachers in two years and don't know if they'll have teachers to write their college recommendations. Uncertified teachers hired off the street in September given no training, put in front of a classroom, and then berated for not knowing how to do everything. Teachers threatened with termination if they do not break the law by ignoring IEPs because implementing them is not consistent with the district curriculum.
Teachers expressed overwhelming guilt about leaving jobs that were literally making them sick because they left their students unprotected in an unsafe environment. They wept. Senator Molly Cook and represent representative Laura Ashley Simmons listened with tears streaming down their faces. It was as the hue Thank you. HISD has lost close to 8,000 teachers in two years. Agenda item 17 is approval of the DOI plan so the district can request a waiver to continue employing uncertified individuals to address ongoing teacher shortages.
Here's the thing. The district is creating the shortage by abusing teachers. The administration continues to act bewildered, claiming only teachers who don't care about excellence are leaving and insisting that the district is a great place to work. This sounds a whole lot like those plantation owners in South Carolina. They just couldn't believe all those people they abused didn't wanna stay and work for them. I bet if they'd had the option, they would have built their own television station and hired their own camera crew to produce stories counteracting all the lies and misinformation that those hater abolitionists and liberated people
were feeding the media. You can either choose to believe the thousands of teachers who have left or the guy who swears to you at the end of every year. Thank you. Earlier, we called earlier, we called Kelly Blickery. Could you go ahead and speak? Good evening. Two weeks ago, nearly 450 staff across the district were cut or reassigned from their schools, classrooms, and their students. Why? Because the number of families leaving HISD appears to be nearly twice what this administration predicted. At my son's school,
what mister Miles calls rightsizing, means losing four teachers, a fantastic librarian, and the only person in the office who spoke Spanish. For kids all over HISD, it's yet another round of trusted adults. Gone. Mr. Miles will point to all sorts of reasons for this. Some are true, but they're not the whole equation. My algebra teacher, Ms. Gellum, who spent her entire career at one school, taught me that to solve a problem, you have to look for what's missing. Board of managers, don't fall for bad math again. Solve for that missing variable.
If you wanna know why families are leaving, ask us. Thank you. Speaker 51. Hi. My name is Mindon Tran. I'm speaking on items six and twenty three. I heard about the show that the city council meeting was. I'm sorry I missed it. I missed it because I am actually a professional. I know Miles dislikes the professionals, but, I am a professional teacher, and I did the coursework. I have a bachelor's degree in my content area. I have a master's degree in curriculum and instruction. And I do know words like pedagogy and scaffolding, and I know they weren't invented by mister Mike Miles.
Things like think pair share did exist before NES took over our schools. So what we need is to get people on the board who actually know things about education, who have backgrounds in education. There are candidates who are up for election this November who are educators, either former teachers, former principals, etcetera. We need those people on the board and not people who don't know what they're talking about. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I wish we could be having coffee together, you and I, having a discussion about the things that you spoke about today, but I'll use my minute to respond. Mike Miles,
this evening you claimed that schools were abusing individual graduation committees using Sharpstown as your example, a school with hundreds of newcomer students where kids speak more than 60 languages. IGCs were created by state law to help those very students, young people who work hard for four years while learning English to graduate. As my hero, a state ESL teacher of the year reminded me, his students went from not a word of English in ninth grade to graduating to join our democracy fully and completely, and IGC got them to the finish line.
When the dust settles, we'll see that instead of supporting all of our students, this administration has pushed too many of them out, inflating graduation rates by marking kids as returning to home country. It's a slight of hand. The truth is our students are Thank you. Michelle Williams, and I'm a teacher in a HISD speaking on my behalf. I've asked over and over again to be transferred from Bembrooke Elementary to avoid having to stand here today. But my requests were ignored. At the start of the school year, I got an email from Sandy Massey,
the chief of schools, calling me one of Bembrooke's high performing teachers. But apparently, that doesn't matter when this administration and the current principal, executive directors, North Division superintendent use bullying, intimidation, and lies to try to force me to break education laws. They're asking me to make eight year olds who can't even read in English. Imagine that. Restart reading passages in English. Why? To sell a lie that Mike Miles' policies are working. What's happening at Bembroke is not just wrong. It's unethical and it's illegal. But I guess it's okay when the governor uses lies to push the state for
take for state takeovers of public schools or when mister Campo, chair of, Port Of Houston, make our kids Thank you. Thank you. Your time is up. Linda Murray. Thank you. I'm representing the Northeast Area Of Houston. My name is Linda Murray. I am a taxpayer, and you are robbing my money. I wanna make sure that everyone understands the reason why we have so many uncertified teachers. It's because it isn't because we didn't have certified teachers apply to the district.
Mister my superintendent Miles said that at the city of Houston. He said 9,000 people. Out of 9,000 people that were certified, you couldn't find one. Every other one that you, that you hired wasn't certified. Why is that? Well, we all know what happens with that. You got the uncertified. They don't know what they don't know, and they can't and whenever you say jump, they're gonna say how high. Okay? And then they're gonna believe the lie that black and Hispanic students are the reason why this district is scoring so low.
But you can just drop the Hispanic. It's the black students. This every time I come in Thank you. Thank you. Laura Henry, National Board Certified High School English teacher and HISD parent. Recently, your board coach told you that students who earn masters on the star have a seventy five percent chance of succeeding in freshman level college courses. She didn't tell you that the published cutoff for master's is ninety third percentile in English too. If only seventy five percent of the top seven percent of star takers in the state succeed in college, there's a disconnect between teaching for test results and building academic skills.
You've got to stop and listen to teachers who understand the impact of test driven English instruction. If you believe that any of our students, including underserved schools, don't perform better when you give them good real instruction, then you do not know HISD students. They are better than that. My daughter will speak next. She's a National Merit committed student who scored seven sixty out of 800 on the English SAT and 34 out of 36 on the ACT. She made a meets on the English two star test because she prioritized herself. Thank you.
Hi. Hi. I'm Ella Taylor, a student at Carnegie, but I've also been a student at Myerland, so I know how constant star prep feels. And it seems even worse after the takeover. When teachers force kids to race timers, they're being taught to skim, not to read. I learned to research and write at home because HISD doesn't teach it. Even as a kid at Carnegie who's taking advanced classes like AP Research and AP Lang, teachers can't teach us enough because we aren't taught the basic prerequisites to learn the content. We were never taught how to write because it wasn't tested.
Now it's tested, but formulaic responses based on simplistic outlines don't teach you how to write. Formulaic responses may earn decent scores, but kids need more. For me, teaching to the test was boring. There may have been a comfortable, interesting assignments, but it's never engaging to spend most of your time doing star prompts. A lot of the time, it felt like it was just desperation to make sure kids got enough points to pass the test. Test passages don't really teach very much. Curiosity, what you think, being creative, none of that matters on the on the test. All of the students here today aren't unique. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Jenny McDavid,
and I am a parent of a child with an IEP who has been in HRISD for over ten years. After the takeover, my son's principal was fired days before school started in retaliation for not adopting the NES model. But it isn't just HRISD employees facing retaliation. Miles and his assistant sought to have me fired for speaking out. In April, I ran into Miles and his channeling companion, Nicola Esch, at the airport and shared some candid thoughts. Days later, after they researched where I worked, they filed a complaint with my employer and urged them to address the issue issue
with appropriate consequences for your employee. I will add that I was not working when I confronted them. I was fired shortly thereafter. We don't have an elected school board with authority to redress our grievances. I guess Miles sleeps better at night now that his contract includes a bodyguard to protect him from five foot two disgruntled HRSD moms like me lurking in the shadows. Instead of teaching our kids about the land of the free and home of the brave, we have an uncertified superintendent for Thank you. We will continue where we can. Thank you. Your time is up. Thank you. Doctor Pamela Vovland,
you may begin. Yes. Doctor Pamela Boatley, I'm speaking to you tonight because I was real confused about what I should talk about. I had a, somebody call me and ask me why was the grad at Sunnyside Elementary School so high. And I said, well, you know, Miles fired all the people that do the job, and now that's all centralized and they're on a schedule. Do you not understand that school is not what any of us ever remember it being currently. I've got people talking about volunteering to cut the grass.
Why would we do that? How is that part of what should be happening at a school? Why why do you need to have a Sunrise Day after three years to a Sunrise Center? They're gonna pick up everybody and take them to show them how great it is. Doesn't that indicate that Sunrise Center should have some sort of transaction mechanism? But, no, that's not what they've done. They've taken the money and just piled up the inventory Thank you. And not done in where's the evaluation mechanism for the Sunrise Center?
Thank you. Miss Lucas Roberts, please turn your camera on, and you may begin. We'll give you a minute. My camera is on. Where's let me try your other device. I'm trying to turn on my camera. There we go. We can see you. Okay. This is a thank you. Thank you, HISD, for no wrap around services. Thank you for making sure that all students don't have access to computers. Thank you, HISD, for no dignity and respect to what our scholars, teachers, and personnel. Thank you, board of managers, for a f Mike Miles making over $600,000
taking home this year, and our custodians don't even have benefits. Thank you, board of managers, for letting Mike Miles spend over $800,000 without any overtime. I talked to Asana, but that's the papa. Oh, I forgot. Thank you for no library. I talked to Asana, but that's the papa. For HISD, for Mike Miles and the board of managers for running HISD into the ground and spending us bankrupt. Y'all don't really care about us. Thank you. Davonah Trimble, please turn your camera on, and you may begin.
Miss Trimble, please unmute yourself. Hello. There you go. Go ahead. Good evening. My name is Davana Trimble, and I am here tonight as a proud parent who believes deeply in preparing our students for what comes next. I wanna emphasize how important it is that our students graduate TSI ready and have access to strong CTE pathways. The world is changing. The expectations for our students, whether they choose college, a trade, or enter the workforce, are higher than ever. When students are TSI ready, they can take college courses confidently and avoid remedial classes. That readiness saves families money and helps students believe in their own academic potential.
HSD's commitment to both academic and career readiness is essential. I encourage the district to continue expanding these opportunities, offering earlier TSI prep, increasing awareness of CTE programs at every campus, and partnering with local colleges and employers so students can see the real possibilities ahead. Together, TSI readiness and CTE pathways open doors to college, to careers, and to lifelong success. I encourage HISD to keep investing in both. Thank you. Thanks. That was our last speaker.
President Campo, that was the last speaker for the evening. Okay. We will, now, vote on our two discussions and report items, and we might may maybe, take a quick break to wait for for Paula. But you check and see, if she's gonna be here in a second. Let's see. Board members, you're getting your computers already because they're probably gone to sleep. Is that what they usually do? Let's see. Let's see. If I hit my computer and then Okay. Let me see if I'm good. Okay. Everybody up? Ready to go? Okay. Good. All right.
So, first item, do I have a motion to accept number one which is Board Monitoring Update on Goal three, Progress Measure 3.2? I have a Motion and a Second. Please vote. And we have our, why don't you raise your give us a thumbs up if you're voting on the web. Okay. We got two four there. Okay. We have motion passes. All yeas. All right. The next item is the do I have a motion to accept number two which is acceptance of the report from the board's Audit Committee Chair? I have a motion to second.
Any questions or comments? Okay. Let's go ahead and vote then. How about our we got two yay votes there, perfect. Okay, the motion passes. Okay, next we'll consider action items on the agenda. Board policy requires Board members to abstain from all discussions and votes pertaining to contracts that might involve conflict of interest. Board policy BBFA Local defines a conflict of interest as any circumstance that could cast doubt on a Board member's ability to act with total objectivity with regard to the District's interest.
Do I have a motion to approve the remainder of tonight's agenda items by consensus? Okay. We have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion? Okay. If none, please vote. Looks like we have two vote yes at the, on the Zoom. Okay, the motion passes. All right, At this time, the Board will recess to closed session under Chapter five fifty one of Texas Government Code Open Meetings Act Subsection 551.04 through 551.089. Should Board final action, vote or decision on any matter considered in the Closed Session be required,
such final action, vote, decision or decision shall be taken up at the open meeting conveyed covered by this notice upon the reconvening of the public meeting or at a subsequent public meeting of the Board upon notice thereof. The Board has recessed to closed session at 07:45PM on 10/09/2025. Thank you. Good evening. This meeting is reconvened at 10:02PM. We're now ready to consider items that were discussed in the closed sessions. Are there any motions? We need to get our computers going again,
obviously. Let's see. Why does mine always shut off in your session? Yeah. That was a lousy typer. Okay. Alright. Now I'm on. Okay. We have a motion. You need to read the motion, please. I move that the board approves the closed session personnel agenda including specifically that the board approves proposed terminations, non renewals of continuing term performance and probationary contracts, and that the board approves suspensions without pay for continuing term and probationary contracts, that the board approve a binding of no good cause for educators to resign or abandon employment contracts without district consent,
that the board voids term probationary and performance contracts, that the board approves withdrawals of contract recommendations, that the board approves issuance of final orders on contract terminations and non renewals, that the board authorize the superintendent to give notice of all approved actions here and to take steps to effectuate same pursuant to HISD board policy and state law effective 10/10/2025. We have a second. Members please vote. And we have two thumbs up on Zoom. The motion passes. Next item. I move that the board terminate the term contract of Michelle Williams and authorize the
superintendent to give notice of same on the terms discussed in closed session. Got a second. Okay. Court numbers, please vote. Got two thumbs up on Zoom. The motion passes. Okay. And that is it for emotions, I believe. There's something I need to, discuss before we adjourn. The law requires an announcement regarding Board Meeting training status at the last Board Meeting prior to Election Day, which is coming up in November for Board of Trustees. So this is a law that is requiring us to talk about our training coming
up to the next election. And that completing the completion of and required continuing education is a basic obligation and expectation of any sitting Board member. Board members appointed 06/01/2025 have one year to complete first year training requirements which will be reported in October 2026. Edgar Colon, Marty Goosen and Marcus Rosales have completed the required training hours for the first one hundred and twenty days of service. Lauren Gore is registered to complete his final required courses as well.
For continuing Board members, Doctor. Michelle Cruz Arnold, Jeanette Garza Linder and Paula Mendoza have completed required courses and exceeded the required annual hours of training. Congratulations. Angela Lamont Flowers and I Rick Campo are registered to complete our respective final courses forthcoming. All Board members are and so that was my legal requirement. Doubtful that I will exceed the hours. But congratulations for you. Do you? Okay, good. All right.
So our next regular meeting is on 11/13/2025. There being no further business, this meeting is officially adjourned at 10:06PM. Thank you.