Somewhere in here are your Board of Managers.
With about a week until the Texas Education Agency plans to appoint a new Houston ISD superintendent and board of managers, the state agency says it is still considering more than 200 applicants for the nine-member board.
The Chronicle obtained through a public information request the names of the 227 people — educators, business professionals, parents and others — who completed a two-day Lone Star Governance training during one of two weekends last month. All of those people remained under active consideration for placement on the board as of Tuesday, said Jake Kobersky, the state agency’s media relations director.
“We’ll be whittling down from that list,” he said, confirming that no one from outside that group of 227 will be chosen for the board.
[…]
Niti Patel, an HISD parent who completed the training, said she was not invited to conduct a virtual interview or participate in the follow-up weekend session.
Instead, she and other participants said they received an email from Lecholop on April 28 thanking them for engaging in the application and selection process.
“TEA is in the process of vetting all applicants who attended LSG training and will continue to conduct candidate evaluations between now and the placement of the board in June. All applicants who attended LSG training remain in contention for potential appointment to the Board of Managers,” Lecholop wrote in the email. “Your genuine participation and belief that all students in Houston ISD can and will be successful are emblematic of why this intervention will be successful.”
Patel said she believes she has been eliminated from the process.
“I think if I was in the process of being narrowed, they would have talked to me by now,” she said.
The weekend training was educational, she said, and included activities like role playing a scenario in which an angry parent shows up at a board meeting. Patel said she was impressed by the other participants but felt that there was a lack of clarity surrounding the criteria and qualifications needed to serve on the board. She now believes the process may be a “sham.”
“There was a lot of talk about how student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change,” she said. “It wasn’t clear to me that this was anything more than an actual training…Later on, I found out it was kind of an audition for going to the next step.”
Pamela Boveland, a community advocate and adjunct professor at the University of Houston, said Lecholop and another TEA representative were “circling like sharks” during the training sessions. She did not get a follow-up interview and also believes she has been cut from consideration, although she has not received any communication explicitly telling her so.
“I don’t think they wanted to be caught with the 30 (names),” Boveland said. “We’re not still in the process…That’s as far away from the truth as it can get.”
Daniel Gorelick, an associate professor of biology at Baylor College of Medicine and an HISD parent, said he completed the two-day training session and a Zoom interview but did not progress to the next step. He said he learned a lot about how HISD and the school board work.
“I left that two-day session thinking that if they picked all nine people from that group we’d be in good hands,” he said. “There were really a lot of good, smart, dedicated, talented folks. I was actually very impressed.”
See here and here for some background, and click over to see both the original list of 450 applicants and the 227 who made the cut by attending the sessions. One of the latter is the parent of one of my daughter’s classmates; I texted them about this and was told they did not get any further interview from the TEA but was impressed by the people in their session and felt a lot better about the whole process afterwards. I remain skeptical of the TEA and how they have handled this, but as I have said before if they pick a good Board it will help. We’ll see.