All of the bond issues on the ballot this year had favorable conditions working for them, so their ultimate passage should not be a surprise. The dire warnings of crippling debt, the long presidential campaign conversation about the limits of government and the potential for sticker shock over local governments’ asking to borrow $2.7 billion [...]
Posts Tagged ‘HISD’
Why the HISD Board of Trustees needed stricter ethics rules
Ladies and gentlemen, Trustee Larry Marshall. HISD trustee Larry Marshall voted repeatedly to award taxpayer-funded contracts to companies that hired his longtime business associate – who gave him a cut of her earnings, according to court records, deposition testimony and interviews. Marshall, the Houston Independent School District’s most senior trustee, has received tens of thousands [...]
Endorsement watch: Various miscellaneous
Just a brief roundup of various endorsements that have come to my attention lately. No particular theme to them, just what I’ve seen in the past few days. – The Environmental Defense Fund has endorsed the HISD bond referendum. The $1.89 billion proposition will be use to build, replace and renovate schools in adherence to [...]
Endorsement watch: For the bonds
The Chron reiterates its support for the bond issues on the ballot. While all eyes are on the presidential race, we would like to remind voters that some of the most important issues for Houstonians aren’t on the first page of the ballot or covered by selecting straight-ticket voting (which we don’t advise in any [...]
All the interviews for 2012
As we begin early voting for the November election, here are all the interviews I conducted for candidates who are on the ballot as well as for the referenda. These include interviews that were done for the primary as well as the ones done after the primary. I hope you found them useful. Senate: Paul [...]
The opposition to the bonds
Noted for the record. Longtime City Hall naysayer Dave Wilson and other anti-tax activists gathered on the grounds of an elementary school that was slated to get $3.7 million from the last Houston Independent School District bond measure but instead was closed for lack of enrollment. Their message was that politicians cannot be trusted to [...]
Downtown schools
The Chron notes downtown’s continuing evolution. Last week’s announcement of plans for a Nau Center for Texas Cultural Heritage marked the latest in a string of developments in the decades-long march in the evolution of about 50 square blocks west of U.S. 59. It started with lots of vacant land, added a convention center and [...]
Endorsement watch: Another critic on board
State Sen. Mario Gallegos sent out the following email on Monday: “The 2012 Bond Referendum will modernize outdated high school buildings and build new schools to meet students’ needs across the city. This proposal is a good investment that will create much needed new classrooms and improve safety and technology at campuses city-wide. Houston cannot [...]
Endorsement watch: HAR for the bonds
The Houston Association of Realtors has announced its endorsement of all of the referenda on the November ballot. The Houston Association of REALTORS® (HAR) board of directors has approved motions supporting the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Texas (METRO) General Mobility referendum and bond packages proposed by the City of Houston, Houston Independent School [...]
Interview with Terry Grier
In addition to the many races for office this year, there are several referenda on the ballot that are worthy of your attention. I will be conducting interviews to discuss them as well. The first one up is the HISD bond referendum, and for that I have a conversation with HISD Superintendent Terry Grier. As [...]
HISD board passes ethics reform
It was a unanimous vote at Thursday’s board meeting. Under the new rules, which will be finalized next month, trustees will have to abstain from voting on deals involving vendors who contributed at least $500 to their political campaigns the prior year. District contractors also will be barred from donating to trustees during the competitive [...]
HISD board to vote on ethics reform
Good. Houston ISD trustees would have to abstain from voting on deals involving big campaign donors and disclose potential conflicts of interest with a wider range of vendors under new policies up for consideration Thursday. The board has been working on changes to its ethics rules since tabling a decision last November, and questions remain [...]
Favorable poll for HISD and other bonds
It’s a good start. Most Houston-area voters plan to support $2.7 billion worth of city, public school and community college bond packages on the November ballot, according to a new poll. The results defy conventional wisdom that a crowded ballot makes passage of multiple bond measures less likely because of sticker shock. “Voters are in [...]
Making the case for the HISD bonds
Bobby and Phoebe Tudor, the chairs of the Citizens for Better Schools campaign, lay out their case for the HISD bond referendum in this Chron op-ed. Study after study has shown that children have more difficulty learning in inadequate school buildings. The 21st Century School Fund, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization, reports that these inadequate [...]
Focusing on reading
This sounds promising. When HISD Superintendent Terry Grier took charge three years ago, he quickly latched onto a troubling statistic: roughly 70,000 of the district’s students were not reading at grade level. Students who should have learned reading basics by third grade continue to enter middle and high school stumbling over words and struggling with [...]
HISD takes another crack at ethics reform
Good luck. Houston school trustees on Thursday renewed serious talks about tightening their ethics rules after failing to agree on new policies late last year. The proposed changes, meant to restore public confidence that the Houston Independent School District is hiring the best contractors without undue influence, also could affect trustees’ political campaign coffers. Trustees [...]
Some children left behind
Oops. Nearly half the public schools across Texas failed to meet tougher federal academic standards this year, according to preliminary data released Wednesday. The failures spiked sharply from last year, when a quarter of the state’s schools missed the mark. Nearly all the districts in the Houston area earned failing grades under the federal No [...]
HISD board approves its bond package
In the end, it wasn’t a close vote. The school board voted 8-1 to seek a $1.9 billion bond issue that would rebuild or renovate most of the district’s aging high schools, remodel several elementary and middle schools, and upgrade campus technology. The plan calls for phasing in a tax rate increase expected to cost [...]
HISD tweaks its bond proposal
HISD Superintendent Terry Grier presents Bond Referendum 2.0 for your approval. Grier’s amended proposal adds five high schools to a list of 20 that would get new buildings or partial replacements. The additions, originally slated for smaller renovations, are Davis, DeBakey High School for Health Professions, Barbara Jordan, and the Young Men’s and Young Women’s [...]
HISD graduation rate up
Good news. Students in the Houston Independent School District are graduating at a higher rate for the fourth straight year, thanks in part to better tracking and online make-up courses, Superintendent Terry Grier said Monday. The district reported a graduation rate of 78.5 percent for the Class of 2011, up 4 percentage points from the [...]
How big should those high schools be?
This is a question that HISD is asking itself as the Board of Trustees considers the $1.9 billion bond proposal, much of which is to be spent on high schools. A number of HISD high schools have had large drops in enrollment, but many of these schools also have badly outdated facilities and would be [...]
Bond concerns
Early reactions to the HISD bond proposal that was unveiled last week. “I think in the long run any anti-tax opposition will make it a close race,” said state Sen. Mario Gallegos, D-Houston, predicting that Hispanics could swing the vote. Gallegos said he was worried about HISD’s timeline. The Houston Chronicle reported this month that [...]
HISD will not raise the tax rate
Instead, they will dip into their reserves to balance their $1.5 billion budget for this year. The amount is about the same as last year, when the district reduced spending by approximately 5 percent to offset unprecedented state cuts. Instead of seeking a tax increase – which the school board has been reluctant to embrace [...]
STAAR pushback
The House Public Ed committee gets an earful. Members of the House Public Education Committee on Tuesday questioned why the first batch of students who took the end-of-course exams scored so poorly. For example, 55 percent of ninth-graders met the minimum passing standard on the English writing test, and only 3 percent hit the college [...]
HISD planning bond election
The fall ballot gets a little longer. The Houston Independent School District is preparing to ask voters to fund up to $1.8 billion in bonds to replace and upgrade aging campuses. Superintendent Terry Grier has said the bond referendum – which would go to voters in November if the school board approves – likely would [...]
Not a great start for the STAAR tests
Whatever we think about standardized tests, we’ll need to do better than this. Thousands of Houston-area high school students failed the state’s new standardized exams and must retake them – or risk not graduating. Preliminary test results released by several local districts Thursday reveal that ninth-graders struggled the most on the writing exam, indicating they [...]
On food in the classroom
Bettina has had enough. See here and here for the context. I hate to go “back in my day” on you again, but I cannot recall a single time in my school days when we had any kind of food, much less treats, in the classroom. No birthday goodies from parents, no food rewards from [...]
No uniform start times for HISD next fall
This surprised me. Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier on Thursday withdrew his proposal to change bus schedules and school hours next year after concerns about disruption to families and questions about the cost savings. This is the second consecutive year Grier has failed to gain support for a standardized bus plan, yet he said he [...]
Well, at least they’ll be able to burn off the calories
News item number one. Papa John’s pizza, Blue Bell ice cream, and fluorescent-colored Slushies. For some kids, those may be the ingredients of a perfect school lunch. But for at least one Houston school district trustee, they may be the makings for a food fight. At a board meeting Monday, trustee Juliet Stipeche questioned the [...]
North Forest gets a reprieve
For a year. The long-troubled North Forest school district will remain intact for at least another year as Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott granted it a rare reprieve Friday from having to close in July. Scott said he would give the northeast Houston district a year to improve. He said he had seen some academic [...]
HISD announces public meetings to address proposed school start time changes
From the HISD News Blog: HISD has scheduled 10 public meetings to gather community input on a plan to add 19 minutes to the average student’s school day by coordinating the bell schedule among the district’s 279 schools. If approved, the extra 19 minutes of daily instructional time would be equal to an extra seven [...]