Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles’ administration greenlit about $870 million in spending over the past 16 months without receiving required school board approval, breaking district policy and frustrating some board members.
HISD administrators did not bring about 130 purchase agreements — all made through a process that allows HISD to skip soliciting bids from vendors — to the district’s state-appointed board for monthly approval, bypassing a step designed to provide oversight and transparency. Many purchase agreements dealt with day-to-day district operations, such as maintaining school grounds and renting equipment, while a handful were for consultants.
The total potential value of the purchase agreements amounted to about $55 million per month during the 16-month period, nearly double the monthly average of $30 million approved during the two years before that span, a Houston Landing analysis shows.
In a video posted Monday morning on YouTube, Miles said HISD administrators did not intentionally hide any agreements. Miles said district staff misunderstood district policy and have now corrected the issue.
“Prior to winter break, we discovered that we weren’t following all the policies related to procurement review process,” Miles said. “One important step is board approval, and that step was missed.”
[…]
Board members Adam Rivon and Rolando Martinez said none of the contracts immediately stood out to them as bad spending, but the breach in policy concerned them.
“While I appreciate efforts to address the issue retroactively, I’m not satisfied because these mistakes make it harder for parents and the community to trust that things are being handled the right way,” Rivon, a member of the district’s Audit Committee, said in a statement.
The district’s internal auditor reviewed each unapproved purchase agreement and found no violations of the law, Miles said. Similar audits will be conducted quarterly going forward, he said.
HISD administrators presented the full list of purchase agreements made from mid-August 2023 to mid-December 2024 to board members for retroactive approval during their December board meeting. At that meeting, board members raised the issue briefly without discussion, went into closed session out of public view for three hours and, ultimately, tabled the vote.
“It came to my attention, through communications with staff members, that the board had not seen all expenditures made under (HISD’s purchasing policy),” Board president Audrey Momanaee said in December, explaining why she had added the issue to the board agenda.
Board members are expected to reconsider approval of the vendor awards on Thursday. Actual spending has likely been lower than $870 million, because the purchase agreements set the maximum amount that district officials can spend on a specific expense.
[…]
In August 2023, about two months after Miles’ appointment, HISD passed a policy raising the amount Miles’ administration can spend without board approval from $100,000 to $1 million on contracts awarded through the bidding process. However, the change did not apply to vendor awards made through cooperative agreements, which were still supposed to receive board approval, regardless of their value.
However, starting in September 2023, HISD stopped bringing spending agreements made through purchasing cooperatives to the board. They did not bring any more to the board for approval until December 2024, aside from a $1 million contract for education consultant Kitamba MGT in February 2024.
Martinez acknowledged he “could have done a better job of looking at that policy” and recognized earlier that purchase agreements were no longer coming before the board. But Martinez said he wasn’t aware of the issue, and nobody in Miles’ administration informed him they had stopped presenting the contracts.
“I don’t feel like it’s a board issue. The superintendent has taken responsibility and they’ve owned up to the mistake. It really falls on them,” Martinez said. “This is an operational challenge. My expectation is that they come back to us and say, ‘This is how we’re going to correct it.’”
There doesn’t appear to be anything weird or questionable about the spending itself. The whole issue is that for reasons unclear, these purchase agreements stopped being presented to the Board of Managers for approval until someone finally noticed what was happening. It’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is embarrassing, and despite what Board member Martinez says, it’s as much on the Board of Managers as it is on Mike Miles, because none of them ever managed to wonder why they weren’t being asked for these approvals any more. If the elected Board had done this, it would absolutely be held up as a failure on their part.
Which is why I strongly disagree with this:
Eileen Hairel, a member of the District Advisory Committee that provides feedback to HISD’s administration, said she is “deeply concerned” by the error. She sees it as an example of poor governance and a possible setback in HISD’s efforts to pull itself out of TEA intervention.
“HISD will only get out of the state takeover if the board and district meet the exit criteria set out by the TEA, one of which is improved board governance,” Hairel said in a statement. “The foundation of good governance is sound policy and district compliance with that policy.”
No. That failure of governance is on the appointed Board and the appointed Superintendent. If anything, this should be a catalyst for getting the Board out of there in a more expedited manner. The rest of us don’t bear any responsibility for it.
I wonder if the flags at HISD or City Hall will be half-staffed?
Noticed last week that flags at Root Square Plaza and Toyota Center (across the street fro RSP) aren’t half-mast either.
How is Miles still sitting on his HISD throne?
How did the millions of dollars that were funneled into one of his previous (and bankrupt) education projects get swept under the rug? And now he is minimalizing unapproved 50 million dollar a month purchases by the board? HISD’s school administration is a travesty.