Houston ISD’s Board of Managers voted Thursday to retroactively approve up to $870 million in purchasing agreements after the state’s largest school district admitted to violating procurement policy for approximately 16 months.
State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said Monday that HISD discovered in December that a team of employees had been violating board policy by failing to submit certain purchases for board approval because they “mistakenly” believed that purchases affiliated with “cooperative agreements” did not require a board vote.
In a 7-1 vote, the board approved approximately 130 of the proposed cooperative agreements. Under these agreements, HISD had entered into contracts for certain projects with vendors that had already been pre-approved by other agencies, such as the Houston-Galveston Area Council, instead of engaging in an open bid process.
Board member Rolando Martinez voted against the motion, and board member Cassandra Auzenne Bandy abstained.
The board was also expected to give initial approval to a change to procurement policy that would only require HISD to obtain board approval for future “cooperative agreements” if the purchases cost at least $1 million. However, board President Audrey Momanaee pulled the item from the agenda at the beginning of the meeting.
The appointed school board had initially planned to ratify the proposed cooperative agreements during its regular December meeting. However, Alex Elizondo, HISD’s chief of public affairs and communications, said Monday that the board delayed the vote until this month because members wanted to do a “little more due diligence.”
Janette Garza Lindner, the board’s audit committee chair, said the board planned to publish an audit of the purchases publicly on the audit committee’s website. The audit by RSM, an external firm, reviewed purchases exceeding $1 million to ensure that the spending followed the appropriate processes, she said.
“Our internal audit team found that all of the all of the processes that were followed were appropriate,” Garza Lindner said. “Wanted to just make sure that that was noted for each other and for our community to understand that we did leverage our internal audit team to review those purchases.”
The district’s failure to follow board purchasing policy sparked outrage among about two dozen HISD community members who urged the board during public comment to demand an additional investigation and conduct more oversight of HISD’s spending to restore trust.
HISD parent Ellen Walter said “$870 million in unapproved spending is not an ‘in good faith’ mistake. This is the point that will make you realize that he is the mistake. Our district deserves better. You should be firing Mike Miles.”
See here for the background. Before we go any further, let me include this quote from the Houston Landing.
Eliana Gottleib, an eighth grader at Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School, pressed Miles and the board to look into the issue more.
“For a group of people who are so hung up on following procedures, like carrying a traffic cone to the bathroom, you would think you would follow your own procedures when spending almost $1 billion,” Eliana said. “Board members, please address this lack of oversight the same way you would at your businesses or jobs. Both you and the community know that a formal investigation is absolutely necessary for this kind of incident.”
I don’t want to overreact to this, but I don’t want to underreact, either. While it appears that nothing suspicious happened during the time that proper procedures weren’t followed and no one thought to ask about it, the fact that they weren’t followed is itself worthy of review and at least some recrimination. One of the stated reasons for the takeover, one of the things that has to be adequately addressed in order for HISD to be released from bondage, was poor governance on the part of the elected Board, even though to my mind most if not all of the Board members who were part of that problem are no longer there. It is therefore to be expected, at the very least, that the leadership that was foisted on us should be exemplary in this manner. This is a glaring example where they were not.
There’s a good discussion of this issue in the first ten minutes of Friday’s CityCast Houston episode, with the Landing reporter who broke the initial story. Mike Miles has already shown himself in many ways to be a bad leader, in his complete refusal to engage the community and get anything resembling buy-in for his actions. This is a much more basic matter, one of just knowing what the rules are and following them. And while, as reporter Asher Lehrer-Small says on the podcast, it’s not on the Board to supervise the administration in this manner, it’s hard to understand why no one even casually brought up the question of why they weren’t being asked to make these approvals more than a year after that started. Everyone was asleep at the switch, and the result is just embarrassing, in a “can’t anyone here play this game?” kind of way.
What the proper consequences should be, I’m not sure. Maybe some of Miles’ hand-picked and very well paid leadership staff should walk the plank for it. I’m not sure this is a firing offense for Miles himself, but the buck does stop with him. Could we at least get an exasperated reaction from Mike Morath, with a warning to get his shit together or get out? Surely that’s not asking for too much. Right now everyone in a position of power seems to be of a mind to just say “oopsies” and move on. If so, that’s a hell of an example of good governance to leave for the next empowered elected Board. The Press has more.
I don’t recall governance being an issue; initially, Wheatley High School’s failure to meet standards was the main reason. Later, MAGA and some non-Latino board members and those communities raised a claim that a meeting of five board members violated the law.
Houston Landing;
“Superintendent Mike Miles was installed by the Texas Education Agency in June because Wheatley failed to meet state standards for several years. He said every moment of instruction counts. “3rd graders through 12th graders — they already know the rules,” Miles said.”
Not a single Latino that Kuff likes to point fingers at was indicted, other were but they were not.
Why not keep rewriting history so it suits what we want to believe?
Manny, TEA took over HISD because the folks running HISD were a clown car shit show. HTX might not like who’s running it now (I.e. Miles) but make no mistake as to Why he’s running it. Wheatley was just the most HS name mentioned.
Jolanda (it wasn’t me, it was them) Jones, (at the time…) trustee, District 4:
“I already knew my colleagues were pulling shenanigans. The preliminary report just confirmed for everybody else what I already knew was going on. Clearly, HISD business was being done outside of HISD without full knowledge of the board or the public and they were executing their plans at the board meetings. It is not my fault the board is getting taken over, it’s their fault. I followed the rules but because of their bad behavior, we’re gonna be taken over. There is no mechanism to individually remove the wrongdoers of us so it’s either all of us or none of us. It’s sad, but I think the alternative is worse.”
https://houstonlanding.org/timeline-the-long-bitter-road-to-the-tea-takeover-of-houston-isd/
Good article…