I just can’t see how this is a good thing.
More than 4,000 employees left Houston ISD in June, bringing the total departures since the state takeover to over 10,000.
The record number is three times higher than the June departure average for the past five years, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of district employment records. Over 75% of the departures were recorded as “voluntary,” including retirements and resignations.
Teachers accounted for more than 2,400 of the employees who left in June, with the monthly tally exceeding the total number of teachers who typically leave HISD over an entire school year, according to the analysis. About 4,700 of HISD’s roughly 11,000 teachers left the district during the 2023-24 school year.
Some teachers cited state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ strict new reforms and sudden class assignment changes as the reasons they left. June’s bloated number of departures includes job cuts and terminations linked to job status notices.
Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, which represents 7,000 HISD employees, called the level of departures “unprecedented.”
“As to how many vacant positions exist, we are concerned because school is about to start next week, and we don’t want to see our classrooms without certified teachers. This is a very high number,” Anderson said.
[…]
The Chronicle requested the number of vacancies the district sought to fill over the summer. The district commented via email, “Houston ISD’s number one priority is making sure that every HISD student, has access to high-quality instruction in every classroom, every day. Because of the remarkable success of our students over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented number of talented educators who want to work with Houston ISD’s students.”
A district spokesperson wrote that principals have been hired for all but one campus. The Chronicle found that 76 principals left their positions in June.
“Additionally, HISD has only 43 teaching vacancies to fill across the entire district, and the North Division has filled every single teaching vacancy,” a spokesperson wrote. “This is remarkable considering that just two years ago, the District began with 640 vacancies, and thousands of students didn’t have a teacher on the first day of school.”
Anderson, the Houston Federation of Teachers president, stressed the need for certified, qualified teachers to fill vacancies.
“And we don’t want to see them just picking people off of the street, putting them in a classroom in front of our students for the sake of saying that there’s a teacher in the classroom,” the union leader said. “Because we really believe that high-quality instruction must be given by someone who is qualified, capable and well-trained to deliver that instruction.”
HISD said it sent out 6,500 teacher contracts just ahead of the last day of school and that there are an additional 250 to 300 teachers on continuing contracts that did not require renewal.
Because enrollment is declining, it is likely that HISD will employ fewer teachers. The district reported 183,900 students in late October, a drop of more than 6,000 from the 2022-23 school year and more than 30,000 since 2016-17. The district hit a 10-year peak of about 216,000 students that year.
The district did not comment on the extent to which it is hiring uncertified teachers. At least 830 uncertified teachers worked in HISD in the last academic year.
This was a followup to the principal departure story. It came out before the story on CityCast Houston episode that while he expects enrollment to continue its downward trend, he thinks maybe the district’s improved performance will attract people back to HISD, away from charters and other options. Maybe he’s right – we’ll know soon enough. I fear he’s not and that HISD will be changed in ways we didn’t want or expect when he was foisted on us.
UPDATE: And then there’s this.
Houston ISD hired around 850 uncertified teachers for the upcoming school year, more than matching the number of uncertified teachers employed across the district last year, state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said at a Thursday press conference.
That means roughly 1 in 3 of the 2,770 teacher vacancies at the end of the last school year were filled with teachers without proper credentials. Those educators have two years to earn certification, he said.
At last count, HISD had 47 teaching vacancies, Miles said.
Copy all my previous comments about the unsustainability of all this and paste them here.
Sorry, this comment is off topic, but I cannot access the https version of this site since the hurricane, only the http version.
J, may apologies, this was I believe the result of a Cloudflare service that I had that got discontinued. I have not had the capacity to see if there’s a general solution or not. The simplest workaround is to just edit the URL in your browser and take out the “s” in “https”.
My daughter’s third grade teacher (she’s now in sixth grade) left HISD for this very reason. She was universally beloved by the students and parents and had great energy. And now she’s left because of the havoc caused by Mike Miles.