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Sound the alarm. Save our children from Mike Miles.

RSVP today to speak at the October 8 Board of Managers meeting at 5 pm and later. We will reach out to you before the Oct 4-7 window to register to speak on HISD’s website. 

You can write your own speech, or you can participate without writing one. Join community members in reading the scathing Commission on the HISD Takeover Report, taking turns one minute at a time. 

This week in the news, read about school closures, the Texas Tribune article, “Is HISD’s playbook under takeover sustainable?", and draconian cuts to school budgets effective immediately. 

Last night, Channel Two aired a report, “Closing Schools: What Now?  An Austin lawyer is quoted as saying, “The school district is not a private entity just out on the free market doing whatever it can do...The school district is part of the community. It’s been getting taxpayer dollars for a long, long time to keep this property and use it.”

Let Independence Heights buy Burrus. Let the other school communities harmed by closures also have a say in who buys these public, taxpayer-funded properties.

On Monday, the Texas Tribune published, High costs, dwindling enrollment: Is Houston ISD’s playbook under takeover sustainable?. Highlights include 

• “Increase in costs:At half of the district’s schools, HISD spent an extra $700,000 per campus and about $2,200 more per student. 

• “Dropping enrollment: HISD lost 21,000 students (now closer to 30K) since the start of the takeover, an enrollment decline that’s at a rate faster than its urban peer districts. That translates into about $190 million in less state funding.

• “District cuts: Houston ISD pulled nearly $450 million dollars from its rainy day reserves in the first two years of the takeover. It laid off roughly 1,500 central-office staff, more than 200 wraparound specialists and eliminated 85 bus routes.”

Mike Miles has taken unrelenting test prep to a dystopian extreme.

And as for the so-called academic gains to which the Texas Tribune alludes, the ratings are a measure of nothing and an affront to students, teachers, and their families. 

Parents and teachers want rich, meaningful learning, not endless multiple choice testing, authoritarian joyless learning, and a district teetering over a fiscal cliff.

But many people outside Houston still think that the scores are a miracle. Sound the alarm.