Protests at Miles’ house. Leaked Special Ed plans. Student opportunities denied. Here are the last two weeks at HISD.
This week, Miles announced that Bonham, Shadydale and Southmayd Elementary Schools and Deady, Forest Brook, Hartman and Sugar Grove Academy Middle Schools will join Clemente Martinez Elementary and Greg Elementary as Future 2 Schools. In a statement to the Houston Chronicle, Miles touted after-school “Action Labs” where students can explore athletics, music, and personal interests. Read the story here.
Miles also announced that Barrick, Bastian, Benbrook, Burnet, Carillo, Ed White, Foster, Garcia, and Law Elementary Schools will be NES next year. Read more here.
Families have heard this sales pitch before. When NES launched in 2023, parents in some of the city’s most underresourced communities were promised dinner, after-school programs until 6:00 p.m, gardening and photography classes, and even international trips for all eighth graders.
What families got looked very different. “After-school programs” often meant kids sitting in a cafeteria waiting to be picked up, with no dinner, while students spent their days on endless test prep worksheets instead of books, including in kindergarten. The much-hyped international trips reached only a tiny handful of students, not entire grade levels as families were led to believe.
“Parents don’t need another false promise. They need something that actually exists,” said NES parent Camille Breaux.
The Future 2 rollout came on the heels of leaked district plans for “specialty schools” for some students with disabilities. The proposal would centralize students to HUB campuses, sparking backlash from families concerned about segregation, disruption, violation of the law and a complete lack of community input. Watch video coverage here and more HPM coverage here.
Miles also cancelled field trips to science, cosmetology and culinary arts state competitions this month because of STAAR testing, despite a three-week window for makeup exams. “It is cruel to let every student compete and practice for something they would later be told was a waste of their time," Yanez said in a TikTok video posted by Community Voices for Public Education (CVPE) on Monday. "Ironically, the district promotes the idea of student success while actively denying us an opportunity to win a full tuition scholarship."
“Mohan, an HISD parent relatively new to HISD, said her children had one year in HISD schools before the state takeover. She described the current system as "complete chaos masquerading as progress." Read more in Chron.com here.
In classic “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” fashion, it appears Mike Miles informed roughly 1,000 employees on Friday that they will not have jobs next year, including most central office math and science support staff reportedly being replaced by AI and up to 80% of HISD’s nutrition services administration, including menu planners and other leadership roles.
After three years of chaos masquerading as reform, families took their frustration directly to Mike Miles’ doorstep. CVPE organized a six-hour readathon outside his home, where parents and students read real books in protest of school closures, AI worksheets, and the steady erosion of authentic learning under the takeover. Read more here.
More public education news links on our website at houstoncvpe.org/news.
Mark your calendars: May 14th is the next HISD Board of Miles meeting. This is the year for public education if we all work together, vote together, speak up together and combat the propaganda together. Registration opens May 10th.
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