HOUSTON – Houston ISD’s new school year officially started yesterday and on the second day of school, Superintendent Mike Miles visited several of the schools to see their progression of preparedness.
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He said he visited Mitchell Elementary School, Thomas Middle School and Jones Academy.
Miles held a news conference Tuesday to provide updates on the district’s status entering the new year.
“I’ve been very impressed with the teachers and the principals and their preparation for instruction that they did all summer or most of the summer,” he said.
The district’s main focus this week was to provide 180 student-teacher contact days of high quality instruction, stating that they had a better start this year than last year.
Approximately 274 schools opened Tuesday and the district did not have to close any campuses -- despite parents complaints last week about the conditions of several campuses damaged by Hurricane Beryl. Many parents complained that overgrown grass, nonfunctioning AC units, mold, and neglect have created a situation that is far from conducive to learning.
“I told you yesterday, it’s going to be a fight every day through the rest of September and probably well into October,” Miles said. “But we were able to keep all the classrooms -- not all the classrooms -- but all the schools cool enough to where the, the kids had a comfortable learning environment. Every day there’s going to be some classrooms here or there that get warm, and we might have to move some kids. But we were not, we did not have to close any schools today. Again, that’s a feat every day for our maintenance department, to keep the air conditioning units going.”
He said the district is reportedly holding steady at a total of 30 vacancies but it also has about 23 extra teachers. At least five of those vacancies are junior JROTC and several are career tech and special ed teacher positions.
“So while we have 30 vacancies, we actually have 23 or so extra teachers. So that’s good because there’s 10,640 teachers. So our kids are not, being deprived of an excellent teacher even in the first, couple days of school,” Miles said.
Miles said they had a much better day with transportation after the district said around 700 students were still being assigned new bus stops and routes on Monday. The district said they have so far assigned bus routes to over 17,000 students for the upcoming year.
For the remaining students who have not had routes assigned, the district said they have reached out to families to let them know that if they have not received their school bus route and stop information, they can call their campus or one of HISD’s transportation services help lines between the hours of 4:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.
“When we get up to speed here in the next few weeks, at least 9,000 students will ride the buses and we know for 3,000 of them, they’re here for the choice program. And we know that some of them did not get routed,” he said. “I think we’re making good headway on that with all kids getting routes.”
Miles said students who have not enrolled and are expecting to enroll over the next three weeks will also not have bus routes and they’ll be asking for bus routes, so changes will happen to accommodate.
He said the call center was able to respond a lot more to all the requests and questions that are coming in.
“I’ll say again though, you know, the transportation system, has been problematic for years,” Miles said. “And we’re trying to change the entire system, not just that, you know, the number of routes. We’re trying to optimize routes. So, we’re going to continue to work on that.”
The superintendent said there were at least 88 known absences on the first day of school.
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