HOUSTON, Texas – The KPRC 2 Investigates team is not the only one looking into Houston Independent School District’s financial operations after Superintendent Mike Miles admitted the district violated its procurement policy on agreements that totaled $870 million.
A former HISD parent, who is now a district advocate, said she had taken it upon herself to advocate for the district’s financial operations.
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Completely independent, the retired mother said she does this on her own time and with her money to ensure that every dollar spent benefits the students and teachers.
“HISD serves the poorest of the poor children in Houston,” she said while highlighting her frustration with how money is often misallocated through contracts that don’t directly benefit the classroom or support teachers. “It makes me mad knowing we’re wasting money, and I feel like we have an obligation because the needs are so great of our students.”
Last month, Miles addressed the unapproved funding, calling it a “good-faith error in the district’s purchasing review process that was discovered in December.”
Investigates reporter Mario Diaz examined HISD’s $2.2 billion adopted budget, tracking exactly where was spent. He uncovered an expense of over $1 million that raised red flags for legal experts who questioned if state laws were broken during the massive $4 billion bond election process.
The former HISD parent described the incident as a “big rip-off.”
“There’s just a lot of expenditures, there’s consultants. Now, with our current superintendent, he’s made the organization very top-heavy. People are making a quarter of $1 million a year and it’s unclear to me what some of them are doing. I think that money could be spent better. I’m also concerned we’re paying high salaries, and if you go and look up individuals, you’ll realize they’re coming in with very little experience,” the woman said.
Transparency, or the lack thereof, is a recurring theme in her critique. She recalls a time when the budget was detailed in a “budget book,” which allowed parents to see exactly how funds were being allocated to their children’s schools.
“When Mike Miles came in and turned schools to NES, they went in and bought new furniture, they were buying $5,000 Smartboards to put in front of a two-year-old, a couple of thousand dollar Smartboards. I mean, the redundancies and replication changing out our technology. We already knew we had a budget crisis. And so to me, that kind of wasteful spending is unconscionable,” she explained.
She added that if the district had built a good bond package, to begin with, they wouldn’t have needed to campaign for it.
“It kind of would have sold itself. But when you have a bond package with big differentials between the replacement cost of a building and rebuilding it and not explaining what the difference is, that is problematic. It honestly just felt like somebody said, ‘Look, can we borrow 4.4 billion,” she said.
In her view, the current administration’s approach to budgeting and financial management is unsustainable and could lead to long-term financial difficulties for the district.
She urges taxpayers and community members to educate themselves about the district’s financial practices and to hold the administration accountable for its spending decisions.
“Taxpayers, everyone really, needs to dial into this because the way the money, the expenditures have been so immense under the Miles administration if we let this continue, we’re going to put ourselves in a deep hole we’ll have trouble getting out of. So I really think that as many people that have the time can educate themselves on the budget, find out what the money’s going towards before it’s too late,” she said.
