‘Elephant in the room’: Houston ISD bond plan includes $150M for small, half-empty schools

Two decades ago, children crowded the halls of Houston ISD’s Attucks and Cullen middle schools, historic campuses located two miles apart on the city’s south side.

Since then, hundreds of families have fled the area or moved their children to charter schools, leaving Attucks and Cullen half-empty with just 450 and 300 students, respectively. The enrollment losses have made the neighboring schools prime candidates for consolidation, a painful cost-saving measure that involves closing or combining campuses.

But after years of talks about shrinking HISD’s number of schools, a prospect floated by recent HISD superintendents and a state-led outside review team, the district’s new leaders are reversing course for now. Rather than closing either school, HISD Superintendent Mike Miles’ administration is proposing $40 million in upgrades for the two campuses as part of a $4.4 billion bond proposal that voters could consider in November.

The upgrades are part of Miles’ ambitious — but potentially wasteful — plan to invest millions of dollars in small and underutilized schools, with the goal of luring families back to once-proud campuses.

A Houston Landing analysis of the bond plan, which district officials fully unveiled last week, shows the district is proposing to spend over $150 million on 16 campuses that meet both of the following criteria:

• An elementary school with less than 300 students or middle school with less than 500 students.
• A current utilization rate, defined as the student enrollment divided by the number of students the building can hold, of under 50 percent .

As part of the plan, HISD would move seven other small campuses to the same building as an existing school, with the two schools largely operating separately from each other. Those campuses were not included in the Landing’s analysis of the roughly $150 million in spending.

In an interview, Miles said he believes the upgrades, combined with his overhaul of the district, will help reverse enrollment declines that have hurt the district’s finances and the image of some campuses. HISD’s enrollment has fallen from 216,100 to 184,100 over the past seven years, largely due to fewer families residing in the district and the rapid expansion of charter schools.

Miles, who was appointed to lead the HISD in June 2023 as part of state sanctions against the district, said he is being “very careful” not to devote money to schools that would later be closed. The investments in low-enrollment and low-use schools address important health and safety issues, such as problems with air systems and water quality.

“We just haven’t done right by those schools over many, many years,” Miles said. “And so we’re going to blame them, close their schools, because we didn’t help them become a great school, (and) draw back the kids that they’re losing?”

Worth the price?

Yet Miles’ plan risks throwing money at a problem he can’t definitively fix. There’s no guarantee that the upgrades will bring families back to HISD, particularly given the unpopularity of many of the changes he’s making to the district. If HISD continues to bleed students, the district could be left with dozens of upgraded but still half-empty buildings.

By keeping open low-enrollment schools, HISD also runs higher operating costs, taking money away from things like teacher salaries. The Texas Legislative Budget Board estimated in the late 2010s that HISD could save tens of millions of dollars each year if it closed dozens of low-enrollment schools.

The financial realities of running low-enrollment schools prompted HISD’s last two superintendents, Grenita Lathan and Millard House II, to raise the possibility of school closures, though district leaders ultimately danced around the issue. Upon his arrival last year, Miles also said he planned to study the issue and propose a list of schools that “need to be closed to provide a better education for the student and also to be more fiscally sound.”

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In recent public meetings, several prominent community members involved in a district-formed bond committee raised questions about what the plans would mean for potential school closures. Eileen Hairel, an HISD parent, called the issue the “elephant in the room,” citing studies that show tens of thousands of unused student seats in the district.

“As we look at funding something on every one of our 273 campuses, when are we going to have a conversation in the district about addressing the massive delta between what we have available and what our current enrollment actually looks like?” Hairel asked.

In response, HISD representatives largely deflected, saying the district can make those decisions after passage of the bond.

“We’ll begin addressing those conversations not right now, but probably in the next year or so,” Deputy Chief of Operations Alishia Jolivette told Hairel. “Our focus right now is making sure we’re addressing the safety, the security, the health and the environment.”

The political view

HISD’s $4.4 billion bond plan, which doesn’t include any tax rate increases, would be the largest school bond in Texas history. Every school is slated for some level of investment under the plan, but the lion’s share would go to roughly 35 elementary and middle schools that would be rebuilt or majorly renovated.

HISD has gone over a decade since it last asked voters to pass a bond measure — more than twice as long as is typical for large urban districts — largely due to leadership turmoil over the past several years. District leaders and families agree that the lengthy gap means many HISD campuses are now in urgent need of facilities repairs.

Despite the consensus, it’s unclear whether the proposed bond would pass. One poll conducted earlier this year by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research found two-thirds of voters would back a bond with no tax rate increase. However, Miles’ critics are largely rallying against the bond, arguing he and a state-appointed governing board cannot be trusted with Houston taxpayers’ money.

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By dedicating money to every school, rather than targeting some schools for closure, HISD officials are taking a politically safer approach that could help with passage of a bond. School closures are highly controversial, particularly in Black and Latino communities that are home to most of HISD’s low-enrollment schools.

HISD’s bond plans excited Maria Umanzor, the mother of children attending Fleming Middle School and Isaacs Elementary School. The two campuses would both operate in a rebuilt Fleming Middle if the bond passes.

Umanzor said her children have learned in schools with periodic air conditioning outages and classrooms with broken windows. She thinks building investments could help bring families back to under-enrolled schools.

“I think more attention can make more parents want to bring their children there,” Umanzor said.

Staff reporter Angelica Perez contributed to this article.

Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Reach him at asher@houstonlanding.org .