They also said they wanted to revamp a second committee that directs a troubled construction program funded with $800 million in bond money to ensure the committee is transparent and free of conflicts of interest.
But a look at who's on those committees doesn’t turn up many new faces.
The budget advisory committee is packed with school system staffers, not outsiders -- nearly four members of out of every five are HISD employees. Meanwhile, the bulk of the members of the committee overseeing the bond program are the same people who were on the committee before the revamp -- though they’ve now been certified as conflict-free.
And for the three vacant posts on the bond committee, a third of the applications Texas Watchdog reviewed came from people who already have a direct tie to the school system, such as being a district employee or former employee, serving on another HISD committee or listing an HISD official as a reference.
“All public schools are not treated equally in Houston,” said Richard Spence, a health care consultant who has applied for one of the three vacant seats. He says he doesn’t have any connections to the school system beyond being a Lee High School alumnus. “It shouldn’t matter whether you have political clout or not. These should all be very transparent decisions.”
HISD says it is allowing anyone to apply to be on the bond committee, and all applications will be reviewed for possible conflicts of interest. The district also said the two committees and their makeup are not related because they serve different purposes.
“There’s a big difference between an oversight committee’s mission and the mission of an advisory committee,” HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said in an e-mail. “It’s important to have employees (principals, teachers, etc.) on the budget committee because they have valuable insight into how money is spent at the campus level.”
Overseeing the construction projects is the Bond Oversight Committee, so named because the construction work is funded through $800 million in bonds.
School officials have been trying to revamp the committee after a 2010 report said the construction program suffered from communication problems, lacked planning and was missing budget reports.
Also last year, it was revealed that some of the proposed appointees to the committee had potential conflicts of interest, a controversy that came to light in part when the Houston Chronicle reported that school system trustee Diana Dávila had tried to get her husband named to the committee. Dávila wound up stepping down from the school board soon after.
Since then, HISD Chief Operating Officer Leo Bobadilla has worked to rid the committee of conflicts, requiring all the existing committee members to reapply for their positions. (Two chose not to reapply.) They’re also being required to verify to the district that they have read the committee rules, which include new language forbidding conflicts of interest, and to affirm that they are conflict-free, Spencer said.
At the same time, the school board also restructured the makeup of the committee to make it less insidery in the future.
For years, the committee had guaranteed seats for representatives of specific business groups including the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Houston Partnership. But the school district -- partly in a move to bring in people without potential conflicts -- did away with the guaranteed seats this school year, except for the provision that at least one member must have experience in engineering or building design.
However, even though the guaranteed seats are no more, most of the people who were in those guaranteed seats have reapplied for their posts. They include the man who has chaired the committee since 1998, retired Halliburton executive Bernard Pieper, who was originally appointed to the committee by the Associated General Contractors; Carroll Robinson, appointed by the Citizens Chamber; and Chris Hudson, the appointee of the American Institute of Architects.
So far, 22 applications for the three available seats on the Bond Oversight Committee have been received by HISD, of which 18 were reviewed by Texas Watchdog. (Four other people have applied since Texas Watchdog reviewed those records.) The 18 applicants included:
- Four current HISD employees, including three teachers and an information technology staffer, as well as a retired HISD maintainence supervisor;
- A green energy consultant who listed service in the PTO at T.H. Rogers Middle School, and a general contractor who said he had served in the Booker T. Washington High alumni association;
- A lawyer who listed the principal of Lovett Elementary School among his references;
- Robert L. Ford, a prominent scientist at Texas Southern University who already serves on the improvement committee for HISD’s Thompson Elementary School;
- A Dallas-area man who is a member of the school board in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school system, and who offered to lend HISD his expertise;
- An attorney specializing in construction litigation; a paralegal; a business manager for the local ironworkers’ union; an executive with an information technology company; a retired federal worker; and an executive with a Baytown-based construction firm.
Technology worker Nicolas Alvarado was among the current HISD employees who applied.
Alvarado told Texas Watchdog he thinks he "could bring something of a reality check to the committee and ask hard questions." He recalled working at Debakey High School when it underwent renovations a couple of years ago: “The decisions they made seemed really flawed at the time, and the oversight of the contractor seemed insufficient. It took too long, it cost more money to get things started, and I was like, ‘Who is watching these bozos?’”
Unfortunately for him, the new committee rules put in place last year specifically ban current HISD employees from serving on the committee, along with district vendors, contractors and consultants. (Spencer reaffirmed that Alvarado would not be allowed to serve because of the rules.)
References listed by the applicants include current and former HISD employees and administrators, HISD trustee Paula Harris, former HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra, one of Gov. Rick Perry’s staffers, Houston City Councilwoman Wanda Adams and Harris County Justice of the Peace Zinetta Burney.
But not all the applicants listed an HISD connection.
“I have watched HISD go through ebbs and flows of common sense when it comes to using finances that they are provided,” said Spence, the former director of strategic planning for the University of Texas in Houston, who listed Perry staffer Terry Zrubek as a reference but no one in HISD. “The HISD brand is broken, and I want to see it improve.”
Despite the three vacancies, the committee is continuing to meet as scheduled. HISD does not have a date for when the positions will be filled, and there’s no cutoff date for applications, but the district has started meeting with some applicants, Spencer said.
Meanwhile, the Budget Advisory Committee is meeting twice monthly to provide “input and feedback” on financial matters at a time that funding cuts from the state could be as much as $348 million per year.
When Grier created the committee this school year, he told the press he wanted “outside perspectives” on it, saying he wanted to include business leaders and maybe even a student.
More than 75% of the 32 committee members are HISD employees, including 10 principals and two teachers. Only 7 of the 32 are HISD parents or members of the public at large -- and of those seven, six already serve on another HISD committee, while the seventh is head of the group Parents for Public Schools of Houston.
Seven of 32 is “at least a somewhat significant representation” of the general public, Spencer said.
Harris, HISD’s newly named school board president, said she wasn't bothered by the ratio. “If it’s 100 percent or 80 percent representation, it doesn’t matter," she said, adding that the community meetings the district has held around the city on budget issues have been more important.
There’s also no student on the committee after all. Spencer said Grier's chief of staff, Michele Pola, who is on the budget advisory committee, told him that “the meeting schedule didn’t seem conducive to a student’s schedule.” The committee has sometimes met on weekday mornings, when classes are in session. Instead, "there has been some thought given to a student focus group to give input on budget decisions.”
The committee is meeting twice a month now, according to HISD, and some issues discussed include ways the district can spend professional development money wisely, the role the district plays in engaging parents and HISD employee pay, according to minutes from the meetings (which can be found here).
But the advisory committee's role is merely to make recommendations. It has no legal authority to make cuts or changes to the budget -- only the elected trustees can do that.
HISD administrators on the advisory committee include Pola, chief human resources officer Ann Best, chief communications officer Aggie Alvez and chief financial officer Melinda Garrett. All of the administrators, 13 in total, also serve on a smaller, more elite panel called the Superintendent's Budget Committee that is comprised entirely of HISD staff. (A list of members of the Budget Advisory Committee is here.)
***
Contact Lynn Walsh at lynn@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850 or on Twitter at @lwalsh.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, NewsVine and tumblr.
Photo of 'Schoolroom' by Flickr user Gerry Balding via the Creative Commons license.
|
|
Comments
|
Connectedness
Thursday, 03/24/2011 - 02:04PM
It appears that this committee was created to give the appearance of providing an objective budgeting process, however, the opportunity for interested parents and other community stakeholders have been blocked due to internal politics and control. If the budgeting process exists to ensure that students receive the appropriate education based on resources, there should be no need for a clandestine environment within the district’s budgeting process. |
RSS feed
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Newsvine
Facebook
Digg
De.licio.us
YouTube
