Houston ISD will once again be funding small schools in the district with a subsidy after trustees unanimously voted for it Thursday.

The plan keeps the subsidies in place, but reduces the funding by $961 or less per school. Trustees voiced concerns about an earlier plan, which would have implemented cuts from about $100 to $14,000.

The smallest schools in the Houston Independent School District receive some funding based on a formula the Houston Independent School District's board adopted years ago, which is based on programs offered such as music or theater, and on organizational structure such as one set up around smaller class sizes.

The small-school subsidy debate does not seem to be over. Trustee Paula Harris said the plan the board adopted Thursday is just a temporary fix, not a solution.

Trustee Larry Marshall agreed with Harris. In the clip below, Marshall discusses the history of the small schools as responses to desegregation.

Houston ISD released an investigation report yesterday into employees and administrators at Key Middle School. The report identified problems including missing equipment and unauthorized fundraising, as well as teachers with access to the standardized TAKS test prior to the test dates. View the full report at the links below.

Summary

Part A

Part B

Part C

Part D

The Department of Criminal Justice needs to be more consistent in spelling out performance standards for contractors providing substance abuse treatment programs in prisons and halfway houses, according to a report by the state auditor.

The report, released today, said the Department allowed several of the contractors to conduct their own criminal background checks on their employees, contrary to its own policies for employment.

The Department also failed to require financial disclosure information from several providers, making it difficult to determine how efficiently those businesses are operated.

Last month when the well-liked president of the University of North Texas, Gretchen Bataille, abruptly resigned, no one really knew why. That's kind of a problem.

It's hard not to speculate in the absence of facts, and with UNT students in an uproar over the popular president's departure, the cone of silence could not stand forever.

Fortunately, Dallas Morning News reporters Holly Hacker and Candace Carlisle sorted through a treasure trove of documents, obtained through an public records request, that sheds light on why Bataille packed her bags. Turns out, Bataille and Jackson were mired in a bureaucratic power struggle over who was the Big Man/Woman on Campus. The two disagreed on everything from IT issues to tuition increases, while Jackson was prone to lecturingBataille as if she were a rebellious teenager.

"You are not authorized to relocate any of UNT's activities or course activities... until all of the necessary information about your plans has been provided to the System and you have received my written approval," he wrote her in a letter on Jan. 29.

Ouch. 

In the story, Bataille doesn't dispute that there was tension between her and Jackson: "Communication is a two-way street, and it takes two people to communicate."

For his part, Jackson, who came to UNT with no experience in higher education, merely offered a statement acknowledging that the two had irreconcilable differences.

Thousands of dollars of equipment and inventory are still missing from Key Middle School, according to a report released Thursday by the Houston Independent School District. 

The report also found that students at Key were subject to unauthorized fundraising activities by teachers and other staff members. The money received from these fundraisers has yet to be accounted for.

The report is a result of an investigation by an outside firm that HISD hired in November in the wake of the district receiving anonymous tips. School officials examined surveillance tape from the Key campus. The video showed multiple adults moving equipment out of the school and into vehicles. 

The district found other areas of alleged mismanagement at the school.

For example:

• Equipment is missing from the school, including 16 Dell laptops, a MacBook Pro, and 10 Hewlett-Packard notebook computers.
  

• More than $39,000 worth of food was purchased by the school over the past two years for students to buy during school lunch hours. But it appears Key Middle School employees gouged the kids: Items such as candy, snacks, and beverages were sold to students at mark-ups of up to 400%. The money made from these sales has not been accounted for.
  

• The investigation also found that teachers on the Key campus had copies of the 6th and 7th grade math TAKS test prior to the actual test dates. The report names math teacher Richard Adebayo. According to the report, the HISD Office of the Inspector General linked Adebayo to another TAKS cheating scandal in 2004. In that investigation a hearing officer said that cheating did take place, but that HISD failed to prove that Adebayo was responsible.
  

• The HISD employees named in the investigation include former Key principal Mable Caleb, interim principal Bernett Harris and business manager Peggy Collins.

Read the Houston Chronicle story on the HISD report here.

Last year, we reported how the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison company, used its close ties to the Texas legislature to defeat measures that would have placed more restrictions on how it does business.

In recent years the firm has suffered a spate of inmate deaths and scandals that call into question the outfit's ability to run prisons and jails.

In 2007, state regulators shut down GEO's juvenile justice facility, citing filthy conditions, while a pair of riots broke out at its prison in West Texas in 2008 and 2009. Also last year, a high court upheld one of the largest wrongful death judgments in recent U.S. history against the GEO Group after an inmate was fatally beaten at another one of its facilities. After the appellate court concluded that the company's conduct was "clearly reprehensible," the GEO Group settled earlier this year.

• In 2008 Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who had been serving a 30-month sentence at the Reeves County Detention Center, for illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico at El Paso, was allegedly sent to solitary confinement after he suffered a seizure. He later died.

• Juan Angel Guerra, a defense attorney and former South Texas district attorney, told Fort Worth Weekly  that he believes at least five men have died in the Reeves County facility since August 2008; however, he says the real story goes far behind the statistics. “We have evidence that people who are going to die are removed … to die elsewhere, to keep the numbers down."

• In 1999, at the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte, in West Texas, GEO Group. then known as Wackenhut Corrections Corp, settled a lawsuit for $1.5 million after several female juvenile detainees claimed they had been sexually abused by a Wackenhut employee, who was a convicted sex offender at the time he was hired.
  

The camp of Republican Gov. Rick Perry in a story from the Dallas Morning News says that former Houston mayor - and Democratic gubernatorial contender - Bill White left the city in “deep financial trouble” because of the way White handled money.

It is one of the first of many barbs, no doubt, as Perry seeks re-election to a third term.

White tells the newspaper he left the city’s finances in good shape. He claimed when he took office that the place was a mess with massive pension funding problems and a structure that gave retired employees a bigger paycheck than when they were working. White also cast blame on the Lee Brown administration for the problem.

White has been criticized for issuing pension obligation bonds, which carry a higher interest rate than municipal bonds, for long-term debt and short-term expenses.

And now, his political opponent will probably make hay of it in the coming days.

Maybe the race will become a symbol of the epidemic of loose play with public employee pension funds around the U.S., where they are wreaking havoc on budgets.

In one egregious example in northern California, a retired fire chief was paid a $284,000 annual pension – a raise of almost 30 percent from his working salary of $221,000.

Call it a taxpayer gift for those golden years.

As far as comment from the current administration on whether Bill White left the city in fine financial form, forget it: “We’re not getting involved in the gubernatorial campaign,” said Janice Evans, spokeswoman for Houston Mayor Annise Parker.

Texas Watchdog will try to keep digging on these questions, to assess the city of Houston's financial shape.

Houston ISD is set to shift a half-million dollars to the district's smallest schools for teacher salaries to comply with state requirements.

The district could shift the money in a couple ways, administrators said at a Monday board agenda review meeting. It could decrease the amount of money given to every school in the district by $3 per student. Or it could decrease a separate subsidy for small schools' general operating costs, and use that money to cover the salaries.

This second option would result in small schools losing between $108 and $14,602 each in general operating funds, depending on how much funding the small school currently receives.

Small schools are categorized by the number of students the campus has enrolled. For HISD elementary schools, the cutoff is 500 students or fewer; for middle schools, 750 or fewer; and for high schools, 1,000 or fewer.

Currently, small schools get some funding based on a formula the Houston Independent School District's board board adopted years ago, which is based on programs offered such as music or theater, and on organizational structure such as one set up around smaller class sizes.

HISD estimates that the small school subsidy needs to be increased by $530,000 based on campus enrollment projections for next school year, to comply with the formula.

Trustees are set to vote on the matter Thursday.

Trustee Diana Dávila questioned the small schools formula.

"The possibility for so much favoritism to go into the decision making of how much funding a small school or magnet school gets makes it hard to believe in the current process," she said. "We need to put a new formula together that eliminates the possibility of school favoritism."

Davila was referring to the differences in the amount of money given to schools, and a seeming incongruity with enrollment.
 
Grady Middle School's enrollment this year was 471 students; it received $300,000 in small school funding. Cullen Middle School, with more than 630 students, received $124,000.

Why the funding discrepancies? Schools get more money if they convince the district they are offering unique programs or a different teaching approach to students.

Trustee Anna Eastman questioned a suggestion that a professional public relations campaign for small schools would boost enrollment and eliminate the need for a small school subsidy fund. Eastman said she believes word of mouth would get the job done faster.

The discussion of small-school subsidy funding ended with Grier promising to have a new recommendation to the board at Thursday's meeting. Grier suggested he may look at magnet and charter school funding to come up with the $530,000.

Also reporting:
Houston Chronicle

Public property, public officials and your public dollars: Want to find out how it's being spent? What about how things might be changing? Get your pocketbooks ready. ... Check out the story coming soon to Texas Watchdog.

KHOU's Mark Greenblatt has been at the vanguard of exposing deep-seated problems at Houston Metro, the region's transit authority.

He was at a court hearing today invloving Metro today when this revelation exploded:

The president and CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority was accused in open court Wednesday of having an improper relationship with a female employee who works for him. That alleged relationship may include taxpayer-funded trips to Spain, additional compensation and benefits, and other items the public paid for with tax dollars, according to the attorney for former Houston Controller Lloyd Kelley.

Attorney Michael West, who represents Kelley, told Judge Al Bennett  he has information which leads him to believe Metro President Frank Wilson had substantial motivation to keep specific documents or e-mails from coming out.

Kelley had previously sued Metro, alleging it improperly destroyed public documents related to a public information request from Kelley.

KHOU grilled Metro CEO Frank Wilson on these allegations, but he remained mum.

KTRK's Ted Oberg has also been doing great work looking into the mess at Metro. Make sure to check out his latest report, as well as Texas Watchdog's video showing what it's like to be grilled by Oberg. (Hint: It ain't pretty if you're in his sights!)

We'll update as we learn more.

Also check out past stories from Texas Watchdog about problems at Metro:

Houston Metro faults fired general counsel Pauline Higgins for using Metro meeting space to organize golf tournament in memory of her dead son

Was she thrown under the bus? Metro attorney fired amid shredding controversy allegedly called employee a 'blond bitch'

Metro board votes in chorus, just one dissenting vote since 2006

Metro says it lacks expertise to manage light-rail project; hired $2,400/day consultant who is associate of Metro CEO