ABOVE: Students hold signs in protest of TEA Takeover (Photo by Raquel Natalicchio)

The fallout over the TEA takeover of HISD continues. On Thursday, April 6, hundreds of students walked out of school in protest of the move. Parents and students from over 30 HISD schools took part in a day of protest organized in part by Houston non-profit Community Voices for Public Education.

Over 100 students protested at Northside High School just minutes into second period. Students left the building and went into a gated courtyard near the school entrance on Quitman St. (about 10 minutes north of downtown). They held signs that said “TEA, go away!” and “STOP TEA TAKEOVER.” One student’s sign contained an especially poignant message: “I am NOT just a number.”

According to sources, students protested for about 15 minutes before returning to class.

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Students at Worthing High School gather on a median in protest of TEA Takeover (Photo from Houston Public Media)

Roughly 90 minutes later, about 50 students at Carnegie Vanguard High School (in Fourth Ward) staged their own walkout. Braving heavy rain, students left the school and walked around the block during their lunch break. They held wet paper signs saying “NO HISD TAKEOVER” and “TEA, Go Away!” After the walkout, students returned to the front of the school for an impromptu rally.

At Worthing High School in the Sunnyside area, hundreds of students left school in protest. They took to the streets chanting, “Save our school!” Some of them even stood in the median in front of the school, holding protest signs.

Freshman Micah Gabay shared that she feared the takeover would push students out of public schools and into charters. “Most kids who go to public schools can’t afford a private school,” she said. “So they basically are trying to take us over and push us out of the public schools and into the private schools, and we can’t afford that.” (That same afternoon, the Texas Senate passed a bill creating a program that allows parents to use state funds to pay for private schools for their children. They would get $8,000 in taxpayer money every year for “education savings accounts”).

The protests came on the same day as the TEA deadline for applications to join its board of managers, and it came just a week after a fiery community meeting at Kashmere High School in which HISD parents and teachers confronted a TEA spokesman.  At that meeting was a group of women who shouted, “Bring back North Forest!” I spoke with a former student of North Forest ISD who suggests history may be repeating itself.

In 2011 the Texas Education Agency notified the North Forest Independent School District that it would be closed after years of academic struggles and a dropout rate of over 30%. KVUE reported that both NFISD and its North Forest High School campus were rated academically unacceptable. This was the third straight year that the district was rated unacceptable and the 6th consecutive year that the high school received that rating. TEA ordered the district closed, but then-Education Commissioner Robert Scott granted North Forest a one-year reprieve.

In Feb. 2013, TEA commissioner Michael Williams recommended the district be annexed to Houston ISD. That came just two days after the district said it would seek a partnership with Texas A&M to assume day-to-day operations of its 10 schools. But the TEA upheld Williams’ decision. In June 2013, HISD’s board voted unanimously to annex North Forest. On July 1, 2013, NFISD was closed and annexed to HISD.

Students hold signs in protest of TEA Takeover (Photo by Raquel Natalicchio)

Former student Nikki Cosby said that the annexation hurt the district. “We were a real, live rich community of family quality servicing, and we really, truly policed our own community well. We did have troubles; yes, we had a lot of situations, but we noticed that within the time frame of HISD taking over our schools, the morale of our community went down. There’s a higher crime rate in our community. Also, the job security of the teachers – of quality teachers that we had in our school system – are no longer there. We had a lot of teachers to retire because they were just not willing to go into the chaos that HISD had at that time,” she said.

After TEA’s intervention, Cosby said she noticed that, in addition to the teacher turnover, parents removed their children from the district and placed them in charter schools. Additionally, school buildings were torn down, and the land was sold to real estate developers. “They immediately took our schools and our properties and sold them off, so, we found out very quickly that this was for financial gain, a financial situation,” she remembers.

She sees similar parallels with the HISD takeover. “What we have here with HISD today is — it’s a sad situation that this is a financial situation. It’s all about money. It’s not about real-life care for kids,” she said. “This is a money issue. And we need to hold not only the school district, the superintendent, and the board, we need to hold the whole entire community and all the legislators and every person who was involved in decision-making when it came down to this [accountable].”

I asked Cosby what advice she would give to HISD students, parents, and teachers who are concerned about this takeover and who don’t know what to expect. “The best thing that I can say to the parents, students, and staff is that we will not really know a true or solid foundation — and which questions to ask — until we get A) a chance to speak with the commissioner, Mike Morath, and, B) until the board of managers are selected,” she said. “Until we get that transparency from the persons who make the decisions — which is Mike Morath and also the board of managers — there’s no way they will be able to decide until we get some transparency from those individuals.”

This is a developing story. Forward Times will provide more information as it becomes available.

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