HISD board president sets bold agenda

Student suspensions, renaming schools tied to Confederates to be debated

HISD board president Rhonda Skillern-Jones proposes potentially contentious initiatives for her colleagues to consider, in her last chance to set the agenda.

Houston school board president Rhonda Skillern-Jones, taking advantage of her last chance to set meeting agendas, has proposed a wide-ranging and potentially contentious set of initiatives for her colleagues to consider Thursday.

The agenda includes starting the process to rename eight schools linked to Confederate leaders and reconsidering a policy to ban suspensions of young students. Trustees also will consider creating 10 new magnet schools, scaling back campaign-finance reforms, ordering a rezoning study and changing the district’s school funding system.

The superintendent typically develops meeting agendas, but the board president has the authority to add topics.

“These are things I’ve discussed all year long, and I’ve been working on them all year long,” Skillern-Jones said. She noted that the campaign-finance change was brought forward by other trustees, though she supported putting it on the agenda.

Each of the items she added had support from at least three board

“I think it’s really important when we are deciding on how large amounts of taxpayer money are being spent that the public’s representatives are present at the meeting.” Anna Eastman, HISD trustee

members, she said.

The meeting Thursday will begin with trustees electing new officers. Skillern-Jones said Monday that she is not seeking the role of president again.

With Superintendent Terry Grier stepping down on Feb. 29, the leadership of the nation’s seventh-largest school district is in flux. In December, the board started the process to hire a firm to search for Grier’s replacement.

Grier, who has led the district since 2009, declined to comment Monday on the board-driven agenda items. However, he previously supported the suspension ban and has favored a stricter policy on school names.

“I support — and I will support — whatever action the board takes,” Grier said.

The board was scheduled to discuss the items Monday, but Skillern-Jones canceled the meeting when it appeared a quorum would be lost.

In November and December, the board rejected a ban on suspensions of students in second grade or younger. However, with two newly elected trustees, the vote could change. Skillern-Jones, who easily won a runoff election in December, strongly supported this policy change.

The schools up for renaming are Henry Grady, Richard Dowling, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston and Sidney Lanier middle schools, and Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and John Reagan high schools. School committees would be charged with recommending new monikers to the board by May.

Eight campuses would be designated fine-arts magnet schools and would receive additional funding: Atherton, Crockett and Kashmere Gardens elementary schools; Dowling, Key and Ortiz middle schools; and Kashmere and Westbury high schools. Hartsfield Elementary would have a magnet program focused on environmental and animal science, and Stevens Elementary would specialize in science, technology, engineering and math.

Five of the new programs would be in Skillern-Jones’ north Houston district. She has lamented the disparity in school quality across the city and noted that the board recently approved a new magnet school in west Houston.

“The magnets are inequitably distributed,” Skillern-Jones said. “It’s difficult for those schools to attract students if they don’t have some sort of mechanism to do so, and magnet is part of that.”

The board also will consider ending a policy that prohibits trustees from voting on contracts involving donors who contributed $500 to their campaigns in the last year.

Another proposal would guarantee that schools had enough funding for certain positions — such as a librarian and nurse — but would remove some flexibility from principals to set their own budgets. Skillern-Jones said she expects trustees will have a healthy debate over scaling back the district’s long-standing, decentralized funding system.

“I think there is a happy medium,” she said.