HISD Spends $18M to Pay Salaries of Workers it Doesn’t Need (TX)

October 21, 2010

Houston’s public schools are spending $18 million in federal stimulus money to pay the salaries of more than 200 employees the district admits it doesn’t need.

That’s because the Houston Independent School District is getting more federal m oney than ever for special education, even though it has nearly one-quarter fewer special ed students than five years ago.
Much of the extra special ed money HISD is getting from the federal stimulus program — starting last school year and running through next year — is paying workers such as teachers’ aides and occupational therapists for special ed students.

But while the number of special ed students plummeted in the past few years, mirroring a national trend, HISD didn’t cut employees’ jobs, leaving roughly as many people working in that department today as there were in 2005, when the district had nearly 5,000 more special ed students.
Fever charts

“Perhaps that was something that was not looked at over the last several years, and we are trying to straighten that out,” said Sowmya Kumar, HISD’s new assistant superintendent for special education. She spent more than a dozen years as a regional administrator for HISD’s special ed programs before being promoted this summer. 

“We have a fresh new team here and some fresh new eyes,” she told Texas Watchdog. “When you take a fresh new look at things, you start to ask questions about data.”

The 200-plus workers will be laid off at the end of this school year, she said. A district-wide special education audit, intended to identify the overstaffing, is underway and is expected to be completed by December.

“We need an overhaul in our special ed department, and we need to be a lot more receptive to what parents need,” HISD trustee Manuel Rodriguez said.

Federal law prevents the school district from spending the extra $18 million on anything outside special education — a sadly ironic situation for school employees, as HI SD earlier this year laid off employees in other departments. And a program to try to fix the system’s most troubled schools, called Apollo 20, is still short by $6 million, forcing HISD officials to ask for donations from private foundations.

Kumar isn’t the only HISD official saying that some workers should have gone years ago. HISD’s top financial officer, Melinda Garrett, gave school system trustees a presentation in June, saying stimulus funds would pay for positions in special ed “which should have been reduced based on prior years’ declining enrollment.”

While HISD administrators say the 200 workers aren’t needed, to people in the special education community, having additional staff on hand these past couple of years has been helpful.

“Some people may say it is a waste of money, but these 200 teachers are a drop in the bucket,” said Jimmy Kilpatrick, a member of a Houston-based group that provides national advocacy and research on special education issues.

“You need quality teachers, especially with special-needs children, and it presents an opportunity for less of a workload for the teachers … The problem is, sometimes an autistic child needs three adults around them at once, and that requires a high level of expertise.”

Said Rodriguez: “These past two years have been relatively quiet. I have not been getting the calls from parents who think their child is not getting the proper special education services they need. It could be that the parents have moved on, but I hope it is that the situation has been alleviated.”

More than $11 billion of federal stimulus money went to the states for special ed programs. Calls to the federal Education Department, which distributed the funds, were not re turned.

However, DeEtta Culbertson from the Texas Education Agency — which was in charge of funneling the federal education stimulus money to the individual school systems — said the amount of money HISD received was based on a formula set by the feds, not by the state.

“In looking at the funding that HISD received, it is pretty much based on a formula that was laid out by the stimulus,” Culbertson, a spokeswoman for TEA, said. “We had to just provide the money as it was dictated to us.”

The Houston district’s drop in special ed enrollment, now at about 16,500 students, didn’t factor into it either, Kumar said.

“It is based on the population and poverty of the district,” she said. “Every district across the state received stimulus money; it was a big pot of money that was awarded to the state.”

Nearly four out of every five of HISD’s 202,000 students are considered economically disadvantaged, which the school system defines as qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

HISD has not been able to create new jobs using the stimulus funds, but as Kumar is quick to point out, creating jobs was not the only goal of the stimulus.

“We were able to save jobs with the money,” Kumar said. “The two goals of the stimulus were to create or save jobs.”

Fewer students in HISD and across the country are being enrolled in special ed programs today, in part because of better screening procedures. At the same time, more federal cash is flowing in to the district’s special ed programs than ever before, Garrett said.

The school system is also using some of the stimulus money to buy big-ticket technolog y items, like a new computer system to manage special ed student data and white boards.

“We’re buying things that, after we are done buying them, they will continue to create dividends for the district,” Kumar said.

The new computer system will manage student evaluations and assessments made by psychologists, Kumar said. It will be updated and tracked through a student’s entire career in HISD and will help the school system submit necessary data to state and federal education authorities.

In addition to the $42.7 million in stimulus funds, which must all be spent by December 2011, HISD is getting unusually big checks from the main federal program that helps school systems pay for special ed, known as IDEA. This year, the handouts from IDEA are currently running about $1.5 million more than last year.

But the district suggests that the extra federal money will, in the end, save HISD taxpayers money.

In addition to the federal and state money HISD gets, the district regularly uses some local money — largely from property taxes — to cover special ed expenses. Under the law, a school district cannot cut its local funding for special ed unless it loses special ed students or gets a boost in its IDEA funding — both of which have happened.

Aside from the 200 workers being laid off at the end of the school year, there are also 40 positions in special ed currently being funded by stimulus money that Kumar says will be needed next school year — when their costs will be borne by the district and its taxpayers.