HISD officials declined to answer questions this week whether about whether they still stood by their decision to award the grounds-keeping contract to Southwest.

A district spokesman this week declined to discuss the council’s audit or the similarities between its conclusions and Texas Watchdog’s questions about the grounds-keeping contract. Grier and HISD Chief Financial Officer Melinda Garrett did not respond to multiple e-mail requests for comment for this story.

PRICE NOT TERRIBLY IMPORTANT

Among the findings of the council’s review was that price often didn’t count enough in how the Houston school system buys materials and services.

That may sting for some — the school system that faces a $44 million budget deficit this year, and last year it closed schools, laid off teachers and cut the amount of money given to each school per student.  The district has an annual budget of $1.6 billion.

In many transactions, the price of the goods or services counted for just 50 percent of the overall decision of which companies HISD ultimately chose to award contracts, the council review stated. In some instances, price amounted to just 12.5 percent of the final score district evaluators gave.

In the grounds-keeping contract, HISD hired Southwest and another company – even though Southwest ranked eighth-lowest among the companies that bid to do the work, records show.

The difference between the low bid and Southwest’s bid was about $205,000, an amount that would pay the annual salaries of about 4.5 teachers on the lowest rung of HISD's teacher pay scale.

Documents made public by the school system show that the price estimated by each bidder counted for just five maximum points out of a total 75 when a team of HISD employees ranked each of the bidders. That’s about 7 percent of the total score.

By comparison, each bidder could have received up to 20 points for “the quality of the vendors’ goods and services” or the extent to which the vendor “meets district needs.” Together, those two factors counted for up to half of each bidder’s possible score.

Despite the documents showing Southwest had submitted only the eighth-lowest bid among the nearly 20 bidders, each of the three HISD evaluators made Southwest their No. 2-ranked scorer in the criteria of “long-term cost to HISD.”

TRANSPARENCY ISSUE

That touches on another problem pointed out by the Council of the Great City Schools audit: Lack of transparency, which Michael Casserly, the council’s executive director, told Texas Watchdog was HISD’s most serious contracting problem.

“The majority of the district‘s purchasing,” the audit stated, “… is awarded based on a number of weighted factors that are not always transparent or consistently applied.”

For example, when HISD formally notifies the public that it’s accepting bids or proposals on a contract, the weighting of the various criteria “is not disclosed in most” cases, other than for construction contracts, the auditors wrote. The school district doesn’t assign the weights until later, and may not assign the weights until the district is actually picking which vendor to hire, the audit said.

“We should have a set method for procurement where we transparently specify the measurement criteria prior to the (request for proposals) being sent out,” said HISD Board President Mike Lunceford, who called the audit’s findings “major problem areas.”

“In that way,” Lunceford said, “everyone knows the rules before they play the game.”

Lunceford also told HISD administrators last year that he wanted them to tell the school board whenever they recommended HISD do business with a firm that was not the lowest bidder, and to offer an explanation of why.

In the grounds-keeping contract, HISD scored Southwest and its competitors on a total of eight criteria. The factors where Southwest and the other winning bidder, Houston Grotech, most greatly outdistanced the competition on the HISD scoring matrix were the vendor’s reputation, the quality of its goods and services and whether the company “meets district needs,” documents show.

“’The extent to which the goods/service(s) meet District's needs,’ refers to the extent that HISD is able to utilize the goods and/or services from the vendors that bid (on) the project,” HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said. “This measures how well the vendor’s offerings meet the needs of the district. It takes into account processes, ease of implementation, technology integration if applicable, etc.”

He pointed out that “meets district needs” is one of the criteria state law says school districts may use when picking vendors.

But national procurement experts told Texas Watchdog they had questions about that category’s use as one of the district’s procurement criteria.

“That’s a little broad, isn’t it?” asked Robert J. Nahabit, a national procurement expert and consultant based in Austin who gives seminars on proper purchasing procedures throughout the country.

When first told of the use of the “meets district needs” phrase in a phone interview, he began laughing. “My first impression? Who’s his brother-in-law?”

Bill Munch, director of purchasing for Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, agreed, in part, with Nahabit.

“It's too nebulous,” said Munch, who inspected the evaluation documents provided to Texas Watchdog by district CFO Garrett for the Southwest contract.  “Best practice says criterion should be much more defined and specific.”

Barry S. Meltz, director of procurement for Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest school district with about 345,000 students, said, “We on occasion will use the term ‘in the best interests of the District’ but normally not for bid evaluation purposes.”

Cindy Hallett, who served as procurement chief for Texas’ Eanes Independent School District from 2000-07, also reviewed HISD’s Southwest Nursery evaluation documents. Hallett currently serves as a Texas city purchasing manager.

“I would award to Houston Grotech Services,” Hallett said. “Their score is far above any of the competitors.”

A formal audit of the district's procurement practices is also being done by Houston-based accounting firm Null-Lairson. That review, being done at a maximum cost of $87,500, should be completed during the upcoming weeks, Lunceford and other district officials said.
 
***
Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

If the gifted criteria had become more stringent, he added, students already in the program “probably would (have been) grandfathered in.”

Peggy Sue Gay, 52, a mother of two sons educated in HISD's gifted program and a member of the district's Gifted and Talented Parent Advisory Committee, is one of many parents who complained that HISD “does not have a clear consistent path for" gifted and talented students.

“When I met with the administration in December, they admitted" they had not rectified the gifted and talented situation, "and said it needed to be addressed,” said Angela Standridge, 46, co-chairman of the committee. Her son, 14, is gifted and has an IQ between 165 and 168, depending on the test.

“I have not seen (a solution) in writing and action, but there does seem to be a dialogue. It would be most helpful if they filled the open position for a gifted and talented coordinator. It will not be on anyone else's front burner, no matter how many parents voice the concern.”

About 15.6 percent of HISD's student body has been identified as gifted and talented, according to e-mails written by HISD administrators in August and obtained by Texas Watchdog. The state rate is 7.2 percent, or closer to one child in every 14.

And even Texas’ percentage is a bit higher than the national average, which is between 6.5 percent and 7 percent, said Jim Borland, a professor who specializes in gifted and talented curricula at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York.

“Houston’s percentage of gifted and talented students is very high,” Borland said. “I haven’t come across an urban school district with such a large scale of gifted and talented students – or anything close to this.

"It makes you ask why so many kids need a form of special ed. What’s wrong with the general education system? That’s sort of the implicit message – that about one in seven students need something outside the regular curriculum.”

Each Texas school district is required to use at least three criteria for entrance into gifted ed programs — but the districts are allowed to pick what those criteria will be.

HISD officials use a matrix which includes these factors:

Even if the five-point increase occurred however, the percentage of HISD gifted and talented students might drop only to 13.4 percent of the student population, according to the e-mails – still much higher than the Texas and national averages. Spencer said the five-point increase would reduce the percentage to 12.5 percent.

But Spencer said that “the fact that HISD has identified a higher percentage of students as (gifted and talented) than the average Texas school district is not indicative of a problem in and of itself.”

Yet Tracy Weinberg, associate director of the Texas Association for Gifted and Talented in Austin, disagreed.

“When you over-identify gifted and talented students, you’re slowing the pace of classroom instruction and not creating a challenge for students who are truly gifted,” Weinberg said. “They don’t get the depth of content and complexity because there’s too many bases to be covered in the class.”

And it could even hurt students who normally would not qualify as gifted and talented, said Columbia’s Borland.

“The whole goal of a gifted and talented program is to identify kids who need that type of instruction and group them homogenously with kids of comparable ability,” Borland said. “The larger you make that group, the more heterogeneous you make it. If kids are misplaced, it’s not good for anybody. It could be less effective because of the unwieldy range of abilities in the gifted program.”

But parents of HISD gifted students say any plan that would cut kids out of the gifted program could hurt the pupils who remain in it, robbing them of valuable dollars precisely at a time when the district faces cuts across the board due to a looming $44 million budget deficit.

“I’d hate to see the district take dollars away from the high-performing kids,” said Judy Long, 64, a parent who has raised four HISD graduates. “We wouldn’t do this to athletes, but we’ll do it to our most gifted kids, like the best violinist. It’s crazy.”

Texas funds programs for 5 percent of students whom individual school districts identify as gifted and talented, said Long, who also serves on the district’s gifted committee. The HISD board of trustees created that committee and appointed about 18 members last year.

“The remainder of (the funding comes) from the HISD budget for kids identified over the 5 percent,” Long said.

Parents have clamored for improvements to the Houston schools' gifted and talented curriculum since administrators eliminated the top program for the district’s best and brightest in 2006.

Long said she believes HISD officials eliminated the "Tier 1" gifted and talented selection process and program five years ago to allow more minority students to access to top-notch academic and arts learning opportunities.

Though a noble cause, Long said that hurts those students who are truly a cut above the rest.

“Now that great violinist goes into a pool with lower (collective) talent,” Long said. “If we do something for the least-able students, we need to do something for those working at or above grade level.”

But she emphasized that the answer is not to take away minority students' access to gifted and talented opportunities or lower the percentage of pupils identified as gifted and talented. That would only eliminate necessary funding to students with high ability.

Instead, Long and other parents said HISD administrators should restore the Tier 1 program, which would create a curriculum for those who really stand apart from the rest of the pupil population.

But even under the current gifted program, Hispanic, African-American and low-income students are under-represented, Spencer said.

For instance, Asian students are six times more likely to qualify as gifted and talented in HISD as African-American students, Spencer said. Overall, 42 percent of all Asian students in HISD have been identified as gifted and talented, along with 40 percent of all white students.

But just 7 percent of the district's African-American students have been designated as gifted and talented.

Those numbers aren't at all in line with the overall demographics of HISD's student body, which is nearly two-thirds Hispanic and about one-quarter African-American.

The state's plan for gifted ed says a school district's gifted and talented population should be reflective of its total population, Spencer said.

HISD officials have addressed this issue in recent years by implementing universal gifted and talented testing for all kindergartners and fifth graders, Spencer said. And in high school, HISD officials provide rosters of gifted students' names to ensure identification is carried over from middle school, he said.

Organizing students according to their actual abilities is the most effective manner to teach kids, said Patrick Suppes, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who founded that school’s Education Program for Gifted Youth.

“It’s a mistake to get caught up in a single definition" of gifted and talented, Suppes said. “It’s a good idea to stratify.”

Spencer acknowledged that the district "has more work to do when it comes to properly identifying" gifted kids, and said an ad hoc committee comprising HISD principals recommended examining the current matrix to determine whether it needs refining.

If district administrators decide it does, any changes would be made in time for the 2013-14 academic year, he said.

***
Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

The city’s Solid Waste Advisory Commission is expected to consider the ordinance at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Austin’s City Hall. Should an ordinance be approved, the City Council is expected to vote on it sometime in March.

As of 4 p.m. Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, was unable to respond to Texas Watchdog’s questions about the calculation he used in the report upon which the disposable bag ban is based. He was, however, expected to address them at the commission meeting, his spokeswoman, Lauren Hammond, said.

The reason Gedert could not make an estimate of plastic bag volume or cost in Austin based on the report he cited was the figure for plastic bag volume in the U.S. was not in the report, Steven Stein, an environmental scientist and co-author of the 2009 study of litter in the U.S., told Texas Watchdog.

The Keep America Beautiful litter study listed the top 10 sources of visible litter on American roadways. Cigarette butts were responsible for 36.3 percent of the litter. Plastic bags, at .6 percent did not make the top 10 list or the study, Stein said.

“We had, like, 60 categories, and we weren’t going to include them all,” Stein said. “Because plastic bags made up such a minute portion of the waste stream we didn’t include it.”

In his report to the City Council in January of 2011, Gedert cites Stein’s study and uses a 2.2 percent figure, which corresponds to a type of litter Stein called Other Plastic Film. This category refers to agricultural plastic like the sheeting wrapped around big round bales of hay.

“That’s the only place I can think of where he might have gotten the 2.2 percent,” Stein said.

On Tuesday, Stein sent an e-mail letter to Gedert pointing out the error.

“You have overstated the amount and cost impact of plastic bags by about 366 percent,“ Stein wrote. “Additionally, since retail plastic bags only constitute a portion of the study’s plastic bag category (dry cleaner bags and trash bags are also in this category), even 0.6 percent for retail plastic bags is an overstatement.”

“Specifically, page three of your memo indicates that plastic bags constitute 2.2 percent of litter. The 2009 National Litter Study found that plastic bags of all types comprise only 0.6 percent of litter. Percentages for categories that constituted minute portions of roadside litter, such as plastic bags, were not addressed in the 2009 National Litter Study.”

“Thus, the wrong data point was used in this memo’s analysis. The mix-up may stem from Figure 3-3 (Top 10 Aggregate Litter Items, All U.S. Roadways) on page 3-3 of the KAB 2009 National Litter Study. That table lists “Other Plastic Film” as 2.2% of all litter. Note that this category specifically excluded plastic bags.”

Stein said he has so far not heard from Gedert, before or after his letter.

“Regardless of this position you take on this issue, what is of consequence is that you dig deep enough to make sure you have the correct data to base your assumptions on,” Stein said. “I think it was an honest mistake that I would have been happy to point out to him. But I think the public in Austin ought to know about it.”

Photo of plastic bags by flickr user taberandrew, used via a Creative Commons license.

HISD has repeatedly done business worth millions of dollars with buddies and associates of district trustees, and it’s a problem that HISD’s own leaders have acknowledged but been unable to nip in the bud over the last few years.

Meanwhile, scores of Houston teachers were laid off and four schools were closed this year. Some HISD leaders have talked about a property tax increase and a request to the voters for more spending authority next year.

Our series of stories publishing today includes these:

Rash of improper influence over high-dollar contracts at Houston ISD — while teachers are cut and schools are closed

Houston school trustees have been accused in at least seven cases in the last two years of using their influence to affect what companies the school district does business with, public records show.

In all but one of those cases, trustees are accused of using their influence to give school district work to favored vendors — even if those vendors weren't the best-suited or the lowest bidders for the job.

Read the full story here.

Read the full story here.

Read the full story here.

***
Contact Trent Seibert at trent@texaswatchdog.org or 832-316-4994 or on Twitter at @trentseibert  or @texaswatchdog.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us onTwitter 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, and tumblr.

Photo of HISD trustee board meeting by Flickr user mikemcguff, used under the Creative Commons license.

HISD has repeatedly done business worth millions of dollars with buddies and associates of district trustees, and it’s a problem that HISD’s own leaders have acknowledged but been unable to nip in the bud over the last few years.

Meanwhile, scores of Houston teachers were laid off and four schools were closed this year. Some HISD leaders have talked about a property tax increase and a request to the voters for more spending authority next year.

Our series of stories publishing today includes these:

Rash of improper influence over high-dollar contracts at Houston ISD — while teachers are cut and schools are closed

Houston school trustees have been accused in at least seven cases in the last two years of using their influence to affect what companies the school district does business with, public records show.

In all but one of those cases, trustees are accused of using their influence to give school district work to favored vendors — even if those vendors weren't the best-suited or the lowest bidders for the job.

Read the full story here.

Read the full story here.

Read the full story here.

***
Contact Trent Seibert at trent@texaswatchdog.org or 832-316-4994 or on Twitter at @trentseibert  or @texaswatchdog.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us onTwitter 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, and tumblr.

Photo of HISD trustee board meeting by Flickr user mikemcguff, used under the Creative Commons license.