The Harris County Department of Education Board of Trustees voted to hold the line on taxes at their monthly board meeting yesterday. The tax rate adopted is $0.005999, 5.6{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} lower than last year’s rate of $0.006358. The adopted rate is the calculated Effective Tax Rate. Click here to view the ETR worksheet.
![Don Sumners addresses the HCDE board](https://bigjolly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/don-sumner-hcde-board-091614-500x375.jpg)
Candidate for the HCDE Board Don Sumners spoke to the board during the Open Forum. Mr. Sumners was not happy with the results of the yearly budget, claiming that the department was operating in the red to the tune of $7 million. Jesus Amezcua, CPA, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services of the HCDE disputed Mr. Sumners claims and told the board that the organization was not operating in the red and that what Mr. Sumners was referring to was a timing difference between posting expenditures and revenues. Mr. Amezcua stated that the audited financials to be released in January will correct this.
Mr. Sumners also asked the board not to hire a superintendent until a consulting firm has been hired to evaluate the department from top to bottom and determine which departments are not returning a positive ROI. I talked to him briefly about his thoughts on hiring a consulting firm and he thinks that the department doesn’t have the skills necessary to do this type of evaluation internally. He also complained that when he attends meetings and department directors are asked questions by the board, a typical response is “I don’t know and will have to get back with you.” Sumners says this was prevalent in the budget meetings he attended and he doesn’t think that the directors have the training necessary to complete their own budgets, theorizing that in the past the budgets were pushed down from the previous superintendent.
I was glad to see Mr. Sumners engaged. The election is coming up fast and I don’t see the other candidates engaged at all.
It seems as though every time I write about the Harris County Department of Education, a commenter or three will chime in and say that the department is worthless, a waste of taxpayer money, and simply duplicates services found elsewhere. This is simply not the truth. I would urge you to go to one of these meetings and become familiar with the department and what it does. It certainly changed my view of the department over the past two years. Click here for an infographic which will teach you more about the department. The HCDE board is the opposite of what my friend George Scott writes about in this post on the Katy ISD board. The HCDE board is active, engaged, and informed and they do not allow the staff to walk over them. The staff is professional, taxpayer friendly, and always willing to listen to different ideas. Every governmental entity should be like the HCDE.
Good job by the board in holding the line on taxes.
There is not a single square foot of Harris County that is not included in some local school district. So, in addition to the local school district which is responsible for educating our children, we have a county Department of Education, a State Department of Education and a Federal Department of Education – all three of which suck in millions of dollars of taxpayer money and return little if any benefit other that additional layers of stultifying bureaucracy and the newest crackpot schemes for “educating our children” by not actually teaching them.
I’m sure the people who work for HCDE are honest, honorable decent people who work hard and want to make a difference. But, if they really want my input, here it is: pull down the shades, turn out the lights, and lock the doors on your way out.
As one of the more experienced and independent public education researchers in Texas, I can tell you for certain there is a profound difference between the mission and work of HCDE and the state and federal departments your reference.
HCDE does not impose all manner of regulations upon school districts as does the TEA and the federal agency.
As one who did work briefly as a consultant to HCDE, I can attest that its basic format is to extrapolate its 1/2 penny of tax rate to leverage funds to provide direct services to those school districts that ask for help.
There are things I would change about HCDE if I were King. However, I am primarily responding to the notion that HCDE functions like the TEA or the federal government. In every important way, that is simply not true. It is not factual.
I think David Jennings would attest that when I was I a consultant for HCDE, I did not sacrifice my standards of accountability that are well known by many because of my ferocious criticism of the public education bureaucracy overall. Those who follow my website know of my contempt for what has become of the public education bureaucracy.
There are services that HCDE provides that are delivered efficiently and effectively and they serve the needs of taxpayers in a good way. HCDE may not be perfect but it is not even close to the top of my list of where reform must begin.
However, I respect and understand your frustration.
George – please understand, I’m not comparing the functions performed by the different organizations. I’m simply questioning why we need ANYTHING for education beyond the local school district. HDCE may very well perform a host of useful and necessary services for local districts – given your and David’s approbation I’m inclined to believe that they do. The question is: SHOULD they?
We rarely hold our local districts accountable for anything, much less the quality of students that they graduate, but why is it that they must rely on HCDE to provide services that they ought to be providing for themselves?
Hi,
First and foremost, I share you anger and righteous indignation at public education and school districts. That naturally makes me a little ‘defensive’ about defending HCDE.
The numbers are available to me but it would take some research of files. I’ll respond “off the top” but if you persist, I’ll go find the real numbers.
Let’s say that a small district has 3 student with particularly egregious special education needs that must be served and are extremely expensive. The expertise requires to meet those needs might serve 50 students, but the district only has 3. That district has the option of using the HCDE in terms of scale of service and buy 3 slots at a tremendous savings.
Let’s say that a big district has 100 students of the same type but it is a big geographical district that might requires 2 or 3 separate facilities to meet the needs. The district can buy slots at HCDE and save enormous.
Let say that a district has a distribution of special education circumstances that it must provide but it doesn’t have enough students to justify a specific number of full time positions. It can cost share with a neighboring district through HCDE.
Let’s say that in certain districts an after-school program makes operational sense from a very practical standpoint that even philosophical conservatives would be hard pressed to challenge BUT that would have to be funded out of local tax rate.
Those districts can contract with HCDE that pulls in grant funds to operate the program.
I am not making fun of your concerns. They are valid. Public education has become an educational cesspool in many ways. I’d love to be invited to the down Pachyderm Club to discuss public education issues and what conservatives should really be advancing.
I am not going soft here. If I were named superintendent of HCDE, changes would be great. But, the organization does do a lot of good work.
If the critics wanted to retain me to develop a reform package, I would do it. But HCDE does do some good work from a taxpayers’ perspective.
Get me that invitation to the GOP club downtown, and I will address HCDE in the context of the broader public education system.
Your frustration is not wrong at all. But HCDE is not the huge problem right now in public ed.
I just got off a website with an edit function and got spoiled. I apologize for the typos. Please work through a couple of them.