North Forest Independent School District
North Forest Independent School District was a school district in northeast Houston, Texas. Established in the early 1920s in a low-income white area, it later became majority-black and black-run. The district had a history of financial and academic issues from the late 1980s until 2013. On July 1, 2013, it was closed by order of the state and absorbed into the Houston Independent School District.
History
The district was established sometime around 1923 as the Northeast Houston Independent School District. It was also named the East and Mount Houston Independent School District. It began with a single school.The district originally had a low-income rural white population. Schools were segregated until the late 1960s. By the 1970s, when the area was suburban and still mostly white, the state mandated racial integration of schools. African-American families moved to North Forest for the perceived quality of the schools. After desegregation, many white families moved to other communities along U.S. Highway 59, such as Aldine, Humble, and Porter, and African-American families became the majority and gained political control of NFISD. By the late 1970s it was one of the largest black-run school districts in the state; on October 12, 1989, it became the largest.
In the 1970s Billy Reagan, the then superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, considered bringing North Forest into his district, but the Texas Education Agency told him that desegregation laws made it illegal for two minority-population school districts to merge. In addition, area residents wanted to maintain local control of their schools. According to Reagan, he also asked the superintendent of the Humble Independent School District to check whether the state would allow Humble to annex NFISD, but no action resulted.
In 1979 NFISD area residents discovered that a proposed landfill had been misrepresented to them by developers as a housing development. The landfill was about from the NFISD administration building, an NFISD high school, the NFISD sports stadium, and an NFISD track field. At the time the high school did not have air conditioning. Seven NFISD schools were within a radius of the landfill. Residents sued the landfill company in federal court, but lost the suit in 1985. As a result of the case, remedies were passed at the state and municipal levels.
In 1981 the NFISD Police Department was established.
In 1991 voters approved an approximately $40 million NFISD bond, and in 1997 another bond, leading to the construction of four schools. On March 1, 1998, the district issued $46.9 million worth of the approved bonds. It used $5 million to refund older bonds at a favorable interest rate and the remainder to construct B. C. Elmore Middle School, East Houston Intermediate School, Keahey Intermediate School, and Shadydale Elementary School. In 1999 voters approved another about $40 million NFISD bond.
In June 2001 Tropical Storm Allison hit Houston, damaging six NFISD schools. Forest Brook High School sustained heavy damage; it, Lakewood Elementary School, and the NFISD district administration building were closed for repairs. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said that it would pay 75% of the damage costs sustained as a result of Allison.
On March 18, 2003, NFISD had a budget of $65 million during that year; about $50 million came from the state and the rest came from property taxes.
On July 20, 2007, teenagers vandalized Forest Brook High School with a water hose. Forest Brook students shared the campus of the district's other high school, M. B. Smiley High School, until Forest Brook re-opened in the spring.
In March 2008 North Forest ISD announced that it would consolidate the two high schools to form North Forest High School and close Tidwell Elementary School, merging it into Hilliard. Pupils formerly zoned to Tidwell started being a part of the Hilliard zone in August 2008.
Academic and management troubles
From the late 1980s, the district had experienced recurring financial and academic problems. In 1988 the TEA assigned a monitor to NFISD to deal with the school board and the finances; Ericka Mellon of the Houston Chronicle said that the school board was "meddling." On October 12, 1989, the Houston Chronicle printed an article, "North Forest district shows off its 'other' side in tour", about the district trying to create a positive impression in the media. The state again monitored the district in 2001. Ericka Mellon of the Houston Chronicle wrote in 2007: "The story has been the same for years in this small, poor, mostly black school district in northeast Houston: Financial problems, shoddy recordkeeping and low test scores prompt sanctions from the state. Employees get indicted on criminal charges. The school board fires the superintendent. The district might improve some but then falls again." Joshua Benton of The Dallas Morning News wrote the same year: "n many ways, its schools are to Houston what the since-closed Wilmer-Hutchins schools were to Dallas: the ones that were always in trouble." John Sawyer, the head of the Harris County Department of Education, also compared North Forest to Wilmer-Hutchins, another predominantly black school district, which the state had closed.The district had the highest March 10, 1986 TECAT failure rate of any large school district. 25% of the district's administrators and teachers did not pass. In 1997 an editorial appeared with the title "Clouds hover over northeast Houston district again".
Graduation rates, test scores, and financial record keeping improved during the tenure as district superintendent of Carrol Thomas, from 1988 to 1996, but the district began to decline again after he left to become superintendent of the Beaumont Independent School District. In a 2006 article Todd Spivak of the Houston Chronicle described NFISD as "a prime example of how inconsistency can wreak havoc on schools". In the five years before 2006 NFISD had four superintendents, and the TEA had indicated financial and governance problems at NFISD. Dr. Robert Sanborn, the president and CEO of the organization Children at Risk, described the state of affairs as "inexcusable", with both district high schools posting poor state test scores considered to be poor and the lowest SAT scores in the Houston area. Also in 2006 Dan Feldstein of the Houston Chronicle wrote: "By many measures, North Forest ... is a troubled district. Not only is it last in Harris County in SAT scores and passing rates on the TAKS test, but it ranks among the worst in the state." In late 2006 the TEA assigned two teachers to monitor two NFISD campuses that were rated "unacceptable" by the TEA.
A February 2007 report by the Texas Education Agency, based on data from 2005 derived mainly from the testimony of school officials, said that Forest Brook High School had no cheating; however, a statistical analysis of two years of Forest Brook TAKS test scores by The Dallas Morning News in June 2007 which examined two years of scores from Forest Brook revealed patterns that the newspaper considered suspicious. In Spring 2007 state monitors supervised TAKS tests at Forest Brook, and passing rates on 11th-grade TAKS tests declined from 2006. In 2008 outside monitors reported poor management at the district and "security violations" related to TAKS testing.
Also around 2007, the average SAT score of high schoolers in the district, 748 out of a possible 1600, was among the lowest in the state. Eight of the district's 11 schools received the TEA rating "unacceptable." That school year a teacher of "technology applications" did not receive any working computers until March. NFISD was rated "academically unacceptable" by the TEA from 2008 to 2011.
On March 9, 2007, the NFISD board voted 4–3 to terminate Dr. James Simpson, the superintendent. In May, the state ordered the district to reinstate Simpson, saying that he had been denied due process. In November that year the TEA appointed an academic overseer to monitor the district; the TEA had sent a financial overseer in March. On January 23, 2008, the trustees voted to rehire Simpson. On January 28, the Houston Chronicle reported that an independent auditor had told the trustees that the district was close to bankruptcy, and three days later that the TEA had investigated the district for possible illegality in the use of construction funds for general purposes. On February 4, a trustee requested to change his "Yes" vote for re-instating Simpson to a "No". The TEA denied the district's decision to reinstate Simpson. In March that year, the Northeast Education First community group asked for the state to fire the school board; Governor Rick Perry denied the request. On March 26 the district stated that it would lay off 90 teachers to try to reduce its budget crisis. The TEA estimated that the district would have a $17 million debt by August 2008.
On July 31, 2008, Wayne Dolcefino of ABC 13 KTRK in Houston reported on a several months' investigation of the school district for malfeasance. His discoveries included misappropriation of federal grants by the Special Education Director, Dr. Ruth Watson, who had subsequently been reassigned by the board while retaining her full salary, and that the Vice President of the Board of Education for NFISD, Allen Provost, had a personal relationship with one of the special education teachers.
From 2008 to 2011, North Forest ISD was consistently ranked "academically unacceptable" by the Texas Education Agency. It was placed on probation in June 2008, and on July 31 the TEA dismissed the school board, which was approved by the state on October 15. The TEA stated that in the year leading to July 2008 the district did not meet payroll and that several banks had denied the district short-term bridge loans. The board members decided to appeal in the federal courts.
Because of the issues, many parents in the NFISD area enrolled their children in state charter schools or moved out of the district area. Senfronia Thompson, a Texas House of Representatives member serving portions of the NFISD area, pointed out in 2013 that in the early 2000s state laws had been changed, making it easier for the state to close poorly performing school districts, such as Wilmer-Hutchins and the Kendleton Independent School District. Chris Tritico, a lawyer representing North Forest, accused the state of only trying to annex black-populated school districts.