Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles’ administration greenlit about $870 million in spending over the past 16 months without receiving required school board approval, breaking district policy and frustrating some board members.
HISD administrators did not bring about 130 purchase agreements — all made through a process that allows HISD to skip soliciting bids from vendors — to the district’s state-appointed board for monthly approval, bypassing a step designed to provide oversight and transparency. Many purchase agreements dealt with day-to-day district operations, such as maintaining school grounds and renting equipment, while a handful were for consultants.
The total potential value of the purchase agreements amounted to about $55 million per month during the 16-month period, nearly double the monthly average of $30 million approved during the two years before that span, a Houston Landing analysis shows.
In a video posted Monday morning on YouTube, Miles said HISD administrators did not intentionally hide any agreements. Miles said district staff misunderstood district policy and have now corrected the issue.
“Prior to winter break, we discovered that we weren’t following all the policies related to procurement review process,” Miles said. “One important step is board approval, and that step was missed.”
Board members Adam Rivon, Rolando Martinez and Ric Campo said none of the contracts immediately stood out to them as bad spending, but the breach in policy concerned them.
“While I appreciate efforts to address the issue retroactively, I’m not satisfied because these mistakes make it harder for parents and the community to trust that things are being handled the right way,” Rivon, a member of the district’s Audit Committee, said in a statement.
The district’s internal auditor reviewed each unapproved purchase agreement and found no violations of the law, Miles said. Similar audits will be conducted quarterly going forward, he said. No HISD employees have been disciplined over the mistake, Miles said.
In a press conference held several hours after the release of the video, Miles said he didn’t know why the value of the purchase agreements in question had nearly doubled over the past 16 months.
“We didn’t do anything unusual with regards to procurement,” he said, referencing the process of getting goods and services. Miles suggested the increase could have been because procurement levels tend to be higher during the first semester.
HISD posted the video and held the press conference after the Landing sent a detailed list of questions on the issue to the district Friday ahead of planned publication of a story early this week.
HISD administrators presented the full list of purchase agreements made from mid-August 2023 to mid-December 2024 to board members for retroactive approval during their December board meeting. At that meeting, board members raised the issue briefly without discussion, went into closed session out of public view for three hours and, ultimately, tabled the vote.
Board members are expected to reconsider approval of the vendor awards on Thursday. So far, HISD has spent roughly $200 million out of the $870 million administrators greenlit, district administrators said. The agreements set the maximum amount that district officials can spend on a specific expense, and spending often stretches across multiple years in several payments.
A matter of oversight
The issue arises after more than a year of community pushback against Miles, who has swiftly overhauled HISD following his June 2023 appointment by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
HISD’s state-appointed school board, which Morath put in place as part of sanctions against the district and its elected trustees, has generally supported Miles’ changes. However, Miles has twice had to walk back plans involving systems for evaluating employees because he didn’t get the proper board approval.
The unapproved contracts were all executed through “cooperative agreements,” which allow HISD to select vendors from lists curated by other organizations, such as the Texas Education Agency and the Houston-Galveston Area Council. HISD typically goes through a months-long bidding process for many projects and large expenses, while cooperative agreements can allow the district to move faster when needs arise.
Historically, board members have approved most such contracts each month without fanfare. On occasion, however, they scrutinized the purchase agreements and reduced the amount of approved spending. In February 2020, for example, board members slashed a proposed cooperative agreement purchase of metal detectors from a maximum of $3 million to $100,000 before approving the measure.
“We definitely talked about certain contracts and asked questions about them,” said HISD elected trustee Dani Hernandez, who served as a board member before the TEA appointed a new board. “Most of them, like 90 percent of them, would end up passing, or even more. But we did definitely discuss them.”
In August 2023, about two months after Miles’ appointment, HISD passed a policy raising the amount Miles’ administration can spend without board approval from $100,000 to $1 million on contracts awarded through the bidding process. However, the change did not apply to vendor awards made through cooperative agreements, which were still supposed to receive board approval, regardless of their value.
However, starting in September 2023, HISD stopped bringing spending agreements made through purchasing cooperatives to the board. They did not bring any more to the board for approval until December 2024, aside from a $1 million contract for education consultant Kitamba MGT in February 2024.
“There were a lot of policies being changed at the time and … there was a miscommunication between the policy that was approved and the policy that the (procurement department) thought was approved,” Campo said.
“I was not happy finding out about this,” Campo continued. “I’ve talked to everybody involved and I know there was no malintent based on the conversations I’ve had looking people straight in the eye.”
A big or small mistake?
Martinez acknowledged he “could have done a better job of looking at that policy” about cooperative agreements and recognized earlier that purchase agreements were no longer coming before the board. But Martinez said he wasn’t aware of the issue, and nobody in Miles’ administration informed him they had stopped presenting the contracts.
“I don’t feel like it’s a board issue. The superintendent has taken responsibility and they’ve owned up to the mistake. It really falls on them,” Martinez said. “This is an operational challenge. My expectation is that they come back to us and say, ‘This is how we’re going to correct it.’”
HISD said its legal department will work with its procurement team going forward to stop similar errors from arising in the future.
“We’re putting in these steps, and we hope this mistake doesn’t happen again,” Miles said. “There’s no impact to our budget, no impact to finances. … It doesn’t affect the classroom.”
Eileen Hairel, a member of the District Advisory Committee that provides feedback to HISD’s administration, said she is “deeply concerned” by the error. She sees it as an example of poor governance and a possible setback in HISD’s efforts to pull itself out of TEA intervention.
“HISD will only get out of the state takeover if the board and district meet the exit criteria set out by the TEA, one of which is improved board governance,” Hairel said in a statement. “The foundation of good governance is sound policy and district compliance with that policy.”
Now, Rivon is focused on correcting the issue, shoring up operational challenges and restoring trust.
“I believe the bigger issue is making sure everyone — our superintendent, employees, and board — follows the rules. Then we can stay focused on helping students succeed,” Rivon said in his statement. “Accountability means fixing what’s broken and keeping the community informed.”
Update, Jan. 13, 5:30 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles and HISD board member Ric Campo and additional comments from district administrators.
Correction, Jan. 13: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Houston ISD officials had not responded to a request for comment prior to publication of this article.
Data Reporter José Luis Martínez contributed to this report.
Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Find him @by_ash_ls on Instagram and @small_asher on X, or reach him directly at asher@houstonlanding.org.
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