Appendix A
HISD's Ideas For Improving the Texas School Performance Review Process
Every public school district faces unique challenges. That's why every time the Texas School Performance Review examines the operations and practices of a different school district, the results are different. This fact was certainly true when TSPR staff was assigned the state's largest and the nation's sixth largest school district. While TSPR's review processes were proven ones, adjusting its methodology to review how HISD exercised its enormous reponsibility for thousands of students, staff, and faculty involved some special challenges.
After nearly two years since the process began in HISD, TSPR staff asked district officials and others for their recommendations on how to improve the review process itself. TSPR welcomes these ideas. After all, if we accept an invitation to study a community's schools and sound off on ways to improve them, we must be willing to take some constructive criticism in return.
There is little doubt from conversations with district officials that the school performance review had a significant impact on the way HISD is doing business today. In hind sight, administrators and board members alike said that the review was fair and well presented, and it changed the way they look at themselves. One comment regarding food services sums up the way HISD has used the report -- "Our focus was on having a positive fund balance and making the food nutritious, now it is on quality!"
The one-year review also brought forth a number of helpful hints from HISD administrators about how TSPR can do its own job better--reviewing the reviewers, if you will. The following is a compendium of comments from the district's officials.
The number of individual information requests of HISD personnel from TSPR's consultants was enormous and in some cases repetitive. The district controlled the problem by maintaining its own list of materials already supplied and simply telling consultants that the information they were requesting had already been provided to them or someone else on the team. Interestingly, TSPR anticipated this problem because multiple consulting teams were working independently, and had created a database and a library of gathered data. While the system worked to some degree, the problem persisted, and there is little doubt that the information gathering process needs refinement in future reviews.
At the time of the one-year review, HISD officials notified the Comptroller's staff that, in some cases, documents supplied to the consultants were on loan, and some of these materials have not yet been returned. Consultants have been notified, and the missing documents will be returned immediately. Since the Houston review, TSPR established a workpapers retrieval system, whereby all workpapers are to be presented to the Comptroller within two weeks after the report is released. Any workpapers that must be returned to the district will be returned at that point.
HISD staff noted that the recommendations, especially in the facilities chapter, were hard for the lay reader to comprehend. In some cases, it appeared that the recommendations were calling for identical pieces of information. After discussions with the consultants and TSPR team, district representatives understood the different components, which enabled administrators to address these issues in the facilities assessment contract.
District officials expressed concern that some recommendations appeared to be repeated in various chapters. For example, recommendations throughout the report reference the new human resource and financial management systems. The district felt these recommendations could have been consolidated and addressed in one recommendation or series of recommendations. TSPR staff believed that addressing the component recommendations in the functional areas would help the reader to understand that the systems could not be developed in isolation, and that indeed, systems should be designed to meet the needs of many functional areas, instead of the functional areas having to conform to the system's capability.
HISD felt strongly that the caliber of the consulting team was critical to the overall review. In most of the areas, HISD thought the consultants were highly qualified and conducted themselves in a most professional manner throughout the review. HISD's administrators, however, thought the consultants could have benefited from greater familiarity with Texas law and governmental accounting in general. TSPR staff will be sensitive to this problem when selecting consultants for future projects.
District officials also pointed out that the timing of interviews and on-site observation of district operations was important. According to one department, an on-site visit was conducted during a shift change, which gave the impression that more people were assigned to the area than were normally there during the remainder of the day. TSPR will be mindful of this issue as interviews and visits are scheduled for future reviews.
Several administrators said the six-month review was extremely helpful, because it gave them an opportunity to discuss issues with the TSPR team and ask questions. In fact, many indicated that the six-month review actually changed the way they were looking at particular recommendations, and significantly changed how they approached implementation in the second six months. They believed it would have been more beneficial if the discussions that occurred after six months had been held only three months after the report was released. After three months, administrators felt everyone would have had time to read and analyze the report and form their own opinions about how or whether a recommendation should be implemented. If requested, TSPR will gladly provide this service to any district under review.
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