Each year, thousands of students apply for a seat at one of the top performing magnet high schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) through an open-enrollment lottery system. Regardless of their background, all district applicants have the same chance of being admitted to these elite schools if they meet the criteria for their specialized programs, including Houston’s storied Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA).
But that opportunity could end under a proposal to turn seven of Houston ISD’s top public high schools into private partnerships under Senate Bill 1882—a state law that offers districts incentives to hand over public school campuses to private operators, including nonprofits, charter school operators, or higher education institutions.
On October 31, HISD announced that four of the district’s top performing magnet high schools—Challenge Early College High School, Energy Institute High School, Houston Academy for International Studies, and HSPVA—are moving forward with the district’s offer for “expanded flexibility and innovation opportunities” by creating a SB 1882 partnership by the 2026-27 school year. Three other top-performing magnet high schools—Carnegie Vanguard High School, DeBakey High School for Health Professions, and Eastwood Academy—are still evaluating the possibility.
District spokesperson Lana Hill told the Texas Observer that these schools may not be required to participate in the lottery system. They “are going to be able to make their own decisions,” she said. “If one school chooses to do one thing, that doesn’t mean that another school has to.”
That has parents and teachers concerned that the district’s top schools will not be equally accessible to all students. Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, told the Observer that she worries these operators will “pick and choose students” to enroll like private schools and other charters. Anderson added the teachers union is against “any type of inequities that this may cause for our students.”
Historically, Houston ISD’s magnet school program began as an effort to desegregate the district in 1975. Still, critics have long complained that there were already more hurdles for students of color from lower-income neighborhoods to enter the top magnet schools.
Under ex-superintendent Terry Grier, who ran Houston ISD from 2009 to 2016, the district created a single lottery system for students to apply to the district’s more than 100 magnets. Prior to this, each administered their own admissions. “We’re allowing principals to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. We accuse some of our charters of skimming. Well frankly, we’re doing some of the same things,” Grier said at a 2010 district board meeting.
In 2022, Millard House II, who served as superintendent until the state took over HISD in 2023 and replaced him, expanded efforts to inform parents about the magnet program and lengthened the application period so that more students would apply.
SB 1882 partnerships offer greater autonomy for the operators to control the magnet schools’ curriculum, operations, and budgets—freeing them from some of the mandates instituted since 2023 under state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles. But, as the Observer previously reported, these partnerships—including schools run by the nonprofit that Miles formerly led—fall under a law for in-district charter schools that contains far fewer financial and academic guardrails than apply to other charters or public schools. And many previous partnerships have run into academic and financial issues.
This concerns parents like Crystal Toussant, whose daughter attends HSPVA. She told the Observer that, in the past, she has been able to resolve some complaints with the school through the district. She worries that “If you’re an individual entity, the accountability may end with the principal,” Toussant said.
These private partnerships are largely governed by individual contracts between districts and operators. Districts then apply to TEA for the state financial and accountability benefits created by SB 1882; TEA’s website states that districts must submit a letter of intent for these applications by December 6. Hill told the Observer that the district “will continue working with principals and nonprofit partners to define the specific terms of each school’s performance contract” and that it plans to submit the contracts to the district board of managers for a vote during a public meeting next spring.
The Energy Institute High School and HSPVA already have affiliated nonprofits that could serve as the schools’ operating partners.
According to Hill, district leaders have not decided how they would spend the extra funding SB 1882 partnership schools could bring. Current employees at the magnet schools, she said, apart from the school principal, would not be employees of the private operator but remain district employees with the same rights and benefits.
Campus leaders at the seven schools are “absolutely not” required to enter into SB 1882 partnerships, and their schools would remain magnets if they chose not to participate, Hill said.
Ahead of a PTO meeting at the DeBakey High School for Health Professions next week, parent Lorri White said she plans to ask school leaders to take time to discuss the proposal with their schools’ stakeholders and to ask key questions. For her, this includes, “Are we rushing to do this? Is this going to be properly considered? How do we know if we’ve selected the right partner or if we’re just selling off our schools?”
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