'Bamboozled': HISD drastically cuts new hire's salary after offer letter signed, teacher says

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- A teacher's employment with Houston ISD is over before it ever really started after she said the district dramatically reduced the salary she was promised.

The woman, whose identity ABC13 agreed to conceal because she is afraid of retaliation by the district, officially rejected the employment offer last week.

"I have been completely bamboozled," she said.

She received four offer letters from the district. The first two listed her job as a high school special education teacher with a base salary of $92,000 and $12,000 in stipends.

The copy of the letter she provided HISD with was signed by both her and a member of the district on July 31.

"I just couldn't believe it that they were offering that kind of money to do what I love to do," the woman said.

The offer was enough to make her commute from another county to work at HISD. She said her father declined a job opportunity to help her care for her children so she could accept the position.

She was hired to work at a New Education System-aligned school. Superintendent Mike Miles implemented the system, known as NES, to help struggling schools.

Since her campus is part of the program voluntarily, HISD said teachers are not automatically eligible for the higher salaries that teachers at schools required to be part of NES are getting. The district said teachers at those schools would be paid, on average, $85,000.

The woman said she was under the impression she would be on the NES pay scale because she was part of the special education program. Her offer letter added to the confusion.

The third offer letter she received did not have a salary listed on it, and the fourth said she would be making $65,000.

"I'm like, 'OK, maybe it's a glitch. Maybe some typos,'" the woman recalled thinking.

She said she went to HISD's administration building last Tuesday and waited for three hours to meet with someone in human resources after she was unable to get anyone on the phone.

"(The human resources employee) said the offer that was sent last night was the only offer that HISD is going to acknowledge and accept, and 'We're not negotiating,'" the woman said.

This woman, who has been a teacher for seven years, said she felt blindsided.

That night, she rejected the job offer. She believes the last-minute salary switch is a way to trap teachers into contracts.

"There are no checks and balances right now for that district, and that's a scary thing," she said. "It's a scary thing. You have no recourse for anything. There's no legal recourse."

Ultimately, the woman went back to the district she came from and was offered a job.

She encouraged all HISD teachers to check their online portal to ensure the salary they agreed to is what is listed.

"It's a game," she said. "It's an evil sinister game they're playing over there right now because you mess with people's lives. Everybody's not going to respond well to, 'Yeah, this is our final offer' after you've been working under the idea that my first check is going to be this and I can do this and this and this."

Friday, the district posted online boasting that they had less than 25 remaining teacher vacancies district-wide and that 178 of their 274 campuses were fully staffed.

ABC13 looked on the district's careers website and found well over 150 teaching positions posted.

Eyewitness News reached out to HISD to ask about the discrepancy in the vacancy numbers and about the teacher's last-minute salary switch. The district did not respond.

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