The Harris County Civil Courts at Law building is seen in Houston, Saturday, April 26, 2025.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle
A Harris County Civil Court judge denied a Houston ISD teacher’s request for a pause to HISD’s firing process because that teacher had not completed the process for appealing his own firing and failed to meet the requirements for that pause.
Under state-appointed leadership since 2023, HISD has sought to nonrenew the contracts of hundreds of teachers, in effect firing them. Many teachers slated for nonrenewal resign from the district to avoid hurting their chances at another job. Some go through the process to contest their contract nonrenewal.
The attorney for the Chavez High School math teacher asked for a pause to all district contract nonrenewals. His filing asked the court to forbid the Board of Managers from voting on any pending nonrenewal recommendations until a “full examination of the culture of retaliation at Chavez High School.” The teacher’s attorney, Omer Waqas Khwaja, told the judge that the nonrenewal process has gone “off the rails” and some of these nonrenewals are retaliatory.
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But to obtain the requested pause, the teacher had to prove “imminent and irreparable” harm would occur, argued HISD’s hired attorney, Paul Lamp. He said the teacher can make his arguments through a separate nonrenewal appeal process, and Judge Erica Hughes sided with the district. The Chavez teacher, Chidiebere Ochi-Okorie, was also previously denied a temporary restraining order requesting a pause.
Three teachers testified Wednesday along with Ochi-Okorie, including a former union leader and a 38-year teaching veteran, in support of his concern that these nonrenewals could be retaliatory to teachers.
“I don’t think we’re premature, but the judge has made the decision that she has. We respect it. We’re going to go through the process, and we get the feedback from the court,” Khwaja said after the judge’s decision.
Chavez teacher had filed a complaint to the state
The memorandum for Ochi-Okorie’s contract nonrenewal came less than a day after he filed a complaint with the state.
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Ochi-Okorie said in the hearing that the April 29 complaint was about 50 pages and named other Chavez teachers as potential witnesses for an investigation. It covered concerns including a glitch in a district testing platform that allowed students to cheat. There were reports of students cheating, he testified, and even though the data was known to be compromised it was used in teacher appraisal.
After this complaint, Ochi-Okorie sent an email at 5:20 a.m. on April 30 to Chavez’s school principal, Karol Galindo, and assistant principal, Juliana Ingram, notifying them he had filed a complaint covering “appraisal-related actions, disciplinary memoranda, instructional-product directives, workload and planning-time enforcement, personnel-record integrity, and related professional-rights issues,” according to that email.
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The teacher — who has worked at Chavez since 2018 and has three complaints with the state — requested in the email that he face “no adverse action, threat, intimidation, harassment, coercion, change in working conditions, negative appraisal action, disciplinary action, documentation, exclusion, assignment change, schedule change, denial of support, or other employment-related action” because of this complaint.
But just over five hours later, Ochi-Okorie was removed from his class and put in a meeting with Galindo.
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At the meeting, Ochi-Okorie testified, Galindo printed a nonrenewal memo and, upon receiving it, he observed “typographical errors.” He was given another copy without such errors. Ochi-Okorie was proposed for nonrenewal, and HISD’s state-appointed Board of Managers approved it in May.
The teacher, who remains on HISD’s payroll but has no contract for the 2026-27 school year, is appealing the nonrenewal with a hearing examiner in August.
While the teacher linked his firing to his April 29 complaint to the state, Lamp pointed to several memos on Ochi-Okorie’s work performance dated between February and April.
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For the memos reviewed in court, Ochi-Okorie called the allegations false or said that he disagreed. He said he had filed rebuttals to his appraisals, which are allowed under law.
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As part of the argument to pause nonrenewals, Khwaja pointed to teachers being sent to what’s called “teacher jail” by HISD employees and “home duty,” which is when an employee must stay at their residence and call to report in and out of work.
Rebecca Williams, a former Navarro Middle School history teacher, said “teacher jail” is when teachers under contract, who are removed from their positions but still on district payroll, spend their workday doing nothing in a designated area on a district property. Teachers, which included those undergoing nonrenewal, had to request permission to go to the restroom there, she said in court. Williams was sent through the nonrenewal process in the 2023-24 school year.
Lamp called Khwaja’s concern with what Williams detailed “purely speculative.” He said Ochi-Okorie sought to “prematurely” stop this process and it would set a “a horrible precedent.”
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