Two years ago Nancy and Richard Kinder grabbed the name of our school in a six-day blitzkrieg at HISD, armed with an airtight, non-negotiable 14-page contract for perpetual naming rights to HSPVA.
Many of us wondered, was the fix in?
It was too perfect. The contract exploited every loophole in an HISD naming rights policy nobody knew about. The policy had been adopted a year earlier. It was written by Trustee Mike Lunceford, who introduced the Kinder contract.
YES, THE FIX WAS IN. A year earlier, Lunceford gave HSPVA Friends an advance copy of the draft policy for their input, which was substantial. The tiny non-profit would go on to arrange the sale of HSPVA’s name to the Kinders, presenting the contract to HISD as a done deal, and placing themselves in the deal as a middleman who controls the $7.5 million sales proceeds.
You can find the emails exchanged between HISD Trustee Mike Lunceford and Jean Brackendorff, his friend on the board of HSPVA Friends, here.
Lunceford and board counsel David Thompson, a significant HSPVA Friends donor himself, wrote a wide-open policy that allowed for all of Brackendorff’s wish list. There were no prohibitions on third parties selling names or controlling the money from the sale. No limitation on selling whole school names, even of historic well-known schools like HSPVA. No time limitation on the naming rights, allowing them to be resold when a facility needs to be replaced or renovated.
The Kinders’ contract exploits every loophole Lunceford and Thompson so deftly left in it. HSPVA will be named Kinder HSPVA forever, even if torn down and rebuilt. The Kinders paid $7.5 million, the policy minimum, not to HISD, but to HSPVA Friends. Two years after the deal was signed, HSPVA Friends was still holding all $7.5 million. HISD had nothing.
HSPVA Friends is a tiny organization. It does not seem to have more than one deep pockets donor capable of giving millions. In two years, it has only raised $1.1 million in addition to the Kinders' $7.5 million to its capital campaign—and that had almost all been pledged by its own board of directors when the Kinder deal was announced.
The policy was for the Kinders and HSPVA Friends. It was written to make it possible for someone to sell HSPVA. HSPVA was sold out by a tiny group of self-interested people, using influence at the school board with a trustee we are glad is gone and a lawyer we wish were gone. The 1% now owns a beautiful community asset paid for by the public and operated by the public.
And HISD didn’t even get the money—at least, after two years they still had nothing. Friends had it all.
If you are wondering how you can support HSPVA but no longer feel comfortable donating to HSPVA Friends, you can give to the HSPVA PTO. They recently began outreach to alumni families, and now you can give to the HSPVA PTO online.