When Greg Poole first became superintendent of Barbers Hill ISD nearly 20 years ago, he inherited three major issues. The sixth-generation Texan said he needed to foster better relationships with local businesses, offset funding diversions to the state and find a way to "truly grow" the district's finances.
"What we did here is likely the most monumental thing to ever happen in public ed — period," Poole said in a lengthy sit-down interview with Houston Public Media.
The "monumental" maneuver included Poole redirecting nearly $100 million of the district's funding into an "education foundation" — where he is also the executive director. The nonprofit education fund then aggressively invested the money, creating a $200 million endowment intended to serve the small school district of roughly 8,000 students 30 miles east of Houston. The foundation's assets now exceed the entire annual operating budget for Barbers Hill ISD.
"We set it up very uniquely and we didn’t pattern it after any other foundation," Poole said.
His "unique" approach, however, now has some Texas lawmakers — from both political parties — deeply concerned.
In a tense government oversight hearing in late August, Texas House representatives grilled Poole on the district's relationship with the foundation. They raised concerns over potential conflicts of interest on the foundation's board, which largely consists of current and former district trustees, district employees and individuals connected to investment firms managing the foundation's funds. Lawmakers pressed him on his prolific use of a since-eliminated tax incentive that reduced taxes Barbers Hill ISD owed back to the state — and questioned if trustees had potentially violated the Texas Open Meetings Act when they met as members of the foundation's board.
Poole and the district maintain all of their decisions were legal and made with advice from legal counsel.
The hearing ignited a debate over how education foundations operate. They exist in a mostly unregulated space, and Barbers Hill ISD Education Foundation appears to be an outlier for how the vast majority of foundations serving public school districts operate, according to testimony from the hearing.
State Senator Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, vice chair of the education committee in the Texas Senate, said after the hearing his office was also looking into the allegations made against Barbers Hill ISD.
"It was a sleepy area of the education code that was designed to be an auxiliary to help people raise some money," Bettencourt said. "I don’t think anybody had ever thought that you’d have a foundation taking dump truck loads of money and depositing it into another bank account and having trustees [serve on both boards]. That’s what was really concerning to me."
The Barbers Hill Education Foundation now has assets worth a reported $200 million, But since 2010, it has only given $2.4 million in teacher grants back to the district.
That's by design, Poole said.
"It wasn’t to give money initially," Poole said of the foundation. "It was to give a lot of money eventually."
Innovative or inappropriate?
Since 1993, Texas has redistributed a portion of property tax revenue from well-to-do school districts to less affluent districts. Intended to bring equity to school finances across the state, the recapture program is commonly referred to as the "Robin Hood" system.
Debate over the program continues to this day. The Midland school district in west Texas voted to sue Education Commissioner Mike Morath in July over the system. Midland was slated to pay$83 million to the state's recapture program— or nearly a third of the $313 million the district generates locally.
Poole testified part of the goal of his "alternative" funding structure was to replace the lost revenue the district sends back to Austin. The Barbers Hill ISD 2026-27budget allocated $30 million for recapture — or roughly 20% of the total budget summary.
"We're not a bad actor," Poole told lawmakers in August. "The idea was we need to somehow have an alternative funding structure to make up for the redistribution — socialistic in my mind — Robin Hood plan."
Poole aggressively pursued a since-eliminated property tax incentive, Chapter 313, that allowed businesses to make payments directly to school districts in lieu of paying property taxes. Sometimes referred to as PILOT money — payments in lieu of taxes — the revenue gives officials much more flexibility over the dollars. The payments were not coming into the district as property tax dollars, and were therefore not subject to recapture.
"It is possible that some of this has been innovative," Bettencourt said. "The question — is this too much of a good thing, or are there fundamental problems with it? There’s a lot here to unpack."
Monty Exter, director of government relations for the Association of Texas Professional Educators (ATPE), said BHISD was not unique in their dislike of the "Robin Hood" program. He said other districts have also worked to find ways to minimize what they owe to the recapture system.
Exter agreed Barbers Hill was unique, "but not in a negative way."
"They have done exactly what I would want them to do as a taxpayer," Exter said. "Effectively, what they’ve done is they have taken a short-term revenue stream and converted it into an indefinite revenue stream."
At the height of Barbers Hill's use of the tax incentive program, which closed in 2022 and is no longer accepting new agreements, Poole said the district had as many as 37 Chapter 313 agreements with local businesses. He estimated the district has another 20 agreements still active and set to expire in two years.
Which is why Poole said he created an "endowment" for Barbers Hill ISD through the foundation — to prepare for the loss of those property tax incentives. He redirected money from the PILOT payments to the foundation.
"We just were wise enough for our taxpayer to do the best we could to take advantage of a law that we didn’t write," Poole said.
Shelby Slawson, the Republican state representative for an area southwest of Fort Worth, pressed Poole at the hearing, questioning if his strategy aimed to circumvent recapture dollars.
"We are not gaming the system," Poole said. "If we learned a way to not send money to recapture, that would be newsworthy, and no, we’ve not done that."
"Respectfully, sir, I think that you did," Rep. Slawson said.
The district maintains it has paid all of the recapture dollars owed to the state. Lawmakers argued Poole's prolific use of the tax break, which minimized the possible property tax dollars it receives, put a strain on the other districts paying in to recapture.
"Do you understand and appreciate that in the meantime, the rest of the state of Texas is subsidizing efforts like this?" State Rep. Mitch Little asked Poole. "All of the small business owners, all the homeowners amidst a property tax crisis, are subsidizing this money for every other school district."
"If I worked in a [less affluent] school district that wasn’t Robin Hood, certainly I may feel differently," Poole replied. "But I didn’t devise the [tax breaks]. I had nothing to do with any of it, and all we did is take appropriate opportunity."
The Public Funds Investment Act, aiming to protect tax payer money, limits and restricts the ways public school districts can invest much of their excess funds. State Rep. Erin Zweiner, a Democrat representing an area neighboring Austin, raised concerns about the education foundation's more aggressive investment strategies involving district dollars. Because the district had transferred millions into the foundation, those funds could be exposed to greater risk, especially in the event of a market downturn.
"It's not a loss unless you sell it," Poole said of the foundation's investment strategy at the hearing and again in an interview with Houston Public Media.
When pressed on his plan to use the foundation money in "two years" and the need for the foundation to sell the investments in order to access the full funds, Poole clarified the foundation may pull just $20 million in returns the investments earned — a small portion of the foundation's portfolio.
Open meetings and employment concerns
Poole said he worked closely with a legal team when he first began building the foundation, but he did not consult the Texas Education Agency or the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) for guidance.
"Nobody's done this," Poole said. "What we were doing was unprecedented."
Poole said they were intentionally building the foundation to be an "extension" of the district, and Barbers Hill ISD added district bylaws requiring the school board president to be on the board of the foundation.
Internal guidance from TASB shared with Houston Public Media indicates the organization advises against trustees serving on education foundation boards because the practice could lead to conflicts of interest and possible Texas Open Meetings Act violations.
The Texas Open Meetings Act requires governmental bodies to conduct all meetings in public. It's triggered whenever a majority of the members — four or more trustees, in the case of Barbers Hill ISD — gather to discuss district business.
According to public tax filings filed by Barbers Hill ISD Education Foundation, in 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025, four of the seven Barbers Hills ISD school board trustees served double duty as board members for the foundation. Over the years, that included Jef Farrell, Becky Tice, George Barrera, Fred Skinner, Benny May, Clint Pipes, Eric Davis and Mark Wilson. Tax records indicate no board members were paid for their work as directors of the education foundation board.
Houston Public Media made repeated attempts to contact the trustees about their role on both boards, which were not returned.
According to Poole, although the board members are listed on the tax records, they did not each serve for the entire year. He said they never held a foundation meeting with more than three trustees at any one time. The foundation provided snapshots of some self-reported minutes of their meetings showing attendance for a handful of meetings did not include four trustees, but did not provide documentation for every meeting for each of the years in question.
"You can’t put a quorum on there, so we were creative," Poole said. "You make the (chief financial officer) a [foundation] board member. You make the superintendent [a foundation board member]. I mean, if we hadn’t set it up the way we did — [donors] likely wouldn’t have placed money in the first place."
"That's exactly proof positive about why there has to be top down guidelines here," Sen. Bettencourt said. "There has to be transparency. There’s got to be audits. You got three trustees plus the superintendent, so effectively, you’ve got a de-facto operational control."
Bettencourt said while his office was looking into the arrangement between the district and foundation, he had not yet begun crafting legislation to further regulate the foundations. The vast majority of education foundations he said did not operate in the manner as Barbers Hill's.
"I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater here," he said. "But the problem is that once bad practices start, they propagate rapidly."
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has an open investigation into the district's relationship with the foundation, but did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the investigation as a whole or if possible Open Meetings Act violations were part of the investigation.
"Because this remains an outstanding matter, the agency cannot comment further at this time," Jake Kobersky, director of media relations for the TEA, said.
Trustees serving on both boards is not the only district policy running counter to TASB guidance. According to the association, school districts cannot legally hire an employee to work for a private entity.
In its guidance, TASB points to a previous Texas attorney general's decision that says a "university lacks authority to place foundation employees on its payroll and give them fringe benefits reserved for state employees as precedent," as well as a Teacher Retirement System (TRS) eligibility code, which requires district employees spend at least half of their time on district work to earn their pension.
Amber Young is employed by Barbers Hill ISD as the "foundation coordinator" — and according to the district's website, she's the sole employee working under the "Education Foundation" department.
In a statement, Barbers Hill ISD said the foundation reimburses the district up to 30% of Young's salary for work she completes at the foundation and said she also performs other duties for the district. In response to a public records request, the district provided a financial statement showing the foundation reimbursed nearly a third of her approximately $100,000 salary — but did not provide any documentation detailing how Young split her time between district duties and work for the foundation.
Poole explained the arrangement was so Young, who was a teacher in the district before taking her position as "foundation coordinator," could preserve her pension.
"There's no way we could ever replicate a pension as good as [the Teacher Retirement System,]" Poole said. "I couldn't get a good employee to [work for the foundation] if they had to give up their pension."
Rachel White is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin. She said all district employees should have positions that directly serve the children attending that school system.
White said the district's move to help Young keep her pension is "concerning."
"If the primary purpose is for [Young] to keep [pension] — that is a private benefit — and it is not serving a public purpose," White said. "That is not a key reason to have this position. The position does need to show that there is a public benefit, a well-run foundation that maybe you know is granting support to students and classrooms and teachers and things like that."
White said if the reimbursement only covered salary, the district was still responsible for health insurance costs as well as other benefits for Young.
"If it’s only covering salary – the district is still sort of subsidizing the foundation share of the benefits, which is sort of the exact thing that's prohibited," White said.
The district's communication director David Bloom said the pension was a benefit and not the sole reason for employing Young in both roles. He said several other districts have employees who manage, direct or oversee their foundations.
Monty Exter, who directs government relations for ATPE and is also a lawyer, said he did not see an issue with Young's dual employment arrangement, but noted documentation by the district of reimbursement and the hours Young spent on foundation versus district work would be necessary.
"They do actually need to be [documenting] that so they can show that they’re reimbursing the appropriate amount," Exter said.
Young did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Bloom said the district's arrangement was not unique to Barbers Hill.
Houston Public Media requested documentation from the district showing how the foundation reimbursed the district and detailing how Young allocated her work hours. In a text message, Poole said, "I have repeatedly indicated to you that we are legal and what we do and I have shared all the information I can."
The district never provided documents showing a record of a completed reimbursement from the foundation to the district or a log of Young's hours showing she stayed below 20 hours per week on foundation work so she could remain eligible for her pension, according to the TRS eligibility code.
"Our foundation is one of the most monumental accomplishments in public education and will impact our district positively for the rest of our district history," Poole wrote.
Board members playing double duty
In addition to district employees and trustees serving on the board, state lawmakers raised concerns over conflicts of interest with some of the investment firms with which the foundation partners.
Nathan Watkins, a foundation board member since 2020, is also listed as a vice president of Americus Holdings, a real estate firm handling some of the foundation’s investments.
When pressed by State Rep. Ellen Troxclair about how the foundation addressed Watkins’ possible conflict of interest, Poole said the onus to disclose was on Watkins, not the foundation.
"He did not disclose," Poole testified. "If he didn’t, then he doesn’t have one. That’s your issue with him."
In an interview with Houston Public Media, Poole said the foundation may begin to require signed disclosures from their board members — but that Watkins would keep his seat on the foundation board.
Houston Public Media made repeated attempts to contact Watkins which went unreturned.
The foundation has also invested with Commerce Street Holdings since January 2023. Poole's daughter, Hillary, works at the firm. The committee raised concerns over whether that too created a conflict of interest for the two parties.
At the hearing, Poole said he could not remember if his daughter was employed by the investment firm at the time they began their financial partnership.
According to Commerce Street Holdings, Poole's daughter was hired by the investment firm on January 16, 2023 — the same month the two entities began their official partnership.
Hillary Poole did not respond to a request for comment.
In a letter sent to the government oversight committee members, Dory Wiley, president and CEO of Commerce Street Holdings, said Poole's daughter was hired "on her own merits: she brought a strong track record and longstanding relationships with school districts across Texas."
"I mean, the optics can get me fired," Greg Poole told Houston Public Media.
Still, he said, he doesn't have regrets about how he set up the foundation, even after recent scrutiny.
"Good leaders never back down because there’s rocks and things," Poole said. "I was raised by my grandfather. He was a good man, he was a school board president, and he would be proud of me — and that means more to me than anybody that thinks I’m a villain."
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