Arrogance breeds contempt

Last week was a great week. The bully brigade that ran the PSJA ISD Board of Trustees and the district for almost the last two years as if it was its own is now a thing of the past, with two trustees losing their respective races big time, Board President Rick Pedraza and George Palacios. The third member of their “We Are PSJA” slate, Joshua Benavides, also lost big to incumbent Carlos Villegas.

All three races were won by double digits, which is the biggest disparity in any past PSJA race that I can remember.

So what can we learn from this race?

For starters, if incumbent trustees hold a majority vote, they can’t play the part of bullies, because if they do it long enough, people are going to start to take notice, and they’re going to start to dislike it.

Two years ago, when the new board majority came in, one of the first things they started doing, with the help of their relatively new superintendent from Houston, Jorge Arredondo, was to start to throw their weight around. Instead of hiring from within, moving administrators up the chain of command, they brought in outsiders who pushed people out of the way who had been with the district for decades.

Even more to the point, as the election drew closer, they started moving around administrators.

They – the five board members who comprised the majority and the superintendent – treated the two trustees in the minority – Carlos Villegas and Cynthia Gutierrez – with contempt and disrespect through their verbal communication and body language. At the time, it didn’t matter. After all, they held the majority vote. “If you don’t like it, tough.”

Bullies. No one likes them when we are in school, on the job, and none of us like them when they sit on a school board or in any elected office for that matter.

So now, Villegas, Gutierrez, Diana Serna, and Yolanda Castillo, with their “Fairness For All Slate,” can go about correcting, hopefully, all the damage done (low morale, etc.) over the past two years by the previous majority who treated the district as if they owned it.

What the new board should do, in my humble opinion, is call for a forensic audit. Do an accounting of all the books. Not that I’m alleging any financial impropriety, but the new board needs to start fresh.

While the audit is being done, the new board majority should also probably place the superintendent on paid administrative leave so no school employee will feel intimidated by his presence. For acting supe, place someone in command who isn’t part of his inner circle.

Do a review of all of the projects on the table, like the new multi-million-dollar baseball stadium, and see if the district and its taxpayers will really benefit from them.

A new day has dawned at PSJA ISD, and I couldn’t be happier.

The other thing about it is, not all of the board members who comprised the past majority were bullies in their own right; but as a team, that’s sure the way they came across.

Based on the vote count, that didn’t play out very well with the voters last Tuesday.

Ka-boom went the ballot vote.