Trustee wants peer censured in Confederate school name flap

Austin school district trustee Ann Teich asked fellow school board members Wednesday afternoon to consider censuring Trustee Ted Gordon for his public remarks about the board.

The request, made during a board operations meeting, is the latest move in ongoing clashes related to the trustees’ delay in deciding whether to remove the names of Confederate figures from five schools.

Teich asked that the board officers — President Kendall Pace, Trustees Geronimo Rodriguez and Julie Cowan — schedule a discussion of a possible closed-door censure of Gordon at a future school board meeting.

Teich said she wanted trustees to consider the censure “for his comments on two different separate occasions about the board of trustees, which includes all of us. They were unprofessional comments, they were not done face to face, they were not discussed with us at all. That, in my opinion, violates our current board handbook provisions about board member behavior.”

Gordon, a University of Texas associate professor, was not at Wednesday’s board operations meeting, but, reached by phone later, he said, “I maintain my position, and if the board feels it needs to censure me for it, it can do so.”

Since trustees on Jan. 8 pushed back a February decision on whether to rename schools, Gordon has at least twice publicly criticized the board’s decision, most recently during Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech at the University of Texas.

Gordon, the only African-American trustee, told the media that the board has “no moral compass and moral spine” on the