Meeting melee

Concerned HISD supporters deserve a public apology from the board president.

Kandice Webber was arrested this week after she joined a crowd of more than 100 at a special school board meeting. The meeting was emotional — at stake was the fate of 10 struggling Houston Independent School District schools that are threatened by a potential state takeover.

Her crime: caring enough about the education of Houston kids like her granddaughter, who will start kindergarten next year, that she refused to leave a public meeting. Her arrest came after the school board president asked HISD police to remove everyone from the building. Webber and another woman, identified as Amélie Goedecke, both spent Tuesday night in Harris County Jail. But they were never formally booked — bogus charges of “trespassing” and “resisting arrest” were dropped.

Those arrests were outrageous and unjustified. HISD President Rhonda Skillern-Jones has a statement saying she was “regretful” and “saddened at this outcome” of her own actions.

“I hoped we could calm the tension and return for an orderly meeting. Unfortunately, the situation escalated and subsequently caused many unintended consequences,” she said in a statement.

But Skillern-Jones’ statement doesn’t go far enough. She should issue a public apology to everyone who attended that meeting — including the two women who were arrested. A third woman, Jenny Espeseth, was photographed being physically dragged through a hallway by HISD police in a photo that already has gone viral as an image of the district’s failure in leadership.

Those arrests came after a series of bizarre events. First, board members began their public hearing by announcing they were going to go into “executive session” to consider legal matters related to a proposal to turn over some schools to a charter organization. They then closed the meeting for a full two hours.

By the time the public hearing finally resumed, members of the audience were restless and eager to speak. Twice, Skillern-Jones warned the crowd not to interrupt by speaking or clapping or she’d declare a recess. A few minutes later, she requested that HISD officers remove a speaker who went 14 seconds past the allotted 1minute time limit. When the audience erupted she asked officers to clear everyone not only from the meeting room — but from the entire building.

Skillern-Jones is a mother of five with a long history of service to HISD as a volunteer and a board member. But she needs to brush up on managerial skills, such as courtesy, diplomacy and Robert’s Rules of Order, and become the leader HISD needs.

All nine HISD board members should have been willing to hear from everyone who wanted to address them on such important issues — even if it meant sitting there a few more hours. After all, the crowd was full of students, parents and taxpayers who care about schools threatened by potential takeover because of years of failure to meet state-ordered goals. Many, like Webber, were concerned about what they see as neglect and underfunding of schools located in the city’s majority Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods.

Skillern-Jones and other HISD leaders have a tough job. They’re charged with turning around these schools to avoid a takeover. But that’s no excuse for the public melee the board orchestrated on Tuesday night.

Webber, for one, says she’s lost her faith in board leadership. “You’ve already had me drug out of a room for just voicing my absolute God-given right as an American citizen,” Webber told the Chronicle’s Shelby Webb. “You’ve already shown your hand at how you treat us. So now, I don’t trust you …”

If HISD and Texas Education Agency genuinely seek to partner to solve difficult problems inside the city’s most vulnerable public schools, they’ll need the help of people who care so much about education that they bother to attend public meetings. HISD leaders now face the uphill battle of finding allies among those it treated with such appalling disrespect. Our kids are counting on them to do just that.

All nine HISD board members should have been willing to hear from everyone who wanted to address them.