San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Pandemic response pivotal in SCUCISD election
2 incumbents facing challengers; 2 vie for open seat on board
Two incumbents have challengers and two candidates are seeking an open seat on the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District board in Tuesday’s elections.
All say they are focused on academic recovery for students hurt by the coronavirus pandemic’s disruption to learning, but they have varying opinions on how the district handled its transition to virtual learning last school year.
Several candidates, including the challengers, said the board made the right decision when it voted to not require masks in August. Some said they were determined to bridge an ongoing political divide in the community over pandemic safety measures.
Place 4
Trustee Edward Finley, 64, is seeking re-election to his Place 4 seat against challenger Dudley Wait, 54. Finley was first elected to the board in 2005 and has served as its secretary, vice president and president.
He said his background in the information technology industry is why he consistently advocates for students to have the best technology and for teachers to be properly trained in it.
In 2009, when the spread of the H1N1 virus caused the district to close for five days, the district struggled to connect students learning virtually at home but was more prepared as a result when the coronavirus pandemic closed schools statewide in March 2020, Finley said.
The total conversion to athome learning didn’t come without its bumps, he said, but the district worked quickly to buy laptops and hot spots for students who didn’t have them.
“When the governor’s order came down, we were pretty much ready to go,” Finley said. “That minimized the student loss.”
He hopes to continue the work of managing the district’s growth.
“We need to make sure the buildings are capable, that we have the resources in there; and with future bond issues, we need to be paying down our outstanding bonds as quickly as we can,” Finley said.
The board was right to keep
face coverings optional at the start of the current school year, Finley said. He said he believes cloth masks are not very effective at slowing the virus.
Finley’s challenger, Wait, a former paramedic and city administrator, said the board could have worked harder to accommodate families who favored and opposed a mask mandate, a debate over which he said he was neutral.
“COVID has polarized our society, put one side against the other,” Wait said. “The maskers vs. the non-maskers. The vaxxers vs. the non-vaxxers. It is like we’ve all come into this great big arena, and half of us are one side and half of us are on the other and we are just screaming at each other.”
The district might have arranged to keep masked students together in classrooms, separated from those who chose not to wear them, so that all families could feel comfortable, he said.
“The board needs to find ways to build consensus and collaboration in our community,” Wait said. “Both sides may not get everything they want; but hopefully at the end of the day, both sides get what they can live with.”
Wait served 14 years as the EMS director for the city of Schertz and four years as an assistant city manager there. He is the operations manager for the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, or STRAC, which coordinates hospital trauma centers and emergency rooms.
Having worked in public safety during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, the board’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic prompted him to run this year, Wait said.
“In the 11- or 12-year window (between H1N1 and the coronavirus) there were things the board didn’t act upon that I think would have made our district one of the best prepared,” he said.
Place 5
Place 5 trustee Gary Inmon, 54, faces a challenge from Amy Thomas, 49.
First elected in 2000, Inmon is the district’s longest-serving board member and has been its president for three terms. He was on the board of the Texas Association of School Boards for 11 years.
Inmon was arrested in 2017 for allegedly assaulting his stepson, which he said was in self-defense during an altercation. Separately, in the same year, his law license was suspended; and in 2019, he pleaded guilty to two felony charges for his handling of an elderly woman’s estate.
The fight with his stepson did not result in a charge, and the matter of the estate “was resolved several years ago and I accepted an offer of deferred adjudication,” Inmon said in a text message. “It has not in any way affected my ability to continue serving the District.”
Via email, he said the impending loss of two experienced trustees who did not seek re-election this year makes it crucial for voters to retain both himself and Finley on the board.
“Ed and I remain committed to preserving the conservative values and high expectations of our community and it is clear that our opponents want to take our board and district in a very different direction,” Inmon wrote. “I am just as fired up today about our District as I was during my first board meeting 20+ years ago.”
Thomas said she is a concerned parent who wants to restore high academic achievement and rebuild community trust in the district. She cited her work as a volunteer and advocate for district schools, and alongside her husband when he was a youth and children’s pastor at Everyday Christian Fellowship.
Via email, she said the district should have been better prepared for the pandemic but had “no plan in place to transition our students from in person learning to remote learning … even though during the swine flu, it was recognized by the Superintendent at that time, that such a plan was needed in case of another emergency.”
Inmon said his legal problems in 2019 were the subject of an ongoing “smear campaign.” Thomas did not bring it up — but Wait, the Place 4 candidate, did.
The deference shown to Inmon by fellow trustees was a problem, Wait said. Some had initially called for him to resign, which was the right response to “an indiscretion in (a board member’s) personal life that would prevent anybody they oversee from working for the district,” Wait said.
Place 7
Belinda Evans, 70, and Anthony Lehman, 33, are seeking the Place 7 seat held by the board’s president, Amy Driesbach, who did not seek re-election.
Evans is retired from a teaching career and said she earned a doctorate of education in K-12 leadership from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix to prepare for her board run.
She said she wants the board to address learning gaps caused by the pandemic and work on ways to keep students safe, provide teachers with more resources to prevent burnout and create more collaboration among students, teachers, staff, parents and other community members.
Evans said she agreed with the board’s vote to strongly recommend but not mandate the use of masks in schools because “it takes into consideration the perspectives of all district residents.”
Lehman is a former firefighter and is now an EMT for a private contractor at Joint Base San AntonioFort Sam Houston. He said he wants to improve career technology pathways, crediting a program at the district for making a student employable at age 19.
The board should pay attention to food insecurity and try to get more parents involved in their schools, Lehman said.
The experience of helping his kids through virtual learning was an “eyeopener” and helped him “see how much teachers go through,” he added. “And it made me realize how much more involved I needed to be.”
Place 6
Dan Swart is running unopposed for Place 6 to replace David Pevoto, who has served on the board since 2007.