AISD to appoint one board

Trustees to choose between two to replace late Robert Schneider.

Austin school trustees on Monday night will decide whom to appoint to the nine-member school board to represent the southwestern portion of the district.

The trustees will choose bet ween two applicants, 53-year-old Dale Sump, an accountant and manager for the Texas General Land Offiffice, and 44-year-old Yasmin Wagner, a manager for the city of Austin’s communications and public information offiffice.

The appointee will replace longtime Trustee Robert Schneider, who died in July of cancer.

Sump and Wagner have each served in a variety of volunteer roles within the school district.

Sump is a past president of the Bowie High School Band Booster board who was appointed twice by Schneider to bond oversight committees on which he continues to serve.

Sump also was part of the AISD Performing Arts Center

task force and is currently on the center’s naming committee.

Sump said he can dedicate the time necessary for work on the board, a volunteer job that often takes 20 hours or more a week, as well as the financial expertise to help the district through rocky fiscal times.

“It’s going to take someone coming in, making sure their calendar is clear to attend the forums, the community meetings, and being out in the public and hear what they have to say and to come here also to take care of the business of the board,” Sump said.

Wagner ran against Schneider in November but narrowly lost with 48 percent of the vote.

She has served on the district’s boundary advisory committee and has been a PTA executive board member at multiple schools.

Since the opportunity for appointment came up, Wagner said, she has attended every school board meeting, spent time in every District 7 school and has met with nearly every principal, as well as the PTAs and campus advisory committees.

“The person who takes this role has to be prepared and hit the ground running,” she said. “There are too many important decisions that are waiting for this appointment.

“That’s one of the things that drew me most to this role, is just being able to be a present and accessible voice that can advocate for our schools in a very real way, not only by understanding but by being a parent to children in those schools, too.”

The trustees’ designate will serve in the District 7 seat until November 2016, the next scheduled school board election, in which four other seats also are up.

That person immediately will be called upon to help decide what types of advanced academic programs are desired in South Austin, as well as whether and where to purchase land for a new high school in South Austin.

For years, Schneider pushed for a new campus in the Southwest to help relieve overcrowding at Bowie High School.

Voters in 2008 approved $32 million to purchase land in South Austin, but the board has yet to make a purchase and does not appear to be in consensus on such a decision.

Parent groups in Southeast Austin have called for another high school there.

Sump and Wagner diverge most in their views on how to move forward with the land purchase.

Sump said building a school is just one option and the district should also consider others, such as putting strong academic programs into underenrolled South Austin schools that could help draw students from Bowie and relieve overcrowding that way.

He is against purchasing land in both the Southwest, where the current student need is, and in the Southeast, which is projected to grow but currently has underenrolled schools.

“Land banking is not what we need to be doing,” he said. “I’m not for buying land in two different places just because it would appease both districts and the fact that they get a little something.”

Wagner said the delay in making a purchase has raised public distrust, and that residents in Southwest Austin feel like they haven’t had a voice in the process.

She believes the “land purchase must happen with immediacy in both places.”

“That is a promise that we made to voters and that needs to happen,” she said. “We need purchase that land in Southwest Austin, and we also need to purchase a tract of land in Southeast Austin to be adequately prepared.”