San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Longest-serving NEISD trustees not seeking reelection
The two longest-serving trustees on the North East Independent School District board are not seeking reelection this May.
Sandy Hughey, a trustee since 2000, has been the board’s president and vice president and, since 2008, its secretary.
Shannon Grona, the board president since 2016, was first elected 12 years ago. She prioritized board unity through tumultuous debates over the renaming of Robert E. Lee High School in 2017, pandemic restrictions and a mass review of library books in 2021 that removed 110 titles and drew national publicity.
The board’s already strained consensus and collegiality began to evaporate in 2022 as newly elected social conservatives asserted themselves. Grona’s instinct for consensus and the middle ground was severely tested during the district’s overhaul of its sex education curriculum, when the newer trustees put a more conservative stamp on appointees to a volunteer health advisory panel in 2022.
The panel tossed out the district’s popular sex ed program, decided that
the new one should not include anything more than the state required, then fine-tuned its recommended new program to de-emphasize teachers as trusted sources of information, among other changes.
The culture war divisions on the board were made stark during repeated and unsuccessful attempts to appoint a new trustee to replace Terri Williams, who died in August, leaving an even split between social conservatives elected after 2020 and moderates who include Grona and Hughey.
During interviews with applicants, Hughey questioned one on her affiliation with the right-wing political action groups Moms for Liberty and
Parents United for Freedom.
The impasse has left the board’s District 2 seat vacant for six months. It will be on the May ballot as a special election, and candidates have until March 4 to file for it. Steve Hilliard, one of the board’s conservatives, and David Beyer, one of the moderates, are seeking reelection and are among nine candidates who are running for four board seats in the regular election.
Grona said by email that she had promised her family she wouldn’t run again in 2020 but stayed another term because of the transition to a new superintendent, Sean Maika.
“This has been a very difficult decision given the passing of Trustee Terri Williams, and I almost changed my mind again. But I made a promise to my family and I’m going to honor that,” she wrote. “I have made this volunteer position my job and have thoroughly enjoyed my time on the board and the opportunities that I have had to work with staff, children, and parents and to advocate for public education.”
In a message posted to Facebook, Hughey wrote that she and her husband decided several years ago that the 2020 school board election would be her last campaign.
“It was a really hard decision for me,” she wrote. “As so many of you have heard me say, the wonderful experiences have far outweighed the heartbreaks and challenges.”
Hughey said she was able to work with “three of the state’s best superintendents,” referring to Maika and former district leaders Brian Gottardy and Richard Middleton.
During her tenure as a trustee, Hughey helped found the Bexar County School Board Coalition and local school districts’ Go Public marketing campaign to counter competition from charter schools.
“The great majority of trustees put aside personal politics to ensure that
ALL children are supported and educated,” her Facebook post reads.
Like most other NEISD trustees, Grona had opposed renaming Lee High School until the violence at a gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 accelerated a national reckoning over memorials to the Confederacy.
Grona made the motion to call it Legacy of Educational Excellence High School (LEE), saying it would honor the school’s history and minimize the hassle and expense of a completely new name.
That compromise left many on both sides of the debate unsatisfied. But the board’s vote was unanimous.