A troubling power shift in South San
Recent changes on the South San Antonio Independent School District board are cause for concern, not just for the residents of that school district but to everyone who has a vested interest in our community’s economic future.
The ouster of three incumbents at the polls and the election of one of the board’s contentious members as its new president does not bode well for a community where personal agendas and politics often override the education needs of its public school students.
Connie Prado, who has served on the South San school board for 20 years, became its president last month after three incumbent trustees lost their seats in the general election. In short order, Prado went from being in the board minority to becoming its presiding member. Her husband, Raul Prado — a former city councilman and former school teacher with strong political ties in the community — maintains a strong presence in the district.
School boards have a strong influence on the direction a district will take, and that is evident across San Antonio. The school districts with the biggest problems — the ones that face intervention from the state — are usually the ones with the most dysfunctional school boards.
South San hit rock bottom a few years ago, but changes on its board placed it back on track and it appeared to be making a strong rebound. Now all that is in jeopardy.
Things have never been smooth at South San, but the last decade has been particularly rough. There was a revolving door for superintendents for a while. The district saw four superintendents come and go in two years. In 2014, Abe Saavedra, a former Houston ISD superintendent who lived in San Antonio, was coaxed out of retirement to help stabilize the troubled district. He remained for four years, leaving in the fall. His tenure was anything but smooth due largely to Connie Prado, the only school board member who remains from when he was hired.
Early in Saavedra’s tenure, governance issues on the board prompted the Texas Education Agency to assign a conservator to oversee district operations. That conservator remained on board until earlier this year. Much of the governance problems documented by the conservator were related to attempts to micromanage district operations.
Old habits die hard. It is worrisome that Prado will now have a new board majority on her side, and that the recently hired new superintendent is still in his first semester on the job.
Prado and her husband were adamantly opposed to a proposed tax increase that went before the voters this summer. The district wanted the extra revenue to shore up the district’s declining revenue due to a loss in student enrollment, but the Prados worked hard to defeat it. They then turned around and used the hardworking incumbents’ support of that desperately needed tax increase against them in their re-election bids. The fault for the funding woes falls squarely on state lawmakers and their failure to fix the public school finance system. Their inaction has forced more than half the state’s 1,000-plus school districts, including several in San Antonio, to seek voter approval of tax hikes though tax ratification elections to balance their budgets.
Prado, 69, has announced she does not plan to run for election when her current term expires in two years, and that is welcome news. It is unfortunate she has chosen to spend at least one of those two years as board president. Her leadership has been less than stellar in the past.
It is difficult to even be cautiously optimistic that things will be different this time.
Re: “Bear this in mind before hugging,” Another View, by Larry P. Johnson, Dec. 1:
This column has been on my mind. I, too, learned as an adult to appreciate the joy of hugging, because I had a mother who never showed physical affection. She wasn’t German, just stoic.
But for women, there is a flip side, an unfortunate but very real one. Of course, that’s not news, but I doubt any man can fully understand it. Men who don’t abuse women or make unwanted sexual advances — which I believe are the vast majority — can understand better than men who feel entitled, but having not experienced it as a “normal” part of life, they don’t fully comprehend it, nor did we for a long time.
Men were so completely in charge of everything for so long that women just lamented the wolf whistles, the insinuations, on up to all the variations of the casting couch but rarely took action because they knew it would do no good. It was our secret, just the way things were. As so often happens with things that are wrong, it simmers beneath the surface until there comes a breaking point, and suddenly it boils over and the truth is out. As women gained power, they also gained the ability to stop the situation.
It has had its good and its bad — as mothers teach their daughters that they have control over who touches their bodies, we see them pulling away from relatives who just want to show their