NEISD Board of Trustees Election

This is a Huge Deal for the Children!

NEISD needs to Stop the Sexualization of Children.

Protect the Children.

Sex education curriculum target of challengers in school board races.All five North East Independent School District trustees seeking to keep their board seats in the Nov. 3 election face challengers opposed to the district’s sex education curriculum. The contest features 11 candidates in all. It was rescheduled from May due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trustees serve four-year terms but the District 3 race is a special election for the remaining two years of a term begun by Joseph Treviño, who resigned last year. Four of the six challengers echo the concerns of the San Antonio Family Association, a conservative group that has protested the sex-ed curriculum the board adopted four years ago. One of them filed a grievance with NEISD in December alleging the curriculum violates provisions of state law, including the requirement that sexual abstinence be presented to students as “the preferred choice of behavior.”

Almost all the challengers have similar messaging about the need for increased transparency and reduced spending, although they are not formally campaigning as an opposition slate.

Early voting begins Oct. 13.

District 1- Sandy Hughey, 71, who worked in banking before retirement, has served on the board for 20 years and is running for another term. She faces Michael A. Osborn, 69, who is retired from a career in electrical engineering. Hughey helped found the Bexar County School Board Coalition and local school districts’ Go Public marketing campaign to counter competition from charters. She has held leadership positions on the Texas Association of School Boards. Two of her children graduated from NEISD schools. Osborn’s two daughters attended North East ISD schools and now his grandchildren do, too. As a trustee, he said, he would have open forums to talk to constituents, and would like to move the board’s closed session from the beginning of each meeting to the end, so those who want to speak to the board don’t have to wait through it. Osborn said NEISD should not be spending taxpayer money to market itself. “Your marketing program should be the students, the teachers and the parents,” he said. “They should be walking, talking billboards.” He criticized the district for having two elementary schools that failed to meet state accountability standards last year. (The Texas Education Agency did not issue accountability ratings this year due to the pandemic.) Osborn identifies as pro-life and said the NEISD sex ed curriculum had been provided by “an abortion organization.” Hughey said she considers Osborn part of a slate of candidates spreading misinformation about the district. “I will continue to vigorously support our teachers and the incredible job that they are doing,” she said. “I’ve had tremendous problems with the way that this opposition slate has been shaming and bullying our district, calling it a failure, which implies, then, that our students are failures, and that strikes me to the heart.”

District 3 Omar Leos, 45, the fine arts coordinator in Harlandale ISD, is running to finish the term he was appointed to last year after Treviño’s resignation. He faces Ione McGinty, 58, a tennis teacher and house cleaner who homeschools her six children. Leos, who has taught in the Southwest and San Antonio independent school districts, praised NEISD Superintendent Sean Maika but said he wanted a more formal process for engaging teachers in decision-making. Citing the financial uncertainty imposed by the pandemic, trustees adopted a budget in June without a decision on raises, but Leos supports a proposal to give a retention bonus to teachers if the district can afford it.

District 3 includes LEE High School, renamed three years ago from Robert E. Lee to Legacy of Educational Excellence. Leos was not on the board at the time but said he agreed with the decision to rename the school out of respect for its many students of color. On ExpressNews.com: Lee High School’s mountain of memories to be auctioned. Leos also hailed the board’s recent approval of a new cybersecurity magnet program, saying such innovations were needed to compete with charters. McGinty said she has been bothered by the lack of public access to the school district’s tennis courts and athletic fields because taxpayers fund those facilities. She also criticized the district for paying substitute teachers while schools were shut down in the spring, saying the subs should have taken unemployment benefits instead. “The district is not a benevolence organization,” McGinty said. “As a taxpayer, the way it made me feel is, if you have a million dollars to give away, then you’re taking too much of my money.”

McGinty graduated from Lee High School and said she disagreed with the decision to rename it. “They should’ve researched who Robert E. Lee was, what he stood for,” she said, calling the Confederate general and his wife brave because, she said, “his wife taught Blacks how to read at the time, which was against the law.” Citing last year’s failing elementary schools, McGinty said the quality of education in NEISD has declined, leading some of her friends to send their children to schools run by the BASIS and Great Hearts charter networks. “If you’re going to succeed you cannot cater to the least common denominator,” she said. “You have to challenge students to reach their full potential.

”District 4 David Beyer, 46, a landscape architect, was appointed to the seat in January 2019 to fill the vacancy Jim Wheat left when he resigned to take an associate judge position. Beyer, who has children attending NEISD schools, is running for his first full term. He faces Joseph Hoelscher, 44, a child welfare attorney and former teacher who got into the race because he opposed the school district’s move to eliminate class rankings. Hoelscher said he is also concerned about transparency, the budget and the sex ed curriculum. He said capital improvements are unnecessary at a time of declining enrollment and he, too, would reduce marketing expenses. Hoelscher characterized his objections to the sex ed curriculum as different from those of the San Antonio Family Association.

Required Reading: Get San Antonio education news sent directly to your inbox“It’s not doing enough to recognize the discomfort that some kids are going to have around sexual issues and body contact,” he said. “It kind of tends to say everyone’s comfort level with sexual activity is equally valid, and I don’t think that that’s protective of children. … That’s the kind of message that could become grooming.”

Hoelscher said he differs politically from the challengers in the other NEISD races but said there’s a lot of communication between them. “If there’s going to be change in NEISD, we need to change the way the board operates, and I don’t think that that’s going to happen if you just elect one or two challengers,” he said. “I think you may need a majority, so I’m pretty supportive of them.” Beyer said he wanted to focus on efforts to keep students and teachers from leaving the district. Any significant spending cuts, he said, inevitably would involve laying off teachers, who make up the bulk of the budget.“ It’s not just looking at how much executive staff we have,” he said of the calls to reduce spending. “That is a fraction of a half-billion dollar budget, and so you really have to look big and hard, and fortunately right now we don’t have to. But when that comes, we’ll take that time and that effort.” Beyer praised the sex ed curriculum, which both of his children have gone through.

On ExpressNews.com: Sex ed rewrite: State board moves to expand contraception lessons, but leaves out LGBTQ “I’m passionate about our neighborhood schools,” he said. “If you want to call me a cheerleader, that’s fine.”

District 5 RelatedNEWS // EDUCATION ALIA MALIK, KRISTA TORRALVA, ANDRES PICON Gradual reopening of San Antonio schools begins in earnest Board President Shannon Grona, 58, is seeking a third term. She was a compliance officer and internal auditor, then stayed home to raise two children who graduated from Johnson High School. She faces Cimarron Gilson, 40, an attorney with two children too young for school and a third due in December. Gilson said his top three issues were transparency, grievance reform and lowering school property taxes. Gilson said he agreed with the grievance challenging the legality of the district’s sex ed program filed by District 6 candidate Robert “Steve” Hilliard that the board dismissed in August. “Abstinence is not emphasized” in the program, Gilson said. He called for budget cuts because enrollment has been declining and NEISD has received federal coronavirus relief funds. (Enrollment decreased slightly last year and this year’s count for state funding purposes takes place in a few weeks.)“I think we don’t need to be spending all the same amount of money, you know?” he said. “The whole country is suffering from economic impacts of COVID. Why are we increasing taxes on our already impacted taxpayers?”

Grona said the school district has lowered taxes 12 percent in the past six years but has no control over increased home values. She praised Maika, whom the board promoted to superintendent last year. “He has come in and made a lot of great changes, and we are moving forward,” Grona said.

District 6 Tony Jaso, 47, an investment banker who works with some school districts on bond portfolios, is seeking a second term. He has children in the fifth and ninth grades at NEISD schools. He faces Hilliard, 46, a retired U.S. Air Force officer and NEISD alumnus with children in the fifth and eighth grades in the district, and Dylan Pearcy, 41, an attorney and former NEISD teacher. Pearcy has two children in NEISD schools and two who graduated last spring. Jaso defended the board’s decision last year to promote Maika from his assistant superintendent position without conducting an external search. Maika proved himself over several months as interim superintendent, Jaso said.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio’s biggest school districts are eyeing the charters next door Maika has made himself and the board more visible, Jaso said, and he’s working to increase focus on mental health, make NEISD more competitive in the hiring marketplace and embrace diversity. “You just noticed a different buzz around the district,” Jaso said. “If there was a better school district somewhere, I’d be living there, but I truly feel this is the premier school district in Bexar County.”

He and Pearcy both support the sex ed curriculum, which requires parents to opt in before their children take it. More than 80 percent of middle school parents have opted in, Jaso said. “We represent a really diverse district,” he said. “It’s not just that because my values are a certain way at home, that’s how everybody needs to be.” Pearcy and Hilliard both said the district’s public communication needs to improve. “We’re past the point where North East can stay inside its little bubble, where it just assumes that doing business as usual is the best way to do business in 2020 and beyond,” Pearcy said. “What I do bring to the table is a recent and current understanding of what board decisions are like when you’re sitting in the classroom as a teacher, when you’re sitting at home as a parent.”

Hilliard said the school district needs to post meeting agenda packets that include presentation slides and the final drafts of documents to be voted on, and release monthly financial and discipline statements. As a trustee, Hilliard said, he would send out a quarterly newsletter to his constituents. “We’re a public trust institution,” Hilliard said. “We need to be able to know what’s going on so that our voices can be heard.”

Alia Malik covers several school districts and the University of Texas at San Antonio. To read more from Alia, become a subscriber. amalik@express-news.net | Twitter: @AliaAtSAEN