The death of a school district

This blog segment is for readers in the Dallas area:
Thanks to dictatorial powers granted to the Texas Education Agency commissioner by the Legislature, a snap of the finger can remove, obliterate and destroy a longtime school district from the face of the earth.
On Monday night, the specially-installed Wilmer-Hutchins school board, led by a superintendent from neighboring Lancaster ISD, announced its plans to dissolve the district immediately and sent its students to the LISD for future education. The W-H ISD would exist for tax collection purposes for one year in order to eliminate its debt and then be nothing more than a memory.
So many questions are raised by this turn of events:
1) Since when did one person get such powers and why didn’t Commissioner Shirley Neeley use them sooner to keep from this “take it to the brink’ situation? The voters will have nothing to say about this since a forced annexation is not subject to public vote. Why did she allow this to go on for such a long time when it was clear to a blind man that the board and its administration were corrupt and bankrupting the district?
2) How will the residents of the W-H ISD have elected representation? That will have to be approved by Justice Department since single member districts are currently involved in Lancaster, but an at-large system is employed for W-H ISD. When will it happen and how will it happen? My best educated guess (from years of residence and employment) is that the old W-H ISD would get two of the current seven seats on the LISD board of trustees.
3) Test scores for LISD were not good this past year – the second worst in the Metroplex.. Now the plan is to add the students with the WORST scores in the area. If the Legislature intends to tie funding to test performance, LISD will be behind the eight-ball, nine-ball and wrecking ball if that effort. How will that be of benefit to anyone?
4) It took a decade to pass a bond package in the Lancaster ISD just to BEGIN fixing what’s wrong with its current facilities. The buildings in Wilmer-Hutchins need TWICE as much help but no one has stated where the money is going to come from to do all that. At some point, LISD will have to absorb the property value of W-H ISD, which is the lowest in the area. That means LISD will be absorbing an instant debt. So the question is this: Where will the state funds come to actually offset the varied cost of adding these students (more buses, food services, liability, split athletic schedules, facility maintenance, etc.).
5) With two communities that possess a history of rivalry and distrust, is such a move a good idea? If you ask most of the W-H people, they’d want to go with Dallas (which actively sought to have these students join its district). W-H people distrust and dislike Lancaster folks and have for a long time. There will be resentment about being under someone else’s thumb.
6) W-H ISD has been, for the longest time, the only minority-majority district and had been held as a standard for such board makeup. Hence, the African-Americans (the minority in question) kept the district as at-large status, freezing out another minority group (Hispanics). How will this unbalance be resolved? Neeley can’t just snap her fingers and wiggle her nose like Samantha Stevens to make things right.
As I wrote before, the blame falls to the voters who kept the same corrupt board members in place who, in turn, kept the same corrupt administration in place. It also falls to the TEA commissioner who acted too damn late until the horse has not only left the barn, but left the state.
I felt sorry for the curriculum boss lady from W-H ISD who broke down in tears when hearing that she was among the staff to blame for the district’s demise. Way to go, board and supt., making grown women cry without handling it in a more genteel manner. I can’t blame the staff; they weren’t given the tools to get the job done because the district was too broke and too corrupt to function. Fish rots from the head down.
And now that fish is being moved to LISD’s refrigerator.