BISD GOT LAWYERS $280,000. WHAT'S ANOTHER $175,000?

By Juan Montoya
Actor Edward James Olmos wants the Brownsville Independent School District to invest a measly $175,000 to fund a documentary film showcasing the chess prowess of Brownsville school children defeating chess powerhouses from around the country.
The local daily said Olmos urged the board members to invest the money in building the students' self respect by chipping in the bucks,.
"Look at what chess has done for these students," Olmos said. "It breeds self-respect at the highest level. It infuses them with self-esteem and self-worth."
Now, $175,000 may seem like quite a bit of dough for poor slobs like you and me. But if you look at the amount that the BISD has spent in totally useless things like the contentious dispute they had with former superintendent Hector Gonzales, it might be worth the investment.
The district spent nearly $300,000 prosecuting its case against Gonzales, according to records released last week by the internal auditing department at the request of trustee Catalina Presas-Garcia.
The Harlingen law firm of Denton, Navarro, Rocha & Bernal PCTISD’s hit the BISD with a legal bill for $60,000 billed in 2008-2009 in addition to another $229,637 in 2009-2010.
Victoria Guerra, a certified Texas Education Agency hearing examiner, invoiced the BISD for $8,811 and found against the superintendent saying the BISD had fired him for "good cause."
In 2008-2009 alone, BISD paid lawyers $876,318 to justify the board's actions.
And, as a result of "legally indefensible evaluations" of special needs children legal fees increased from $86,407 in 2006-07 to $150,292 in 2007-08. They wenrt even higher in 2009 when lawyers gobbled up $293,521. Auditors say the majority of the billings came about as a rsult of due process hearings for special education students.
So far this year, legal fees for special education total $62,540, and general legal fees are 490,585, for a total of $553,125, the Herald's Gary Long reported recently.
Some moves have been made to hire in-house counsel in the past but have been rejected. It stands to reason, since former BISD board member Mike Saldaña is the local counsel for the San Antonio law firm of Walsh, Anderson, Brown, Aldridge & Gallegos, P.C., which is BISD's counsel.
Walsh Anderson has billed the district $259,039 in the current fiscal year and $741,263 for 2008-09.
When Saldaña represented the BISD as the Law Office of Mike Saldaña in 2007, he raked in $195,372 in fees.
Now, as someone remarked recently, "Olmos wants the BISD to pay $175,000 to put Brownsville on the map nationally. With the $300,000 they paid to get rid of Gonzales, they could just have paid him for one more year ($130,000) and used the rest to buy out the rest of his contract. That would have put the money to better use than to line Saldana's and the law firm's pockets."
There is still a lawsuit that Gonzales filed against the district looming on the horizon.
If the BISD board doesn't watch out, instead of paying $175,000 to Omos to make them look good, they could be paying considerably more to Gonzales to settle the lawsuit.
But then again, Saldaña and the law firm stand to make bucks out of that, too, so does it really matter to them?