SPRINGSTON: YOU PLAY THE GAME...YOU TAKE YOUR CHANCES

By Juan Montoya
Does it come as any real surprise to anyone that the new board majority is considering the replacement of Brett Springston as superintendent of the Brownsville Independent School District at today's meeting?
I remember seeing Springston pacing to-and-fro in the board meeting room November 2 as the results were coming in from the election where the majority that had hired him was evidently getting kicked out by the voters of the district.
He wasn't smiling then and probably hasn't smiled much since. It was early in the evening when it became obvious that Springston's mainstays on the board Rick Zayas and Ruben Cortez were going to get swamped by Luci Longoria and Enrique Escobedo. Further, his hopes on having a sympathetic Otis Powers on the board didn't materialize either.
At that point, I think, he knew the jig was up.
We had all seen the televised meetings where he kowtowed to the majority and emulated then-legal counsel Mike Saldana in his philosophy (which he stated often enough) that he didn't work for the entire board, just for the majority.
When the final tallies were sent to the BISD by the Cameron County Elections Administrator's office, it became apparent that his champions on the board were there no more. Suddenly, the minority members that he publicly belittled on the televized meetings were now running the show.
He was on his own.
And yet, he gamely went about it.
During one of the first meetings, he openly challenged the new board chairperson Catalina Presas-Garcia to specify where the district had made fiscal mistakes that now have the new board scrambling to find areas and personnel where cuts can be made.
He probably won't be asking that now that the state is bankrupt and the fund reserves dwindled from $148 million to $78 million to cover the "cost overruns" of the past two years.
Presas-Garcia didn't press it then. Like Bob Marley, she was probably thinking, "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day."
From the get-go, Springston was an avowed political animal. He had clawed his way from the ranks to become an assistant superintendent. Those who have climbed the byzantine career ladder at the BISD know this takes gumption, guile, and out-and-out political adroitness.
Springston played the game with relish.
He has been superintendent since December 2009 after serving in the position on an interim basis beginning in January 2009 when former superintendent Hector Gonzales was placed on administrative leave with pay and eventually was fired.
Even his hiring was a crass political fix. The old majority (Zayas, Cortez, Colunga and Aguilar) limited the pool of applicants to BISD employees only.
Hellloooo!
They might as well have hung a sign on the interim's superintendent's door that said "anyone else not need apply."
Only he and some of the former and current trustees know how deeply involved he was in that election. But some of the new trustees say that some in the administration like CFO Tony Fuller and Springston himself were supporting the incumbents and giving them information to counter the ads by a political action committee that was clearly swaying votes away from their candidates.
When the PAC showed that the board had dipped into the reserve funds to cover the shortfalls between the revenues and their expenditures, they denied that a "deficit" existed. However, the PAC showed documents signed by both men that indeed, the district had counted on those reserves to address multimillion dollar shortcomings that resulted from the revenue-expenditure disparity.
A rose by any other name...
His defenders will say that under Springston all 52 of its campuses received a designation of either "recognized" or "exemplary" from the Texas Education Agency and the district as a whole received a TEA rating of "recognized."
However – and there always seems to be a catch with this administration – it seems the district got that rating with the use of the Texas Projection Measure (TPM), a device used by the state where a statistical technique called regression is used to develop an estimate of whether students at a given school who got given scores on state exams would be likely to pass in future years.
For example, if a student fails part of the TAKS but the TPM shows the student on a glide path to pass the TAKS in future years, the school is credited with the student having passed the exam. Lawmakers during hearings into its use found that at 4th-Grade writing at Benavidez Elementary School in Houston, the TEA credited a student with "passing" even though the student barely passed the math and reading tests. Yet the TEA - using TPM – credited the school for the student’s “passing” with no correct answers on his test.
It's worth noting that the TPM was approved by the U.S. Department of Education in January 2009 as the Bush administration was on its way out the door.
The State of Texas, and Brownsville, it now appears, has found yet another way to make its public schools look better than they really are.
Can you honestly compare, as the local daily so blithely did, the district winning the 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education under former superintendent Gonzales, which is generally regarded as the nation’s top education prize that included $2 million in scholarships for that year’s graduating students, with this ratings jerry-rig?
Zayas and Cortez got what they wanted from Brett. Relatives and friends got hired to important (and well-paying) positions, the district incurred huge legal expenses to defend their actions (there are a at least two federal lawsuits and countless grievances pending), and local contractors got filthy rich when the boys handed out the goodies.
But now someone has to pay the piper. And it appears that only Brett is left holding the bag.
Don't feel sorry for this man. He played the game and he took his chances. All that's left now is to see how bloody he wants to make this affair.
Will he take the eight months paid suspension and go away quietly? Or will he not budge from his demand that the board pay him the full two years remaining on his sweetheart contract and drag the district he says he loves so much through an expensive litigation wringer?
The ball is in your court Brett. You got game.