MAS BONITO CALLADITO COLUNGA, PART 2

By Juan Montoya
Someone reminded us that Brownsville Independent School District trustee Joe Colunga had abstained from voting on the Jan. 6 meeting on the item on whether to allow the district to pay for BISD chai Catalina Presas-Garcia's defense in the lawsuit filed against her by former A.D. Joe Rodriguez.
They said that Rodriguez has filed the lawsuit against her “in her individual capacity only” and not “in any capacity relating to her being a BISD school board member.”
Knowing the Rodriguez clan and their adherents, they probably filed it is this way to try to prevent the district from paying her legal fees for an act they allege was done by her and was not in any way related to her actions as a trustee.
Now, since he abstained from the vote then, Colunga can raise the issue during thisTuesday's BISD meeting and try to make hay about any conflict of interest issue he can pausibly construct.
That's cute.
Disingenuous, but cute nonetheless.
Once the motions for discovery and depositions get underway, it will become apparently clear that Cata and others had been trying to get someone – anyone – to review the reports way before she took office or even ran for the BISD board.
They were rebuffed at every turn. When they went to the state the Texas Education Agency people advised them that the issue rightly belonged in the purview of the school board, or, if not them, then with local law enforcement authorities.
But the board, in which Colunga himself was a majority member, instead of turning the potentially explosive reports over to law enforcement at the state or federal level, chose to spend huge amounts of money to make sure the public didn't see them.
Joe joined the majority of the board and authorized the expenditure of district monies to sue the Texas Attorney General to keep the secret. Once they knew that the ills of Pandora Rodriguez's box were in the open, they stopped wasting district money to squelch them.
This is the same Joe Colunga who now wants to revisit the approval of the majority on the board so they won't pay for her defense against Rodriguez.
Isn't it a little disingenuous for Colunga to attempt to make Cata foot the bill from her own pocket for doing something that the TEA officials told the BISD chairwoman was her option to do as a public official with a duty to the district and the taxpayer after he used district funds to try to prevent the public from seeing them?
Where was Joe when former BISD law firm and consultants for Special Services were milking the district by filing a rash of due process hearings, skipping over the hearings, and going directly to the negotiations for a cash settlement and raking in the cash?
Where was Joe when the former director of Special Services Art Rendon provided Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos, the Texas Rangers and Medicaid investigators evidence concerning suspected fraud and abuse in the due process hearing system for special education students?
Rendon said he discovered the fraud and abuse when he took over the Special Services Department in 2006. The department's billings for due process hearings shot up during the 2007-2008 school year because of the alleged fraud and abuse.
And where was Colunga, who had a Special Needs child on his own in the system when Rendon provided the BISD administration and board with information concerning the district's need for additional licensed specialists in school psychology?
His federal lawsuit against Colunga and the majority of the board then states that they (Rick Zayas, Ruben Cortez, Rolando Aguilar and Joe) reportedly knew that improper LSSP (State State School Psychology) evaluations provided the basis for fraudulent due process hearings, which at one point were costing BISD $12,000 per day, according to a memo provided to board members prior to a Dec. 16 board meeting.
Was Joe alright with those excessive legal payments then? Was Joe OK with kids being labelled as requiring Special Services when they perhaps did not? Or worse, not being provided Special Services when they did?
After all, the administration, BISD counsel Mike Saldana, and the board were told by the BISD's law firm (which Saldana later joined) that the evaluations were "legally indefensible. Saldana's response. according to Rendon and the former superintendent's sworn testimony was for Rendon to "dilute" their reports. Where was Joe then?
And what about Saldana's billings? Did Joe know that Saldana was billing the district even for the time it took him to drive the BISD's attorneys from the airport?
So this was alright then, Joe?
The word conflict of interest is easy to say, but very difficult to prove. If proving it is a stretch in Cata's case, would it be much easier proving it in your case?
Calladito te mira mas bonito.