SYLVIA ATKINSON: THE IRON FIST INSIDE THE BISD VELVET GLOVE

By Juan Montoya

As the Brownsville Independent School District board of trustees and administration move to utilize the $12 million Daniel Breeden Elementary School and realign the boundaries of its 54 campuses, the spear carrier for the move of personnel throughout the campus has fallen on none other than Asst. Supt. Human Resources Sylvia Atkinson.
Atkinson, by no mean the world's sweetheart, has become, in the opinion of some local teachers and administrators, the "power behind the throne," and the "iron fist inside the velvet glove" of the BISD administration.
"When you see Sylvia on the scene, it does not bode well for anyone," said a middle-school teacher. "Something not nice is up."
Breeden, the district’s newest campus, is located at 3955 Dana Road. The board last October adopted a 2012 balanced $475.3 million budget that maintained the current level of pay for all full-time employees, avoided any layoffs, did not tap into fund balance and left the effective tax rate unchanged.But is did not include start-up costs for Breeden, which BISD now estimates will include $1.5 million for necessary furniture, equipment and supplies and $2.5 million in staffing costs. The former administration under Brett Sprinsgton apparently miscalculated the funds necessary to operate the school, current BISD administrators said.
But now, as plans are being made to use it, teachers and administrators are wary of the Human Resources Dept.'s strategies to utilize the district's staff.
Many say that if Atkinson's record in her rise to power after she left behind a trail of superintendent positions stretching from Los Fresnos to Socorro ISD is any indication of what is going to happen here, some people are in for a nasty surprise.
"Her favorites will get the best positions and the rest will get the shaft," said a teacher. "It always happens with her."In fact, before she was hired by the district as Grants Administrator, Atkinson had made it known that she was prepared to announce her candidacy against former trustee Ruben Cortez.
Just days after she was showing her campaign cards to her potential supporters, the district announced that she had been tapped for the $87,000 job formerly held by former CFO Tony Juarez.
Sources then indicated that some board members approached Atkinson (whose brother Charley was a City of Brownsville commissioner) and told her that if she wouldn't run, the majority would vote to get her the plum position. In the end, she did not announce and got the job with the BISD.
Atkinson's career has been marked by conflict and charges of favoritism and cronyism in almost every district where she has worked. When she was at Los Fresnos, a divided community ousted her after a school election with many school employees charging that she kept a coterie of favorites and disdained others.
On December 2005, she resigned from the Los Fresnos Independent Consolidated District after she could not muster the majority vote on the board to maintain her job. The LFCISD shelled out more than $205,000 in severance pay when she resigned.
And, thanks to a law championed by state Rep. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, the state penalized the district for awarding severance in excess of a superintendent's annual earnings and the district took another $80,000 hit in state funding, too. It was the largest cut to any district in more than two years.
As part of Atkinson's severance agreement, Los Fresnos agreed to rescind a number of negative documents from her personnel file, according to documents on file at TEA.
In April 2006, after leaving Los Fresnos, Atkinson landed in the Santa Rosa Independent School District where she served as superintendent for about eight months.
After conflict there, she left to take the job of superintendent of Socorro Independent School District in January 2007. Charges of favoritism and cronyism have followed Atkinson there, too. Her hiring of Ida Trevino and her husband Guillermo Salinas and Andres and Cynthia Lopez, who all worked with her in South Texas, for the Socorro ISD Police Force, irked some locals who claimed they were hired simply because they knew Atkinson.
Trevino beat out 15 other qualified applicants for the job of task force commander, even though she only had a high school diploma and a cosmetology degree. Critics said they believed cronyism played a role in her hiring since Trevino worked briefly as the chief of police for the Santa Rosa School District.
The El Paso Times and KFOX television station had reported that Atkinson had been at the center of an investigation into the district's hiring practices and allegations of cronyism.
Trevino and Salinas left the SCISD after a number of controversies including one where Trevino charged that a district employee had threatened bodily harm on her son, a charge strongly denied by the accused. No charges were ever filed or arrests made in that fiasco. When Atkinson she left, the SCISD agreed to give her one-year salary as severance. At the time, her salary was $220,900.
And when former Veterans Memorial High School Principal Acacia A. Ameel was placed on administrative leave with pay on Sept. 21, 2011, the day after a Board of Trustees meeting at which BISD presented plans for the school to become a magnet and college preparatory campus, witnesses said that Atkinson was one of the first administrators to visit the campus.
At meeting held at the school, several VMHS students and community members expressed concerns about the STAMP program, which was then in the planning stage. Some sources said that Ameel sympathized with the students and parents and that some meetings to protest the changes were held in her office.
On April 4 this year by a 4-3 vote, trustees denied Ameel’s grievance at Level III, which sought reinstatement to her position as principal. Ameel's attorney John Shergold said the trustees had violated the Texas Open Meetings Act by holding a the Level III hearing in closed session when Ameel had asked for it to be in open session.
A lawsuit, undoubtedly, will result on the matter.
Then, in mid-October last year, on her department's recommendation, the BISD trustees approved former city commissioner Charlie Atkinson (Sylvia's brother) for a physical education teaching position at Faulk Middle School.
Atkinson has three sisters who work for BISD: Sylvia , Sandra Powers, the supervisor of BISD’s Special Olympics programs and wife of former trustee Otis Powers, and Mary Tolman, the administrator for State Compensatory Education services. At the time, several applicants for the positions cried foul, saying some were already certified and more qualified than Charlie Atkinson to get the position.
In March, Michael A. Alex, a former Porter High School track and cross country coach who had a racial discrimination lawsuit against the BISD in 2010, amended his suit after the district hired the former city commissioner for a physical education teaching position at Faulk Middle School. Alex, who is black, had been unable to obtain a position with BISD since a 1995 incident in which he was fired.
Unlike Atkinson, Alex holds a valid lifetime teaching certificate for secondary health education and secondary physical education. Although the certificate is valid for life, it was revoked from Sept. 6, 1996 through March 26, 2001.
Atkinson has made no bones about wanting to become BID's next superintendent.
However, as in 2011, a majority of thre trustees are wary of having the controversial figure at the helm of the district. For now, she has become the district's favorite to put out brush fires and silence dissent to the board's and administration's decisions.

"She's not someone you want to mess with," said a teacher. "The board better watch their own backs with her."