By Juan MontoyaWhy is the man on the right smiling?
Or is it a smirk?
That is the face behind the Gary Long byline in the Brownsville Herald's education beat.
That's right. It's the same person who defended the former Brownsville Independent School District majority and the administration under Brett Springsteen when they denied that they had gutted the district's finances and refused to call their raiding of the BISD's reserve funds to balance their budgets a "deficit."
In fact, Gary not only megaphoned their denials, but provided former Chief financial Officer Tony Fuller, for Superintendent Springsteen and the motley crew of Ruben Cortez, Rick Zayas, Joe Colunga and Rolando Aguilar with a soapbox from which to issue their denials under the color of journalistic objectivity.
It took Fitch's Bond Rating Service report and downgrading of BISD bonds to "negative" and the service's explanation of the budget "deficits" before administrators and Long acknowledged the fact. Come to think of it, we don't think Long ever looked back on that deceit. Long's heroes raided the reserve funds and in two short years whittled it down from $171 million to $68 million.
In the end, the voters of the district ignored the siren songs published in Long's articles and threw the main perpetrators – Cortez and Zayas – out on their ear. Gone, too, are Fuller and Springsteen. And the taxpayers of the BISD were left to pick up the pieces of the dying carcass and try to make it whole again after the bout of obscene spending and manipulative debauchery under the old crew.
Now we learn that the Association of Texas Professional Educators (ATPE) selected Long for the Alafair Hammett Media Award for excellent public education news coverage in the category for newspapers with circulations 25,000 and less.
According to the ATPE press release, the recipients were selected by a statewide panel of seven volunteer educators who serve on the association’s public information committee.
The release further states that "the committee was impressed by Long’s reports on Brownsville Independent School Districts’s first shooting incident that killed a middle school student on campus as well as stories on local educators collaborating with business leaders to improve the area’s high school graduate rate and BISD academy helping students graduate and receive job training."
ATPE calls itself the largest educators’ group in Texas and the largest nonunion educators’ group nationwide.The association’s membership consists primarily of classroom teachers but also includes administrators, paraprofessionals, college students and retired educators.
In the case of the BISD, it is the group that most of the BISD administrators belong to. Drue Brown, the public relations maven for the district in charge of newspaper stories belongs to ATPE. Now, let's connect the dots.
The Herald has new ownership. The new ownership might make personnel changes at the paper. Brown and the BISD administration want to keep Gary Long as the education reporter /distorter. So Drue gets her union to give Long the "award" to help him keep his job so things can stay exactly the same at BISD.
Just what does the ATPE know about journalism? And is giving someone like lapdog Long an award really a betrayal of their members? Calls to local ATPE president Jose M. Garza went unanswered.
But it's just as well, we guess. Those who know him say that Jose probably has no idea about how this came about. When people talk to him, he doesn't know what's going on in the district and is never at the main office for board meetings or anything else, for that matter. They say there is no way he actually took the initiative on this. He's a numbers guy, a math teacher.
"This is as much a betrayal to educators as AOBE/TSTA endorsing Ruben Cortez for the State Board of Education," said n BISD teacher.
And while we're at it, local residents are asking where is the follow-up on the shooting story that Long won the award for?
Long, as well as some of us, remember reading the police report a few months back. One of the things in there was the assistant principal who locked out the police when they arrived at the 911 call and then told them to shoot out the front door glass of the school instead of unlocking it for them.
When they did this the police claimed they believed Jaime student was shooting at them at the same time! Is it important that the police shot first? And before they even saw the student? It's illuminating that the asst. principal was no one else but Elizabeth Hatcher-Brito, a member of the Zayas/Cortez crew.
But don't expect those questions to be found in any Long story in the foreseeable future. Long's critics are saying that the prize should be called the Holler's Award for Non-Reporting of local events.
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