FALLOUT FROM STUPID HANDLING OF OUTAGE AT VETERANS

By Juan Montoya
Remember the power outage that left Veterans High School and Villa Nueva Elementary schools last Thursday?

The Brownsville Public Utility Board told the local media that a car accident had knocked out a power pole at the intersection of Alton Gloor and Military Highway at approximately 3 a.m. that morning.
When administrators arrived at the school before the students arrived, they knew they could not attend classes.
Nonetheless – at least at Veterans – the administration under principal Maria Solis decided to keep the students at the campus for no apparent reason. They could have just as easily turned back the buses, prevented parents from dropping off kids, or just notified students who drive to school that they were dismissed for the day.
Instead, Solis (under direction from the main office?) held the students until past 11 a.m., the required time when the district can charge the state for their attendance. In fact, no students attended classes that day.
Meanwhile, those students who could called their parents to come after them after 11 a.m., creating a monstrous (and dangerous) traffic chaos that extended a couple of miles from the school toward town.
It wasn't until close to noon that the district buses, having to detour around through Olmito to avoid the jam on Military arrived to ferry the bus riders to their respective drop off points.
Parents who were called to pick up their children had to wait in the traffic jam and then enter the school parking lot where they waited for their kids to leave. But then they found out that the security guards were not letting anyone leave the campus until they had a release from the main office. That mean waiting in another line outside the main door of the school. Inside, it was wall-to-wall humanity as parents and students milled around waiting for permission to leave the campus.
One can imagine the frustration of the campus security gatekeepers trying to deal withe the traffic jam of cars coming inn, and trying to keep parents with their kids without passing by without the proper authorization.
This is where the consequences of this stupid, inept and heavy-handed management style became evident.
Word got around the campus that those students who had driven to school could leave, but first they had to wait to get a permission slip to pass through security.
One 17-year-old thought she could make it past the security checkpoint and tried to leave through the rear gate, only to find it locked. She then tried to go through the front gate. Groups of her classmates cheered her on and she drove up to the gate only to be flagged down by a female security guard.
With the rest of the students yelling encouragement to the teen, the security guard said she could not let her get away with it and alleged that the 17-year-old who had never even gotten a parking ticket and felt that she had tried to run her over. (It may be her visible on the right hand side of the car being checked in the photo at right.)
It was all the teen could do to explain and apologize telling her she was not trying to run her over.
The teen said that the guard told her she could not allow her to get away with it because it would undermine  her authority before the rest of the students.
So she arrested the 17-year-old, handcuffed her, and called the Brownsville Police Department to have her jailed at the city lockup until her parent came to bail her out.
She also ordered her car to be impounded and her mother had to pay the towing company about $250 to have it released.
A simple phone call to PUB from the school administration or from the main office would have informed them that the pole would be replaced and that electric service would resume later that afternoon. Instead, they made a deliberate decision to subject all the students and their parents (plus motorists using Military Highway) to inconvenience, danger, and perhaps automobile accidents because they wanted to charge the state for attendance.
In the case of the 17-year-old, it meant being handcuffed, subjected to the humiliation of being thrown in jail and having her parent pay the $250 to a towing company. Depending on the outcome of her court trial, this 17-year-old with an unblemished record may be subjected to a criminal charge, see her insurance premiums rocket, and bear the cost for the unmitigated greed of the high school administration and the district.
To the high school principal and the administrators in the district: Your actions set an example to the students you teach. They see and judge your every act. This is the example you want to set so that they in turn repeat it? Why make a bad situation worse by committing these types of ill-considered acts that have untold consequences on everyone else to satisfy your personal whims?