POM-POM MINNIE STILL TRYING TO BE HEAD CHEERLEADER

By Juan Montoya
If you look at the agenda for tonight's Brownsville Independent School District board meeting, past the election of officers, and the payments to assorted vendors and lawyer, there is an item that might catch your attention.
It is Item 22 and it reads " Discussion, consideration and possible action to submit a Board Resolution #026/14-15 in support of Board Member/s application/s for the National School Board Association
Council of Urban Boards of Education’s Steering Committee."
The CUBE is actually an urban component under the umbrella of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA), the Big Leagues of education organizations.
Now, the CUBE's Steering Committee is elected by the members of the 140 or so urban school district board representatives.
The current BISD member on the CUBE is none other than Catalina Presas-Garcia, who was selected by the current Steering Committee members to serve the unexpired term of Dr. Patsy Taylor of Sugarland.
When she was tapped to join the Steering Committee, director Deborah L. Keys  aid that she was selected to serve the unexpired term of Dr. Patsy Taylor of Sugarland "because of her consistent presence at and support of CUBE events and her energies and enthusiastic spirit.
Presas-Garcia, a Brownsville Independent School District trustee since 2008, became a member of the 16-member steering committee in May.
The BISD was named as the recipient of the CUBE award in 2008 Award for Urban School Board Excellence, the same year that the district won the Broad Prize for Urban Education, an annual $1 million award that honors one U.S. school district each year making the greatest progress in raising student achievement.
The last time a BISD board member served on the CUBE Steering Committee was when Dr. Christina Saavedra was elected in 2013 and in 2010 when BISD vice-president Ruben Cortez was named to the position.
Well, the introduction of the agenda item to have the board pass a resolution can be traced to trustee Minerva Peña, who has hungered to be on the CUBE for a long time.
With the passage of this resolution and the forwarding the support of the majority, Peña wants to impress upon the Steering Committee the fantasy that she has hte full support of the BISD board for her candidacy.
"It is the green-eyed demon of envy," said a former school board member. "Minerva has always wanted to be a head cheerleader and has only gotten to be a pom-pom girl on the sidelines like she was at Porter."
According to its website, "CUBE supports urban school boards and fosters effective leadership for excellence and equity in public education, with a specific focus on underrepresented students.
CUBE provides educational opportunities that engage urban school districts and district leaders, working through their state school boards associations, while addressing challenges in urban centers.
CUBE represents nearly 100 urban school districts in 35 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The districts that comprise CUBE educate nearly 7.5 million students in over 12,000 schools, with a collective budget of approximately $99 billion."
Presas-Garcia will serve until March 2015. She will then have a chance to run for another which expired in 2017. And apparently now, so will Peña.,