IS MINNIE PENA TRYING FOR THE PACE POM-POM SQUAD?

By Juan Montoya
Is Brownsville Independent School District board member Minerva Peña trying out for the Pace High School Lady Vikings pom-pom squad?
That's what parents of students there are asking nowadays because it seems that every time they pick up their kids, Peña's car (and she) always seem to be there.
As we all know, Minnie has never forgotten that in her long-gone youth as a fetching member of the Porter High School cheering squad.
But sources tell us that there is another, more practical reason why Peña is spending so much time at the Viking Nation.
It appears that she is particularly close to principal Rose Longoria, who finds herself under yet another cloud of suspicion in the running of the school.

This time it appears that attendance reports at Pace have been manipulated in order to collect attendance fees from the state. The way we are told, the complaint was passed on to the Texas Education Agency and charges that "some school Principals might be cooking the books (purposely reporting false student attendance) to get more federal and/or State funds."

They point specifically to Pace High School, ( PEIMS Dept., Pupil services Dept., Computer Technology and asks agency investigators to look closely at why only the second period’s attendance is collected when children are absent during the first priod, and the same children are absent the third and seventh periods.

We understand that this is one of the reasons that there has been a shakeup at the BISD after interim superintendent Esperanza Zendejas was recycled while a new superintendent search is launched.

The last time Pace came under scrutiny was when there was a report from staffers at the school who said they had seen Longoria and her Assistant Principal Ms. Carla Gonzales in the room where the finished exams were kept.
Reportedly, the test in question here is the 11th grade exit text. This test in effect determines whether a student graduates from high school. It also shows how the school's academic performance will be rated by the state.

Longoria, a rising star in the district after her meteoric rise as the former principal at Lucio Middle School, took over Pace, a low-performing high school, in the 2011 school year.
At the time, she said that with the state-mandating new testing, she had no doubts the students would "be up to the task."
“I inherited a school that was already in forward motion,” Longoria said at the beginning of the school year. “We want to continue that momentum. Everyone wants to see Pace as an exemplary campus and they’re not going to rest until we get it back up there.”

Longoria's performance at Lucio caught the attention of the BISD administration and resulted in her promotion to Pace. While at Lucio, the school's ranking rose from the 48.3 percentile among middle schools in the state in 2008 to the 79.7 percentile in 2009. The school, also placed in the 72.0 percentile in 2010, the last year she was there.

Its state ranking has fallen ever since.

Meanwhile, at the time Peña said she had not been contacted by the administration that any such incident was reported at Pace or that she had been assessed of the matter by any other source.

"No one has told me anything about this," she said. "If something like this had happened, I'm sure that Dr. Montoya would have informed all of us about it."

District spokesman vehemently denied that the two administrators were changing the grades on the 11th-grade exit exams but rather that they were correcting erroneous demographic information contained in the exams.
However, the district assured a local televisions stations that what some reported as changing grades was actually an innocent move by Longoria and Gonzalez to correct the students' information on the face of the exam.
According to the dictionary, demographics relates to "the statistical data of a population, especially those showing average age, income, education, etc."
After the district's investigation concluded, spokesmen said that they had inserted a "letter of concern" in Longoria's files as a result of their investigation and was forced to release a copy of the statements made of the incident by some 14 witnesses.
According to the rules of the Texas Education Agency only the testing coordinator at the school is allowed to have access to the exams to insure the integrity of the testing process. 

If the reports that Peña has been close to the Pace administration, it would come as no surprise to anyone since she is said to have convinced the principal to hire Cory Elizondo in the school library. Cory Elizondo is married to Joey Garza, who was recently indicted for mail-in vote fraud. Her father (and Joey's father-in-la) Ralph Elizondo was also indicted for voter fraud in the same election.
Peña has been known to let the trio use her reserved seats at Sam's Stadium during football season. (See graphic at left.)
The Elizondos and Garzas are well known to be part of the Ernie, Norma and Erin Garcia political vote-harvesting machine. The charges against Garza and Elizondo date back to the 2012 runoff election when they were helping Erin Garcia in her runoff race against Yolanda Begum.