BISD ACCOUNTING CLERK CONFESSION RAISES QUESTIONS

By Juan Montoya
The accounting clerk who was in charge of depositing concession stand proceeds from four Brownsville Independent School District campuses and pilfering over $300,000 over six years was paid only $20,000 a year.
Leticia Arreola, of Los Fresnos, pleaded guilty before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Morgan and will face sentencing. She had worked at the BISD Food and Nutrition Service since 1999, but is accused of stealing the funds she was supposed to deposit since 2006.
She could face a maximum of 10 years and a fine of up to $250,000.
Now, there is no excuse for her actions. Stealing is stealing.
But imagine that you are earning a measly $20,000 and authorized to handle concession receipts from the four campuses that probably equal that in a month.
On top of that, you see that the BISD has made the FNS a repository of highly-paid administrators when it doesn't want them in their original positions for whatever reason.
You have Art Rendon, the former head of Special Needs who sued the district and won $100,000s, his employment back, and then made director of Transportation. After a new board and administration comes in, he is transferred to FNS where he continues to draw his old salary that dwarfs yours by more then fivefold.
For as long as anyone can remember Rosario (Rosie) Peña was the head of the Purchasing Dept. at the Brownsville Independent School District.
Then, after the new board majority picked Esperanza Zendejas as the new superintendent, suddenly-popular game of Musical Chairs gained the vogue there.
Peña, the once powerful BISD Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Glass Palace, was relegated to the Hair-Net Set at Flapjack Canyon, or FNS. Her pay remained the same.
To the uninitiated these may seem like a vertical transfers, but to those in the know of the BISD bureaucratic morass, this means that an unequivocal message has been sent to the luckless individual that they might do well to consider another line of work.
And, following the scandal of former CFO Lucio Mendoza after he signed off on a $1.3 million check to an insurance company without board approval, he ended up there, too, Later, it was off to the BISD records warehouse within smell of the Robindale Wastewater treatment plant as a Special Assignment Administrator.
With all that musical-chair frenzy going on, people at the BISD are getting stiff necks wondering whether Zendejas and her majority on the board will decide whether they will be the next one to walk the gauntlet toward the FNS.
Federal investigators say that they had discovered discrepancies between Arreola's $20,000 annual salary and her personal bank account deposits over the last six years. They say that those deposits averaged over $40,000 during those years.
Interestingly, it was in 2015, when the turmoil brought on by the the board majority resulted in district wide transfers and resignations that Arreola racked up deposits totaling $71,532 from her pilfering.
There is some common wisdom among those at the lower tier of the salary scale in whichever industry they may be. If they work in a restaurant run by a miser, expect them to steal food. If  they work for low wages on a shipwrecker, expect copper and aluminum to walk out the gate.
We are not privy to her taped confession, but we wouldn't be surprised if she had told the feds that since everyone else was taking their opportunity, she thought she might as well take hers, too.