ZENDEJAS OFF TO CALIFAS. SEEKING GREENER PASTURES?

By Juan Montoya
Sources close to the office of Esperanza Zendejas, the superintendent of the Brownsville Independent School District, say she is off to California for the third time in as many weeks, and the speculation is that she is there to interview for a superintendent's gig.
The BISD elections have turned out to be more contentious than ever and, apparently, Zendejas sees her four-vote majority in danger.
Before, with the support of Joe Rodriguez, Carlos Elizondo, Cesar Lopez, and Jose Chirinos,
Zendejas could put up with the sniping from pesky Catalina Presas-Garcia and later, from Minerva Peña, the anti-evolution born-again Christian who sought to establish an independent image as her reelection approached.

Peña is one of those people who pander to the evangelicals in this city who still can't cope with the geological evidence that shows the world was not created in seven days, that human being evolved like other species on earth, and that different cultures and religions can still co-exist peacefully without a lightning bolt crashing down from the heavens to smite the non-believers.

Listen to her speak publicly (if you can bear the thought), and what you get is a homily with more "God bless yous" and appeals to Providence than a Bishop Flores sermon. She has found out that religion, as patriotism to some, is a nice, safe refuge from which to delve in local politics.
It's a measure of our local electorate, that a core group of her supporters think her style of politics is just fine, thank you. She may be inarticulate, adorably brash and naive, pero es muy buena gente.

She is the classic gabber at social functions who is not above spreading a bit of juicy gossip when it may leave some sort of political profit in return from the listener.
Peña has seen the tides of fortune change during her tenure on the BISD board. At first, she went along with the Rodriguez, Lopez, Elizondo, and Chirinos majority and cooperated to remove Otis Powers from the president's chair. But she didn't realize that it would be her head rolling down the steps of the Glass Palace that would be next. Sure enough, the inevitable happened and the boys turned on her and she was out.

Kent Whittemore is giving her a run for the money. Whittemore, a veteran administrator at BISD, has sought to distance himself from the majority policies that have shifted the priorities of the district away from small class sizes, supporting Spacial Needs students, and other decent goals, to pay homage to the Jock Gang who imagine the BISD becoming a football power in South Texas. Anna Elizabeth Hernandez Oquin (rAnna McDonald), has used her McDonald's franchises to make her run at Peña, but apart from having a Fren-Fry font on her logo, not much has been seen or heard from her on the hustings.
The Rodriguez dream of establishing a football powerhouse at the BISD, of course, will never happen, but that hasn't stopped the Rodriguez Gang to plunk down $800,000 to cover a football field with artificial turf at high schoos, and even a middle school or two.

And he even threw in an indoor training center for his protege Tom Chavez's Rivera High School.
Football prowess never happened even during the Rodriguez Reign as coach and Athletic Director, but as we said, it's all about imagine. In this town, reality is shunted aside in favor of putting out a good front.

We may be the backwater of the United States, but by god, we can dance zumba with the best of them, have more kids dipping fishing poles in a resaca than anyone else, and cover more surface space with bike trails than we have sidewalks for people to walk on. And, oh yeah, we also bought ourselves the All-American City designation.

The administration and the BISD lawyers have allowed just about anyone to run for a seat on the board of trustees. Already, with Head Cheez Erasmo Castro making a run at incumbent Presas-Garcia and pressing on the heels of Laura Perez-Reyes, the documentation is in the hands of his opponents that will disqualify him from holding the position because of a felony conviction for forgery in his youth. The Brownsville Herald, which prides itself in not publishing political ads unless you can document where the ink in your pen came from, has allowed one Frank Mar to run two ads accusing Castro of not only having the conviction, but also of being named in other, less unpalatable acts involving filing immigration forms for poor clients without proper authority.

Perez-Reyes, meanwhile, has been the recipient of funds from BISD vendors who despise Garcia-Presas, although, to her credit, the challenger's campaign ads have not attacked the incumbent.

That slack has been picked up by BISD general counsel Baltazar Salazar, a mediocre education lawyer related by his sister's marriage to the Lucios and being subsidized by taxpayers at a generous $264,000 salary. Salazar has been sloppy and is the main suspect in the formation of the Brownsville Taxpayers PAC which has paid for at least three mass mailings against Presas-Garcia.

After it was discovered that its treasurer listed his "office or residence" at 925 N. Iowa – a vacant lot being sold by Salazar's sister Liz Vera's realty company – the PAC's next report to the Texas Ethics Commission listed a Houston address. But it didn't take but 15 minutes for documentation to show that the house in Houston is owned by Baltazar Salazar and his wife Maria.

As we said, he is a bit sloppy in his deceit. The only money reported in its TEC finance reports by the PAC for its website and printing and mailing the anti-Presas-Garcia literature, was $13,000 from Salazar.

The last thing Zendejas wants is to have Dr. Sylvia Perez-Atkinson beat Chirinos (a member of the Gang of Four) elected to the board. After all, it was with Zendejas' connivance that Atkinson was shown the door at BISD. But with a well-funded campaign and a horde of supporters, her worse nightmare may well become reality. Her nearest opponent, firefighter Rigo Bocanegra, lacks the financial purse to counter her campaign, and at least one source has told us of bounced checks as the campaign is in the home stretch. Only a late-game surge from Team Rigo could make it close. Of course, if he filed his reports on time, we may have a better idea of the breadth of his support.

At stake in all of this is control of a $500 million budget, the education of 45,000 students and the employment of 7,000 employees.

Zendejas – from previous experience – has shown that she can see the writing on the wall, even if misspelled. She has left a trail across the country in school districts where she was courted by a board majority, wore out her welcome as the districts succumbed into personnel turmoil and bad finances, and then walked away when the next board ousted the previous majority and bought out her contract.

She cannot only read the writing on the wall, but the omens are all bad. Even the Giant Pumpkings contest turned out to be a dud. Instead of giant calbazas, the merciless South Texas sun stunted the gourds, as the vote in this BISD election may stunt her dreams of staying on as superintendent here and fizzle at the polls.

It appears, as the baseball prophet said, that it's deja vu all over again.