Monday night’s SMCISD board meeting wasn’t all that some people expected it to be due to miscommunication about issues up for a vote. However, the meeting led to a target date for a vote on where the district’s new central office will be located and a public hearing on donating the old Bonham campus to Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos.
“Let me apologize for the confusion regarding what items actually should have been on this agenda prep,” Superintendent Michael Cardona said at the start of the meeting. “The school district’s lawyer and I miscommunicated on what should have been discussed.”
The agenda, as posted, had included items including a resolution donating Bonham to Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos and a resolution on the sale of school district property. However, the only items meant for discussion or action Monday night were site plans for the proposed central office building and a public hearing on the proposal to donate Bonham to Centro.
Public comments during Monday’s special called meeting centered on the uses of the Bonham campus by Centro and School Fuel, a program that provides sacks of food for students in need. Nancy and Larkin Smith, who work with School Fuel, spoke about the program, the number of students it feeds and the amount of community supports it gets. Larkin Smith said that in 2016-2017, School Fuel delivered 19,496 sacks of food; in 2017-2018, more than 24,000 sacks were delivered. The number of volunteer hours for School Fuel has also increased over the years, he said, to more than 4,000 — with a total of 15,000 volunteer hours put in since School Fuel began. Moreover, the number of organizations that donate to the program has more than doubled, from 46 to 95.
“If we have to pay rent,” Nancy Smith told the board, “it would knock out about 175 sacks of food.”
Frank Arredondo, who is on the board of Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, talked about the cultural center and what it does for the community as far as preserving Hispanic culture and providing educational and artistic opportunities.
“If you would go and sit in the lobby of Centro any day of the week, you’d be amazed at what’s going on,” he said. “The singing, the dancing, the public presentations on topics of interest to our culture, civic groups meeting there. It’s a museum, but it’s an active museum.”
Arredondo said he would like to see the district donate Bonham to Centro.
“This has been a dream of mine,” he said. “... We have plans to renovate it. To fix it up. We’re going to start a capital campaign and that’s where the funds are going to go.”
Not everyone who addressed the board was keen on the idea of the district donating the old school campus that Centro and School Fuel use, however.
Sarah Lee Underwood Meyers said she was “confused” about numerous things, including the odd night for the board meeting, since the board usually meets on the third Monday of the month. Monday’s event was a special called meeting tacked on to the board’s monthly agenda prep meeting.
Meyers said she was also confused about the district giving away a building..
“Do we give this property away?” she asked. “If we give it away, let’s give it to School Fuel. They’re using it.”
Dan Lyon said that when he read the newspaper headline about the district considering the donation to Centro, “I thought that I was having a bad dream. … To my shock and horror, I read further and had my worst fears confirmed.”
Lyon objects to the district giving away a “valuable piece of property” when it could be sold or otherwise used to protect taxpayer dollars.
He noted that if the building was to be donated to a German cultural society “or the Dan Lyon School for Public Speaking, my attitude would be exactly the same. … I beg you to keep the children of this district and the people who paid for Bonham in mind. They are the ones to whom you are primarily responsible.”
Tying Centro to the Central Office
Trustee Miguel Arredondo said that he had asked for the items about the central office site selection and the public hearing about donating Bonham to Centro to be put on the agenda, in part because the central office issue touches on other issues, including the fate of the Bonham campus.
“It is clear that we are all on very different pages about one very big substantial and expensive issue, which is spending in excess of $5 million to build a new central admin building,” he said. “And that vote impacts all of these interested parties who’ve been here tonight.”
Arredondo said that primarily, he wanted to ask his colleagues to approve a public hearing on donating Bonham to Centro and to discuss the site plans for the administration office. Specifically, he said, he wanted to see the original site plan for the proposed location on the corner of Suttles and Hunter Road that did not involve clear-cutting the trees. Arredondo said the board got one site plan, and then at a meeting when the board was slated to choose a site plan a different version was presented.
Trustee John McGlothlin said he was also concerned about the change.
“That was confusing to me,” he said.
Trustee Kathy Hansen said that she thought the board would be selecting a site at its regular meeting next Monday, but McGlothlin said that was an error on the agenda for next week’s meeting.
“There’s nothing presently on the agenda with regard to selecting a site for March,” he said. “Presumably we’d have to come back in April or May or whenever we decide to do it.”
“Why are we postponing?” Hansen asked.
“Are y’all suggesting that we wait until April?” board president Clementine Cantu asked.
McGlothlin said that numerous board members asked for more information at the last meeting, and,. “Since that last meeting, we’ve received nothing new. … We don’t want this to linger into the summer but it may have to wait more than seven more days.”
Trustee Margie Villalpando said she would like to settle on a site for the new administration building before discussing the donation of Bonham to Centro. Arredondo said the two issues are connected. At the last meeting, he said, it was asked what it would take for some of the trustees to be more comfortable with making a decision on the central office, and some of the trustees said they wanted reassurances about the future of Centro and the district’s property on LBJ.
“Again, the question was asked, what’s it going to take for some of us to be more supportive. … That is what my response to that is. Assurance that … the building is left untouched and unsold, regardless of who the tenant is and whatever organization it’s donated to,” Arredondo said. “I would disagree that we have to vote and decide on a central admin property site and expend those funds and then at a later meeting decide what happens to the old Bonham campus.”
Arredondo said that he would make a motion to hold a public hearing on the donation on the same night that the board chooses a site for the new central office. The board is aiming to do both on April 15.
Arredondo said that some of his trepidation about the fate of Bonham stems from the sale of the old Lamar campus.
“We had individuals in this community come to this school board a few months ago and say, ‘We didn’t know Lamar was being sold … why did y’all do this, can you buy it back,’ so I’m hoping this conversation, this dialogue, prevents that from happening again,” he said.
