Kayla Mendez and David Nance now are members of the Amarillo Independent School District board of trustees.
Good for them. I wish them well from afar.
I will stipulate that I don’t know either of them. I am left to presume the school board that chose them did so after doing its due diligence. I actually spoke in this blog in favor of former Amarillo Mayor Debra McCartt. So, she didn’t get the nod. Time to move on, Mme. Mayor.
The board also wisely avoided selecting an applicant who got defeated in the AISD election in May, but who wanted to return to the fray.
So, what’s the challenge awaiting the board? Transparency seems to stand out.
AISD is still trying to slog its way out of the mess created by the removal of an Amarillo High School volleyball coach and the mess that swirled around a former trustee who hassled, harassed and harangued the coach over playing time delivered to the trustee’s daughters.
Here’s a thought: How about revealing to the community the circumstance that led to the departure of the coach, who left a post she held for a single season?
The trustee implicated in the coach’s departure, Renee McCown, has quit; so did former trustee John Ben Blanchard.
Mendez and Nance now get to step into what all observers should hope is a public school system that is prepared to fix what went wrong and then explain fully how it repaired it.