The headline of the El Paso Times Wednesday (Nov. 14, 2012) was “Region 19 director grills EPISD trustees”. The article however did not report any heavy questioning from the Region 19 director. There evidently was some lecturing on his part though. From what I have been able to figure out about this school board mess, the director was spot on.
My issue with the headline is that it is misleading, but then again I have a dictionary. Intense questioning was in order and I would have liked to read about it.
Unfortunately the article went on to say that the Region 19 director asked “How do you get a company and don’t find out that they don’t know how to do what your’re paying them for?” in referring to a $375,485 contract the district was required to issue “to oversee and monitor test administration and test security for this school year…”. The director evidently told the board that the leader of the company they awarded the contract to called him after the contract was issued and asked Region 19 to provide training to the company.
That sounds pretty bad. It appeared that the board issued a sizable contract to a company to perform a critical function and that the company did not know how to do it’s job.
Then on Thursday the Times headline was “State test-monitoring company followed EPISD bid requirements” which I took to mean that the bid was defective. The rather long article did a pretty good job of explaining that the contract required the vendor to receive some kind of training from the director’s education service center. I suspect that some lawyers helped the El Paso Times understand the need for clarification. It appears that the vendor was doing what was required of them. Then it turns out that the education service center does not offer that kind of training.
So what did they do? “Representatives from [the vendor] participated and observed EPISD training on these procedures on November 1”. Let’s get this straight. The company that is supposed to oversee and monitor the process gets trained by the group that they are supposed to oversee and monitor. Only at EPISD.
The bidding process was defective. Only one bid was received. This is typical. The school district wrote a bid request that could not be complied with and that was so restrictive that only one firm responded. In all probability any local CPA firm would have been able to do the work, but then again they probably don’t want to get involved with the school district.
So what do we have here? First we have a newspaper that goes through the motions of helping watch a defective school district but relies on emotion instead of fact. Second we have the director of an education service center making highly misleading accusations. Third we have the EPISD that has thoroughly failed in the past and that cannot even handle a bid fairly.
By the way, I remember when is was called Region XIX Education Service Center. I guess somewhere along the line they stopped teaching children Roman numerals. For all I know they don’t teach where Rome is anymore either.
Our children deserve better!
elpasospeak 
It is way past due for the TEA to decertify this Board and the Administration, assign a Master, do a complete and thorough audit to find all the skeletons in each department, issue the required indictments or pink slips, the hold a new election. This is the only way EPISD will every gain any credibility back. Stop screwing around TEA and pull the trigger!
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