This is why the whole Board of Managers concept sucks.
The four ousted members of the Houston ISD Board of Managers sent the majority of the board’s formal requests for information to the district in the two years before the Texas Education Agency removed them from their roles in June, records show.
HISD’s appointed school board members can submit formal “requests for information” to the district for certain data, policies or documents. The district typically sends the response to all board members, even those who did not ask the initial question, members said.
HISD’s current and recently removed appointed board members have made more than 140 requests into topics such as teacher shortages and retention, the district’s removal of principals, and student enrollment and achievement data from June 2023 to May.
Over the past two years, former HISD school board members Audrey Momanaee, Cassandra Auzenne Bandy, Rolando Martinez and Adam Rivon sent more than 100 formal information requests combined.
Meanwhile, board members Ric Campo, Michelle Cruz Arnold, Angela Lemond Flowers and Paula Mendoza sent eight total formal requests for information.
Janette Garza Lindner — the fifth remaining school board member — sent 29 requests, while five requests have no name attached to them, according to HISD records.
Martinez said he felt like, as an effective board member, it was important to submit requests for information — as well as multiple questions before school board meetings — because he wanted transparency for other board members and HISD community members.
“This data, for me, shows … that I took it seriously, that I was going to work at it, and I was going to ask questions when I felt like I didn’t have answers, even if that meant there was a perception that I wasn’t 100% aligned with the superintendent or the district or the TEA,” Martinez said.
While he remains excited about the district’s “tremendous” academic progress, Martinez said he wasn’t necessarily surprised when the TEA removed him from the board. He said he thought it might happen eventually due to potential concerns from the administration over the perception that he was misaligned with the district’s direction.
[…]
Bill Aleshire, an Austin-based lawyer focused on government accountability, said the district data does not directly indicate a correlation between the number of requests and the TEA’s removal of board members, particularly because the member with the third-highest numbers of requests remained on the board.
However, he said the data does raises “a legitimate concern and suspicion” about the dynamics of an appointed school board like HISD’s, where members do not have to be held accountable by voters in elections.
“If someone sat there and never asked questions and never submitted a request for information other than what they were fed, that might not go well with voters, but it depends on who they think they’re being held accountable by,” Aleshire said. “That’s why the takeover statute is so undemocratic, so dangerous, because it completely changes the dynamic of who the board is serving and how they are held accountable.”
See here and here for the background. I’ll concede that this is more suggestive than conclusive. Why wasn’t Janette Garza Lindner removed when she was as active a question-asker as the four who were booted? All that gets us to is another level of speculation. But when you never worked to build trust, when you avoid engagement with the public, when you work to be un-transparent, this is what you get. The next real Board is going to have a lot of work to do just making visible all the things Mike Miles did without anyone asking him why.
On the general theme of ‘ask questions, get booted’, there was a recent Chron story with the headline that Whitmire got rid of some LGBTQ board members because one of them repeatedly requested a meeting. The story was paywalled so I don’t know what board or any thing else.