Last week, HISD Trustee Diana Davila resigned her position. It’s not clear yet whether the Board will appoint a replacement or there will be a special election, but Marc Campos is floating the name of a possible successor.
UH-Downtown Political Science Professor Adolfo Santos is expressing an interest in replacing Davila. Santos’ resume is being passed around by respected H-Town Latino business and professional leaders. In recent years, Santos has regularly submitted Op-Eds for publication to the Chron.
Here’s his UH-D page, and here’s his curriculum vita. I couldn’t find any of the op-eds that Campos mentions in the Chron’s archives, though I did find a letter to the editor in response to one of them. I also found a couple of mentions of him in various stories. Here’s one about school uniforms, from 2007:
Reactions like this don’t surprise Adolfo Santos, political science professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who studied uniform polices at HISD middle schools in the late 1990s. Poorer communities can benefit from standard dress requirements, he said, because the clothes are often cheaper than trendy ones. And minority communities, especially Hispanics, he noted, are often more open to the idea of a strict dress code. All of the majority-Hispanic high schools in the district have standardized dress.
“When you look at predominantly Hispanic schools, there is often a large immigrant population, and these are students coming from Mexico and other countries where kids are accustomed to wearing uniforms in school,” Santos said.
He was also quoted in this story about the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and this profile of UH-D. Finally, possibly the most interesting thing I found in Googling around was this think piece about the future of education, from 2005. I don’t know if Dr. Santos will actually be a candidate to replace Davila, and if so if he’ll have to run a campaign or not, but at least now we know a little something about him.
UPDATE: Via email from Marc Campos, here’s a fuller version of Dr. Santos’ CV.