COMMENTARY ON JUDY SNYDER:

Judy Snyder was a person I met while I was on the school board in the 1990's.  She was recently separated from her husband, and running what appeared to be her half of the shipping company that they both had owned.  Not sure what happened to that enterprise. She had recently gotten involved in school matters, having a son at Mayde Creek High School.

Ms. Snyder helped me to get elected.  We had a mutual friend, Eddie Dugger, who eventually helped us both.  I met Ms. Dugger through Cindy Soeffer who ran for the Board at the same time I did in 1990.  Ms Soeffer lost to Larry Moore, and I lost to Garry Weiss.  These ladies did everything they could to help me get elected, and I truly appreciated all their effort.

When Ms. Snyder decided to run for the school board in 1995, I offered to help her.  I stood in front of Hutsell Elementary all day for ten hours handing out her flyers.  I was evidently doing a good job because her opponent, Joe Adams, sent his wife over to do the same thing to keep me from getting votes for Mrs. Snyder.  I had a truck driver tan for the rest of the summer after spending the day in the sun!

Ms. Snyder lost that election 1,459 to 949. 

At the end of the day, while I was still standing in the sun handing out her flyers, she commented to my friend, Linda Porto, that no one had turned out to vote for her, and it was "Mary McGarr's fault!"  Such gratitude.

Needless to say, I had lots to say about Ms. Snyder after that.

She decided to run again the next year (1996) against Robert Shaw and Ward O. Hayworth.  She won with 1,262 votes to Shaw's 615 votes and Hayworth's 27 votes.  Of course the reason she won had something to do with a scheme apparently cooked up by Snyder and Joe Kimmel.  Mr. Kimmel was president of the Board that year, and there had been an item on the Board Agenda to move the students from Fleetwood, Barker's Landing, Thornwood, and Memorial Thickett to Taylor High School.  The parents of students in those subdivisions did not like their children attending Mayde Creek High School with other students not of their socio-economic class.  (And I still have all the letters they mailed to me saying just that.) 

Interestingly it was one of their own residents who had caused them to be moved to Mayde Creek High School in the first place (that resident had a daughter that she thought could get a college scholarship if she were at a new high school with a new swimming pool!--really that's why she wanted all those students to move! And never mind that the move eviscerated all of Taylor's sports and academic endeavors. Taylor lost Donnie Lawrence as the head football coach when that happened. Of course Old Katy board members were happy to oblige as it got Taylor's winning football team out of contention, they thought.)

Anyway, Ms. Snyder's scheme went like this.  Their friends wrote and signed a letter that said Ken Burton was wanting to not let the students from that area move to Taylor.  Actually Ken had actually said something to that effect, as he thought it a prudent thing to do which was his prerogative. But what they DIDN'T say was that when the item was on the Agenda earlier in the spring Mr. Kimmel pulled it off even though, he had his vote, my vote and that of two other board members (Larry Moore and James Peters) who wanted to bring back the east end area south of I-10 to Taylor. Four votes in favor of the item is all Mr. Kimmel needed to have the students in his neighborhood moved to Taylor and Memorial Parkway Junior High. (As I said earlier, I never thought they should have been moved in the first place--it personally had affected my own kids and their sports.) I even remember asking Mr. Kimmel why he took the item off the Agenda when he had the votes to pass it.  He replied, "I've decided to do something else."

Instead, they stopped the matter cold, and used the issue to pry votes out of the east end for Judy Snyder and the opponent (Jean Richardson) for Ken Burton.  (Ken Burton had also beaten Shelly Lesikar, another Fleetwood resident, in 1993 as well as Joe Kimmel in 1990, so there were those old matters of competition.) Mr. Burton was blind-sided on election day and had no idea what they were doing.  He lost 1,098 to 788.

Sounds like a soap opera, doesn't it?  But this is the kind of thing that goes on with Katy ISD school board elections every year.

Ms. Snyder and Joe Kimmel rode off into the sunset together, so to speak, and ran the school board between them for several years.