LETTER TO THE EDITOR REGARDING THE OPPORTUNITY AWARENESS CENTER:

As a school board member, I had groused and complained and otherwise let it be known that I didn't like the "no due process" mantra of Texas public schools in general and especially the way there was not "due process" for students in Katy ISD.  I had seen up close and personal the treatment of the children of two families who were close friends.  I KNEW the particulars of both cases, and yet I was helpless to do anything about them. I did render a sworn deposition for one of the court cases.

The following is a letter I sent to The Katy Times.

                                                            Katy, TX 77450

                                                            June 16, 1997

                                                            (281) 578-1679

Editor

The Katy Times

Katy, TX

Dear Editor:

The Opportunity Awareness Center certainly needed the attention to it that you called in your last issue.  The teacher who has come forward, as well as the young man and his mother who provided you with information, are to be thanked for their courage.  Standing up to the school district is not easy.  I know.   

The OAC has been many things over time.  When first established it was designed to be prison-like.  Students were treated as serious criminals.  Then, under the leadership of Mr. Blankenship, the place became a rehab center with warm fuzzy pictures on the walls and designs on having a “mascot.”  Supt. Hugh Hayes expressed to the Board of Trustees that there needed to be some middle ground approach.  What he did not express was his intention to strip the number of faculty numbers down to bare bones.  One would think that a decision to cut this school’s teaching staff in half would have warranted a board decision.  If Joe Adams, the board president at that time, knew of the cuts, he did not share that with me. However many decisions that should have board approval are hidden from the board. 

As long ago as November 1993, according to my notes, I was suggesting to  the administration that the curricular offerings at the OAC were inadequate.  At that time a senior student, who was taking physics and calculus at Taylor when incarcerated at the OAC, was deprived of having instruction in those two courses.  Junior and Senior students often may lose course credits when they attend the OAC because of the specialized nature of their upper level courses.  Lest anyone think that these students’ behavior warrants this loss, let me be the first to explain that more often than not, since our school district has a perverted sense of “due process,” these students have sometimes not been charged, much less found guilty, of anything.  The concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is a Constitutional guarantee that somehow has been denied to students in the Katy school district! 

Campus administrators, who to my knowledge, receive no training in being judge, jury, and executioner, become just that.  They do indeed provide speedy justice; never mind that it is more similar to the Law West of the Pecos than anyone can imagine.  Students who have never had a single mark against them have their lives turned upside down by those who have assumed some rights that I’m not sure they should have.  Their parents must spend thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to protect them.  All sorts of consequences are piled on these children; they are stripped of all school honors and privileges; and many times all before they have been charged or found guilty in a real court of law.  When the charges are never filed or dropped, and the whole venture has occurred for no good reason, no one ever even says, “We’re sorry.”  Honors are not restored, events that are missed cannot be replaced, and lives are changed forever. 

I am aware of the content of the cited report by the young man.  The report was offered to the board and the superintendent last summer by a citizen who asked if any of them were interested in looking at it.  Amazingly no one was.  Would you not think that someone would be interested in what is happening at that school?

I also am not surprised that special education students are not being properly addressed at the OAC, because at the same time Supt. Hayes, without benefit of board approval, was halving the OAC faculty and eliminating honors programs from our secondary schools, he also cut the special education budget by a million dollars.  Obviously the intent was to cut back on services for these children in every Katy ISD school.   

Mr. Zimmerman’s suggestion “that the community needs to stand up for itself in the face of the arrogance of the educational bureaucracy” should be heeded.  When 51,000 of you who are registered voters stay home on school board election day and allow 2,200 voters (4%) to re-elect an incumbent who is directly responsible for two year’s worth of bad decisions which include encouraging School to Work in every way possible, eviscerating the Katy Plan as it was intended, inviting placement of the County’s Boot Camp in the midst of our school district, and not looking after the welfare of Pattison school children, to blatantly moving his children and those of his wealthy neighbors out of the Mayde Creek Junior and Senior High School zone so they can go to school with their “demographic counterparts,”  why is anyone surprised at what happens?

Mary McGarr 

(Permission given to print this letter only in its entirety.)