MY RESIGNATION LETTER:

                                                                                                                   Katy, TX 7745

                                                                                                              May 21, 1996

Mr. Joe Kimmel

President

Katy ISD Board of Trustees

PO Box 159

Katy, TX 77492-0159

Dear Mr. Kimmel:

Upon receipt of this letter I am asking that you and the Board accept my resignation from the Katy ISD Board of Trustees.  It is with a great deal of regret that I feel I must separate myself from an activity that has consumed my life for the last five years, but after last night's meeting, it is apparent to me that none of you truly care about the education of the children of this district.  If I am unable to affect and to improve the educational opportunities for the students in this district, then I am of no value to the system.

I am grieved by the inability of all of you to understand or to even make the effort to understand what is happening in our schools.  We as board members are responsible for the sorry state of education in Katy ISD and for the efforts of some elementary principals to make socialists of our students.  When you vote as you did last night to give up Board powers and undermine the right of parents to be a part of the decisions regarding their children, and when you vote to initiate the Outcome Based Education/Mastery Learning concept of eliminating grades, I can no longer stand with you.

I blame the parents of the students who live in this district for allowing you to be so indifferent to what is proper.  When parents stay home on school board election day and allow people to be elected who have hidden agendas, they deserve what they are getting. When they do not know the names of their school board members, when they never attend a school board meeting to see what is happening because of your inability to be statesmen and true public servants, they deserve what they are getting.  When they allow their children to be treated shabbily by principals who wish to play God, and do nothing about it, especially when their children are no longer in the clutches of those people, they deserve what they are getting.  Parents eventually do discover what they have done to their own children, but it is always too late.

In the end, all one has is his good name, and I can no longer allow my good name to be associated with yours in the travesty of governance which you all represent.  I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish and of the things I have been able to stop or postpone.  I have tried as hard as I know how to do my job as trustee in an honorable manner and with integrity.  I wish I could say the same for any of you, but I cannot.  You are like the ugly signs stuck on the sides of our school buildings that proclaim excellence where there is none.

And so, Mr. Kimmel, with my resignation you will have achieved your only goal since you joined us two years ago.  You may now pursue your efforts to cut short discussion, for there will be none of substance or length; and you can all get home by 8:30 on meeting nights.  There will be no one on watch.  Perhaps you can initiate a policy whereby all of you just mail in your "Aye" votes, and then you will not have to even show up at all.

Nonrubberstampingly yours,

Mary McGarr