"For 35 years under the court order the school district ran like a big, fat jobs program," Flores says. Today, blacks make up close to 50 percent of the principal and assistant principal positions at DISD. Latinos, despite a far greater number of children in the district, make up close to 30 percent of those positions.
Over time, DISD gradually replaced an enforced system of segregation with a more voluntary one. Black parents began to call for the end of busing, while white parents began to flee the system as if it were in the path of a tornado. Whites now make up only 5 percent of the student population at DISD, leaving blacks and Latinos as the only real constituents of public education in Dallas. In the classrooms, hallways and lunchrooms, black and Latino kids get along just fine, teachers say. It's the adults who are the problem.
Mark Graham
A matter of principal: Former NAACP Chief Lee Alcorn helped lead the opposition to the bilingual-principal policy.
Mark Graham
Teach your parents: DISD instructor Diane Birdwell says blacks and Latinos don't work together for kids.
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"The black and Hispanic communities simply don't work together," says DISD teacher Diane Birdwell, a representative of the National Education Association of Dallas. "I want to see them work together to push their kids toward achievement."
May's proposition was hardly the first issue to divide the board along racial lines. Last year, Latino and white trustees voted to eliminate the $3,000 in discretionary funds trustees could use in their districts. To them, the money was nothing more than an ill-disguised slush fund, and getting rid of it was simply a good business practice. But the black trustees saw the measure as racist, since it forced them to pay for community events in their districts out of their own pockets. When the board finally voted on the issue last fall, none of the black trustees showed up.
But that issue didn't approach the contentiousness of May's principal policy, which seemed to irk blacks inside and outside DISD.
In the days prior to the heated October 26 meeting, callers lit up the lines at black talk radio stations.
"It was a top, top issue, because many blacks in education felt like their livelihoods were threatened." says KHVN-970 AM host and news director Robert Ashley. "The majority of our listeners we have heard from say we should be speaking English and if people are here illegally and can't speak it, that's a result of them coming here illegally."
To hear some say it, May's proposition exposed some latent frustrations in the black community. "There are a number of African-Americans who believe that Asians and Hispanics have taken advantage of the Civil Rights era that black people gave their blood for," says Willis Johnson, who hosts a talk show at KKDA-104 FM. "Whether it was the Civil Rights Act or affirmative action, those were put into place because America was black and white."
Trustee Edwin Flores was reluctant to talk about how he and his colleagues were treated at the October 26 meeting. A biotechnology patent attorney, Flores is a data hound who can cite the latest findings in educational research. Still, as much as he tried to remain above the fray, he was clearly irritated over how the speakers lashed out at him and his colleagues.
"If I were them, you know what I would be angry about? The piss-poor performance in that part of the district," he says, referring to several schools in the southern sector. "For the amount of money we pour into the district and the results we get out of it, I'd be mad as hell."
Lost in the debate is whether May's original policy is good for education. Many of its critics say that principals should be judged on the kind of school they run, not on whether they can speak two languages. "Bilingualism is not a bad thing, but I'm against putting translation above administration" says Birdwell, the DISD high school teacher. "Is it important that principals speak Spanish or that they run a good school to help Spanish achievement?"
But others insist that May's bilingual proposition never applied to those types of principals anyway. It was only for those in charge of struggling schools with high percentages of children who can't speak English.
"If the building isn't functioning and the administrator can't speak the language of the parents, he needs to learn the language or change jobs," says Bayardo Arelleno, a second-grade teacher at Leila P. Cowart Elementary in West Dallas, which he describes as being 99.9 percent Hispanic. "If he doesn't, I don't know what business he's in, but he's not in the business of education."
Of course, it's a perfectly defensible argument to respond that principals shouldn't have to learn a second language to keep their job. And where exactly does it end, anyway? Asked if May's policy should apply to teachers as well, Garza didn't dismiss it out of hand. "I don't know the answer to that," he says.
In any case, Garza can expect that black leaders will be watching this time. One of those is Haynes, whose church has nearly 10,000 members, including District Attorney-elect Craig Watkins. Haynes says that he and several other black residents have formed an informal group that plans to serve as a watchdog of DISD.
"At every district trustee meeting, we will have a presence there. Not only to take notes, but so we can be there at a moment's notice to speak out against anything that is not in our interest."
