Arresting Development

This week from the Valley's new independent weekly, The Paper of South Texas (DISCLOSURE: I do freelance editing for the publication): School police arrest a union organizer for trespass when she sets foot in the McAllen Independent School District bus barn.

Hortencia Armindariz works for Service Employees International Union. She says the district cops never warned her she was trespassing before slapping the cuffs on. The real reason for the arrest, district employees say, is that she's teaching school workers to stand up for their rights:

Throughout the past several months, Armendariz has been working closely with transportation and other MISD employees to help them learn how to inform the administration about problems that workers are faced with, explained Rosa Medina, an MISD school bus assistant and union member.

"We have problems with the distribution of hours, here in the transportation department. We don't have enough food-service staff to handle cooking food for all the schools," Medina said.

But the McAllen school district administration doesn't like being questioned. It extends to the supposedly open forum during board meetings, in which board members refuse to allow employees to talk. When non-employees try to bring up problems, they get muzzled as well:

A union organizer mentions an administrator's name, then a board member stops the discussion to proclaim that names can't be mentioned in open forum. An organizer mentions the phrase access to open forum, and a board member quickly states that the organizer is off topic. One organizer in the last school board meeting tried to circumvent restrictions by relating the district's silencing of speech to the history of the Chicano movement. The board allowed the organizer to mention the Chicano movement, but not to draw a connection with the district's public forum policy.

District officials don't want to respond to questions about this issue:

Phone calls placed last week by The Paper of South Texas to the MISD Information Office, as well as e-mails sent to superintendent Yolanda Chapa and board member Sara Tippit, remained unanswered as of press time.

The answer is clear -- McAllen school officials think they're above scrutiny.