SMCISD Election Interview & Campaign Finance Report: Adam Gonzalez

Adam Gonzales Sits Down With Corridor News

By, Breona Blakemore

 

Printable PDF Campaign Finance Report

 

 

Adam: First thing is I have said multiple times that I believe in improved community involvement and I think that many of the decisions, if not most of the decisions the board makes should be open in public discussions. I don’t think that we should have closed meetings, and I don’t think that we should discuss just among board members about what should be going on in the district. Additionally, I don’t that board trustees should have a personal agenda of their own. I think that’s where some of the ideologies don’t match well with everybody because everyone seems to have a personal agenda, and I’m not trying to say anything negative about our current board, but whether you think our current board is doing a good job or a bad job we can both agree that some improvements can be made especially in terms of cooperation. I think it’s important that we help quarrel with board members and in fact, the people that are running for school board right now I think are doing a great job at working together. I don’t see any personal quarrels. In fact, we were all at a school board debate yesterday and nobody there was saying anything negative about each other or anything like that because we all understood that the person we may be speaking about could be our potential coworker in the future. So far I see all the candidates working together and that’s good, we certainly need to do the same thing with the board. We need to be open with everyone’s perspective. There may be some trustees that didn’t agree with something on a certain proposition or a piece of policy, and of course people need to leave that in the past and work on new issues because we can find common ground where we want to find differences. In terms of getting people more involved as I said, I think we need to have more open public discussions about things I don’t think we should have closed meetings and I don’t think that we should just speak among board members about what has to happen in the district. They need to understand that this district isn’t ours it’s the community’s and they should have a say to the matters that go on in this district.

 

Adam: Well, that’s not exactly something that I can have an opinion about because those things are already set out, technically speaking. In terms of responsibilities, the board sets policy and it’s the superintendent’s job to implement that policy, and again that’s not something that is my opinion, that’s in our job description. So, that’s already set for us. The relationship between the board and the superintendent, obviously they need to be on the same page about the context of the policies that are set. If we set a policy that is supposed to increase a budget ideology for example, if we are supposed to set a policy that is supposed to restrict record spending, then the superintendent needs to be along the same lines of that context even if something isn’t and not explicitly in a policy. If the context is there it that alone should be important. So, it is important that the superintendent understands the policy that the board sets and implements it given the context of that policy. Additionally, the superintendent should understand that the board for the most part is going to set a policy that the community wants. So it’s not the superintendent is implementing the policy that he feels you should be implementing, but you should be implementing the policy the community agrees with. And, of course as I said I think the community needs more involvement to make sure that that is happening. To make sure we are not setting policies that we believe should be going on. Additionally, the superintendent should not have a separate vision for the district than the board, but at the same time the board should not have a separate vision for the district than the community. So, they are all supposed to work together. In terms of responsibility, the board sets the policy and the superintendent is supposed to implement that policy.

 

 

Adam: Certainly, the superintendent is a leader in terms of administration so he is basically the leader of our administrators, and I think that our administrators deserve a voice on that board so certainly and this is my personal opinion so it is of course subject to change based on what the community wants, but given the current information that I have now I think that if the superintendent had a seat there and if he is involved in the discussion then he is representing the administrators that he is a leader of and I think the more voices we have at that board, the better. I would much rather have him in the discussion than to not have him in the discussion simply because it’s another person’s perspective especially since he supposed to be representing the administrators. Now, if the community chooses to do something different about that, then of course I’m going to support the community’s decision.

 

 

Adam: Absolutely I disagree with it for multiple reasons. For one, I consider myself to be very physically conservative and that’s not just something that is an opinion, it is something that is necessary and I’ll tell you why. We have 68.75 percent of our students considered economically disadvantaged. That says a lot about the people in our district. When we look at the median household income in our district, the median household income is only $42,000. We are not a rich district and we don’t have rich families paying a lot of money into this district. We need to match our budget with our financial demographics and quite frankly we shouldn’t be spending $850,000 for a football screen. I mean that’s absolutely ridiculous. If we were in another district with the demographics to match that, then maybe we could talk about that, but when we look at the numbers, when we look at what we can spend that money on, we have much better alternatives to where that money could’ve gone to enhance our education quality. From a statistical or numerical standpoint, I have to say I certainly disagree with that because it does not match our financial demographics.

 

 

Adam: I believe our fund balance is there for use in emergencies and for use in, and here’s the key word MINOR expenses that were unexpected, and that’s the key word MINOR. Sometimes we may formulate a budget and not everything on that budget we may have thought of as we were thinking about that budget, and there may be small items that come up later that we may need to pay for that we simply completely forgot about putting into that budget. That would be a time when we need to use that fund balance money or if we need to use that money for emergency. Any kind of emergency can happen. I shouldn’t have to go over emergencies that could happen, but again the key word is MINOR. We should not be spending millions of dollars for some things people may feel are necessary. If we are going to be spending large funds coming out of our fund balance, it’s something we should be going to the voters about.

 

 

Adam: I haven’t heard anyone complain about people’s representation or anything like that, there may be issues with people’s representation honestly I’m not sure. I consider myself to be a person who wants to be informed on a subject before I make a decision, so even though I can’t physically say what I’m going to be for in that situation, I’ll say this: When it comes to the decisions I make, I want to make sure that we get the community involved, that we represent people equally, and that we make a decision that is of majority rule but minority right, and that’s what is important. So, whatever decision is based off of those three principles I am definitely going to support. But, honestly I haven’t heard of that be an issue lately so I apologize I can’t give you specifics on what I think should be done about that.

 

 

Adam: I most certainly support televising school board meetings here’s why I believe in open and accountable government and I also believe in transparency, and it’s not so much I believe in that personally, which I do, but it’s that everyone in the community believes that. That’s something that everyone has been wanting. We’ve gone through the numbers and we’ve looked at debts versus the costs, and the benefits do vastly outweigh the costs and it’s something that we should have. Even if we have few people are watching the televised school board meetings, it’s still the principle of transparency, and it’s still the principle of an open accountable government. I believe they have already started televising school board meetings even though you said how long until they will start televising. To my knowledge, I believe they have already started but I could be wrong on that. If it hasn’t started, which again I believe it already has, that certainly is a top priority that I’m going to want to make sure that we implement honestly as soon as possible.

 

 

Adam: Absolutely not. In fact, those are some of the numbers that I was going to read yesterday. If we compare ourselves with Lockhart I.S.D. for example, they spend just about the same amount of money that we do, yet they have 20 percent better reading scores and 20 percent better math scores. They also score better on SATs and ACT, and by the way they also have a worse student to teacher ratio than we do, yet they are scoring better performance wise. Additionally, when we compare our demographics to their demographics our demographics are the same. They have the same amount of economically disadvantaged students as we do so certainly there’s something between our two districts that we are not doing good in and they are doing good in when everything else is matching. I believe money and education are very closely tied together, and one thing we can do to increase our education quality is to make sure more money is going directly into the classroom, that’s what is important. It’s not that we’re spending more money for students, it’s that we’re spending more money in the classroom. We are spending more money directly on education. When we compare our budget to Lockhart I.S.D.’s budget we’ll see that they only spend about 11 percent of their budget paying off their debts and we spend about 16.5 percent of our budget paying off our debts. Now, that 5 percent difference may not seem like a lot, but our budget this year was $80 million. Five percent of $80 million is $4 million. That’s $4 million that’s not going to direct education of our students. One solution I think we could certainly agree on is that more money needs to be going directly into the classroom and in order to do that we are going to have to make decisions that save us money in the long run so we can have more money to spend directly on education.