SMCISD Election Interview: Danny Gonzales
Danny Gonzales Sits Down With Corridor News
By, Haley Hartt
Campaign Finance Report Not Submitted
Q 1: If elected, what will you do to build consensus, community support and help lead our school district forward?
Danny: As far as the community support, be open and give them the information and make sure the community is informed in what the district is doing and be available to answer any questions. We are working towards kind of having some community meetings to where they can come out and meet with us, the board members, or superintendent. I believe that will be us going in the right direction as far as getting the community involved with the school district and being informed.
Q 2: What is the ideal relationship between board and superintendent?
Danny: The ideal relationship is to make sure that we have the school district and children’s best interest in our decision-making and make sure that everybody is informed and as far as the board, he is the only employee we have. We have to make sure that he’s doing what we requested. For us to monitor his decisions and make sure that they are going in the right direction and helping our district and our children.
Q 3: Do you agree that the superintendent should sit at the head of the dais and help lead the meeting or should meetings be similar in structure and format to that of our city council?
Danny: Well our board president and superintendent sit side-by-side at the meeting table and that’s okay. I don’t see an issue with it. I mean, the superintendent is the one that’s monitoring the day-by-day actions of our district and he should be very informed and let us know or answer any questions we may have.
Q 4: Although there were funds allocated in the May 2013 Bond Election our school board recently spent an additional $850,000 purchasing a score board for our district’s new Multi-Purpose Athletic Stadium using funds from our district’s reserve accounts. Do you agree or support this purchase?
Danny: I would have requested a little more information on it on the item. I wasn’t on the board at the time.
Q 5: In what instances do you deem it is appropriate to utilize our district’s fund balance?
Danny: When it is helping our kids and our school district and making us better as a district.
Q 6: Do you support the way our current board is elected? If given the opportunity, would you keep our five single member district and two at-large trustee system of representation the same?
Danny: That is a tough question to answer. There are pros and cons to both ways. The single number districts you need to make sure we have representation across our district. If you make them all at-large, then you are going to have to stand a chance to have more representation from one side or the other. There are pros and cons to doing it both ways. I am okay with the way that we have it right now.
Q 7: Do you think televising school board meetings is important? If elected, how long do you think it will take until our school district begins televising meetings?
Danny: We are putting something on the agenda and are working, we got a live stream going on right now and working towards televising it. It just depends on where the funds come from, but we do have a live stream going on right now. That was something that was put on the agenda by me.
Q 8: The Texas Education Agency’s 2013-2014 Texas Academic Performance Report for San Marcos CISD tells us that only 44% of San Marcos High School graduates are deemed college ready in both math and language arts. Is this acceptable?
Danny: No, it is not acceptable. We are always trying to head in the right direction. Our scores are increasing. Are we where we want to be? No. Are we working to give our school teachers succeed and make our children college ready? Yeah, absolutely. We are working on that. We are working hard every day.
