TPR interviewed all 12 NEISD school board candidates and attended forums for the candidates hosted by the North East ISD Council of PTAs. Visit the NEISD website to input your address and find your single member district. To read about all 12 candidates, return to the main voter guide. Scroll down to the bottom of this story for links to guides on the other four races.
Interviews have been condensed for brevity and relevance.
Single Member District 1 — Churchill High School Cluster
Two candidates are vying to represent the Churchill High School cluster in Single Member District 1. Long-serving moderate board member Sandy Hughey decided not to run for reelection this year, leaving the seat open.
Michael Gurwitz
Age: 76
Occupation: former tax lawyer; retired Alamo Colleges math instructor
Political affiliations: Parents United for Freedom PAC
Reason for running: “I've been around a long time, and I haven't seen the country this divided. And I’m just very concerned how we come back together.
“One of the problems is the warring camps immediately assume the worst about the other side. The outliers and the other side become what people think the other side represents. So, we need to have a vehicle where we're interacting. And so, the school board should be that place.
“Before there were any, let's just say, conservatives on the board, before 2020, I’ve been told that the board had 750 consecutive votes that were unanimous. That doesn't sound like any group of people that I've ever known.
“If you go to the Texas Education Code section 4.01, it expressly says that parents are necessary a component of the child receiving education. And it further goes on to say that objective number one of public education in Texas is that the parents are to be full partners with the educators in the education of their kids. So, if you have a group of parents who come along and say, 'We want to be more involved,' from their point of view, are they being ideological? Or are they in compliance with the intent of the Texas Education Code?”
Priorities if elected: "I think parents and students deserve a reasonably accurate assessment of where the children stand. And I'm very suspicious of the grades. The grade point averages are astounding. ... State testing, which is independent of the grades given by the district to its own students, paint a different picture.”
Gurwitz said in the early 2000s, before he started teaching at the Alamo Colleges, he taught high school math in San Antonio for three years: one year at a charter school, one year at a private school, and one year at Northside ISD’s John Jay High School.
“[John Jay] was my first exposure to practices that are designed to create good looking results with no substance. I was given a [passing rate] quota, and I was told if I met my quota, we were all good.”
Would you have voted for NEISD’s new, more conservative sex ed curriculum?
Gurwitz said he would vote in favor of teaching sex ed in school if parents opt into it, as they do at NEISD (and as required by state law).
“As far as I'm concerned, parents are in control of values. And so, we should accommodate that wherever we can.”
Many of the books NEISD pulled from school libraries in 2022 had LGBTQ characters or themes. Do you think LGBTQ books should have greater scrutiny?
“I haven't studied the books that were involved. And as I said, that's not an issue that I'm up to speed on. And then there's the issue of what grades were involved in that. What grades were they concerned about children not having access to those books? I don't know that.”
“I lived in San Francisco for 30 years. I have many friends who belong to that community, so I don't have any biases. I think we're all made in God's image. But I think there's a certain innocence for children that is valuable.”
What about Black history?
“No one's saying, 'don't talk about the evils of slavery,' but don't adopt what the "1619 Project" says as gospel. We want a more honest assessment, good and bad, about what happened.”
Would you have voted to allow chaplains to serve as counselors in NEISD schools?
“There are apparently reports that schools have benefited substantially, particularly teachers, as I understand it, when they've introduced chaplains. I'm sure there's a contra argument. I have not heard the contra argument. There's also an argument that the legislation that the state had drafted was poorly drafted, which causes its own set of issues.
“To take a controversial issue and then have poorly drafted language is a prescription for disaster. So, I don't have enough information. I will say one thing: From what I know about chaplains, these are people who've gone through a certain training, and it's my understanding that they don't pray, or they're not supposed to be proselytizing their particular faith when they're interacting with whomever.
I'm Jewish, and I personally would not have any problem with someone who had that training speaking to my child if my child felt the need to outreach.”
Are you in favor of school vouchers? Would you advocate against them if elected? (Question and answer from PTA forum)
“Vouchers would introduce additional competition for the district. There's also already competition from charter schools, and the charter schools have been doing very well within NEISD.”
“I am concerned that we have all of these options within NEISD, these magnet programs, special programs, and yet parents seem to be taking their children out of the district. So, my concern is we're not doing well with the competition that already exists, and we should be focused on making ourselves as competitive as possible.
“I'm sort of honored that the thought would be that I could decide for the State of Texas whether we'd have a voucher system.”
NEISD, like many Texas school districts, is facing a budget deficit this year due to rising costs, the end of federal COVID relief, and flat state funding. What parts of the budget would you prioritize as a trustee?
“This would be an area that I have not made a deep dive. But look, you have revenues, and you have expenses. And if there's a mismatch, you need to prioritize things. If something is mandatory, then it's mandatory. And then the issue is can we comply with our obligation more cheaply. And I think in that regard you need outside help.
“The first thing I would want to look at is, what's the size of our workforce now compared to what it was when we were much larger? Because you have a tendency to not adjust to the changes. But I couldn't tell you right now that we are overstaffed.”
Lisa Thompson
Age: 43
Occupation: substitute teacher / PTA mom; former NEISD teacher
Political affiliations: Bexar County Champions for Public Education PAC
Reason for running: “I'm proud of our district, and I really love public education. I believe in it. It's kind of the great equalizer.”
“I've had to resign from it, but I was part of the North East Council of PTAs, and that brought me into kind of the world of what is happening on our school board. And so recently that has been a reason to run, because I see some — I don't want to say chaos — but I just see behavior that is not getting things done.
“I think the division, in terms of getting business done, is a problem when we're stuck at three and three, and things don't get passed. And then our children are the ones paying for that. I really don't like that. And then, as for the direction, I worry about the direction. This is an opportunity for it to shift one way or the other.”
Priorities if elected: “My priority is taking care of our children and taking care of our teachers and families. I want everybody to feel connected to their schools and engage with their schools.
“I hear from the other side [that parents don’t have enough access to the district]. The doors are open. We want and need parents to be involved in their child's education. So, priorities to me are community engagement and having stellar teachers who are teaching our kids and getting a wonderful education.
“I've also heard this idea about a lack of transparency. And as a parent myself, everything I need to know about my daughter's education is accessible to me. I can open up her Skyward account, and I can see what she had for lunch, what books she checked out, her graduation plan, her attendance, her volunteer hours. If I wanted to know about her curriculum, I can go online. And I feel personally that her teachers are accessible. I can email them, and within 24 hours I hear a response. And the same at the administrative level. If I had a concern, I would feel absolutely comfortable talking to the principal.”
Do you think NEISD’s discipline policies are working?
“As a teacher from in the classroom, what I can say is that they're hearing from this other side this no tolerance policy. If you have ever been in a classroom, that would be impossible.
“As a teacher, you can't get through five minutes of a lesson without somebody chattering or somebody messing with something in their desk. And so, if we're considering all those things distracted behavior that are discipline issues, that would mean I would need to stop my lesson right there.
“We wish we could say that COVID didn't change anything, but it did. It absolutely did. It changed student behavior. And we are all learning new ways to work with that.
“I just don't see a zero tolerance policy working. Teachers are excellent at managing behaviors. That's a huge part of what we do. And if there are behaviors that are beyond things that the teacher can address, there's great administration to back up those teachers.
“As a parent, you might see someone who got in trouble, and then they were gone for a couple of days, and now they're back at school. But it is our duty to educate all children. And so, when they are not in the chair at school, they are not learning.”
Thompson said there are occasional fights or an occasional weapon found at an NEISD school, but it’s not something that happens a lot.
“Every once in a while, is there somebody fighting? Yes, but our administrators take care of it.”
Would you have voted for NEISD’s new, more conservative sex ed curriculum?
“I would have voted for the one that says, 'We're going to teach abstinence, but also here's how to stay safe.' I think kids need to know medically accurate information.
“If you are relevant in a high school, this is happening, and it seems rather wrong to not teach our children these things.
“It has always been opt in. I can remember [when I was] teaching [elementary full time], sending home the maturation forms and collecting everybody's back and making sure that this is what their parents agreed to.”
Many of the books NEISD pulled from school libraries in 2022 had LGBTQ characters or themes. Do you think LGBTQ books should have greater scrutiny?
“Every book that comes on to a library and shelf is really carefully selected. It was put there for an educational purpose.
“NEISD has a process in place if someone wants to challenge a book. There is a way, a proper way, to do that. And if a parent doesn't want their child checking out a book, they let their librarian know, and librarians take care of that.
“I think that we learn from books, and we connect in our lives through books, and we can also just expand our knowledge about others in our world through books. To me, if a book is developmentally appropriate in terms of like reading level it's okay for the shelves. I mean, I'm not going to put a kindergarten picture book on a high school bookshelf that's not developmentally appropriate, and vice versa, I wouldn't put a high school level book on an elementary school shelf, but we learn from books. That's how we learn about our world.”
Would you have voted to allow chaplains to serve as counselors in NEISD schools?
“I would not. I appreciate chaplains and their work that they do in their capacity, but schools are not the place for chaplains. We have so many different religions. Even within religions there are different ways they do things. So, no, I would not have agreed to that.”
Are you in favor of school vouchers? Would you advocate against them if elected? (Question and answer from PTA forum)
“I am firmly against vouchers. I don't think that a world coexists where you can have vouchers and say that you support public education at the same time. The voucher system would allow parents access to $8,000 to $10,000 of taxpayer money for whatever program they choose, and that program perhaps has no state oversight. Whereas, our ISDs have regulations and rules that we follow, and that is what makes us a level playing field.
“If even 10% of our NEISD families chose to use vouchers, we have a total enrollment of about 60,000 people. That's $60 million leaving our district. And so, if you think budget things are trouble now, that would exacerbate this.
“And statistics show that a majority of the families who use vouchers were never in public schools anyway. They were attending private schools.
“My number one job is to support public education. It's a wonderful system that we have in place, and I want to continue that. … If there is a trustee up there who is not supporting public education, they don't deserve your vote.”
NEISD, like many Texas school districts, is facing a budget deficit this year due to rising costs, the end of federal COVID relief, and flat state funding. What parts of the budget would you prioritize as a trustee?
“I think that we have to look at, are we using our staffing resources efficiently? I mean, when you have a campus that only has maybe 300 kids, and they have to be staffed just like a campus with 800 kids, I can see that there is some tightening up that could be done there.
“What I love is that NEISD has experts, financial experts who know all of the things to look for to help get us in a better place. And just like I trust teachers to professionally teach, and I trust my curriculum people to thoroughly review curriculum. I trust our financial advisors to come up with a plan.”
- Single Member District 2 — Roosevelt High School cluster
- Single Member District 4 — MacArthur High School cluster
- Single Member District 5 — Johnson High School cluster
- Single Member District 6 — Reagan High School cluster
