PHARR — Valley View ISD staved off a possible state investigation by agreeing to a Texas Education Agency corrective action plan Thursday.
The investigation would have looked into whether the district followed state laws when it hired former superintendent Monica Luna.
Those same concerns prompted the board to suspend and remove Luna in 2020, about a month after she took the job.
Thursday’s action is a step that the district’s legal counsel says will have virtually no impact on the district and avoid a potentially bothersome investigation.
Luna was suspended from her position in November 2020 following a trustee election that saw four newcomers voted onto the board. In 2021, the district reached a settlement with Luna that allowed her to step down from the superintendency and stay on as an administrator. The settlement required the district to pay Luna her $185,000 annual salary through January of 2022 and a $150,000 annual salary from 2022 to 2024 before it can be adjusted.
The board tapped Silvia Ibarra as Luna’s permanent replacement in June last year.
After Luna reached a settlement with the district, district general counsel Gus Acevedo said the board suspended Luna because it feared her hiring process had been rushed and that “there may have been an error in both the Open Meetings Act and the way that it needed to be posted and acted upon and voted on by the board.”
On Thursday, Eden Ramirez with O’Hanlon, Demerath, & Castillo, the district’s special counsel, told the board that a private citizen lodged a complaint about similar potential violations, which prompted the TEA to give the district a choice: accept a corrective action plan or face a full-blown investigation that could have possibly led to some sort of intervention.
Ramirez said an investigation would have taken about a year.
The district had, however, addressed at least some of the concerns prior to TEA’s involvement, Ramirez said via text Friday.
“Before the complaint to TEA was issued and prior to TEA proposing the corrective action plan, the board of trustees were already working on addressing some of the concerns that were identified with the hiring of the previous superintendent by the prior board,” he wrote. “This included further board training, board education, and the hiring of a professional search consultant firm to ensure that policies were adhered to with the hiring of now Superintendent, Dr. Ibarra.”
Ramirez told the board that the corrective action plan consisted of eight requirements, among them stipulations to hold training, policy review, to seek guidance from TEA, and to follow rules of the education code. The district is already meeting all eight requirements, he said.
“So it’s very — how can I describe it — very superficial things they’re asking you to do that you’re already doing,” he said.
Agreeing to the corrective action plan, Ramirez noted, does not mean that the merits of the TEA complaint have been investigated, accepted or validated.
“And we are not making admission to the merits either,” he said. “We’re not admitting that anything happened, we’re not admitting that anything went on. All we’re saying is that we’re not even gonna get involved in this, we’re gonna dismiss the issue, just follow these eight steps.”
