Former board President Carlos Elizondo won re-election Tuesday to the Brownsville Independent School District Board of Trustees with 48% of the vote, beating out two other candidates in a three-way race.
In unofficial results, but with 43 of 43 precincts counted, Elizondo polled 13,358 votes, 48% of the total, to 7,695 and 28.6%, for Trustee Drue Brown and 6,527 and 23.4% for Philip T. Cowen.
Both Cowen and Elizondo previously served on the board, Cowen from 1986-89, 1992-95 and 2016-20. Elizondo served from 2012-2016.
Only a plurality of the votes is required to win election to the BISD board. BISD holds elections every two years alongside the U.S. General Election.
Elizondo attributed his victory to the community, saying the vote showed people “believed I still have what it takes to make the community great. …I believe the community wanted change and saw that I was one of the individuals that could bring that about. We need to bring back respect to our educators. We need to bring back respect to our students, and we need to bring back respect to BISD,” he said.
In the race for Position Four, Frank Ortiz, a retired BISD administrator, defeated board vice president Prisci Roca Tipton by about 4,400 votes.
Ortiz, a former principal at Burns and Cromack elementary schools and a student teacher trainer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, polled 16,011 votes, 57.9% of the total, to 11,618 and 42% for Roca Tipton.
For Position Two, Trustee Denise Garza defeated Victor Caballero, a retired principal at Garden Park Elementary and Perkins Middle School, by about 4,200 votes.
Garza polled 15,907 votes, 57.6% of the total, to 11,695 and 42.4% for Caballero.
Garza was running for election to her first full term on the board, having won election in 2020 to the unexpired term of Erasmo Castro, who resigned from the board.
She ran on the progress BISD has made over the last two years and the raises employees received in BISD’s most recent budget.
Roca Tipton thanked people and organizations who supported her campaign, which she said was dedicated to her son, Scott Roca Tipton, and all the children in Brownsville.
“I hope to inspire them as much as they have inspired me,” she said in a statement to The Herald.
Brown said she takes pride in having run a positive campaign.
“I firmly believe in the power of public education to improve students’ lives. I have shown these past four years that I am independent, hard working, and clear thinking. I have spent this campaign listening to our students, parents, employees and the community and I share their concern for school safety,” Brown said in a statement to The Herald.
