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McALLEN — The McAllen ISD board of trustees voted 5-2 to name Brownsville ISD superintendent René Gutiérrez as the finalist for the district’s vacant superintendent position at a special meeting Monday.
The split vote appears to involve concerns over his salary in Brownsville.
Four months after their former superintendent J.A Gonzalez left McAllen ISD and took the helm at the Harlingen school district, the board named a finalist and by law must wait 21 days before negotiating a contract.
Trustees Sam Saldivar, Sofia Peña, Erica de la Garza-Lopez, Lucia Regalado and Aaron Rivera voted to approve the decision. Board president Debbie Crane Aliseda and trustee Elizabeth Kittleman voted against it.
The school board went into executive session at 7:03 p.m. and voted to name the finalist at 8:58 p.m.
Gutiérrez, who graduated from McAllen High School in 1983, has been the Brownsville ISD superintendent since June 2019. His experience includes being the Edinburg school district superintendent from 2009 to 2019. Prior to that, Gutiérrez worked as a teacher and administrator.
Obtaining his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees at the legacy institution University of Texas-Pan American, Gutiérrez first started school in Reynosa, Tamaulipas and then migrated to McAllen.
“It’s nice to have a hometown boy come back home and I think it would be the first time in the history of McAllen ISD that someone that’s a McAllen ISD grad is the superintendent of the school district,” Aliseda said following the meeting.
Aliseda said valuing Gutiérrez’s experience and expertise, ultimately voted no due to her concerns being “fiscally conservative” regarding the finalists base salary for the position.
“I believe his current base salary in Brownsville (ISD) presents a significant challenge for successful negotiations during these 21 days,” she said via text message Tuesday. “Our previous superintendent’s base salary was much more fiscally conservative.”
In a Brownsville ISD board meeting on June 28, the board approved an annual salary of $354,128 through June 30, 2025.
Trustees Peña and Regalado referred questions to Aliseda while Kittlemen, Rivera and Saldivar did not respond to requests for comment.
Aliseda previously told the Monitor via text on Sept. 26 that at a special board meeting on Sept. 25 that trustees started to look at a “substantial number of applications.”
The number of applications was not disclosed.
The Monitor filed a Texas Public Information Act request on Sept. 26 to see who applied and how many applications were submitted for the position. McAllen ISD has asked the Texas Attorney General if they can withhold the requested information from the public.
