Preview: Dallas County School Board election

by Jeff Melcher

There are four candidates running for two seats on the Dallas County Schools (DCS) board of trustees.

The DCS board is often mistakenly confused with the Dallas ISD board of trustees. But the DCS is entirely separate. The county organization is one of two historic government agencies dating back to times prior to the conception of the "independent school district". (The other such agency operates near Houston.)

The Dallas County Schools serves not only Dallas ISD schools but districts and charters all over the county and, with such districts as Grand Prairie that sprawl beyond county lines, slightly beyond. Primarily the DCS offers transportation services on its buses -- and operates a bus fleet larger than DART. Their budget is larger than most of the county's ISDs, and it is spent with minimal news coverage. The election this year is one of the few opportunities voters, parents and taxpayers have to make any comment or have any influence over the agency.

The two seats open are, this year, both "at large" seats, meaning every voter in Dallas County will see these candidates names on the ballot and be offered a choice. Since major news coverage has been so scant, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the people who are running to the readership.

Please take all the following with substantial doses of salt -- this is the product of one long lazy afternoon's web searching, not an exhaustive series of actual, you know, phone calls, reporting and research. Corrections are invited. Anyhow, when voters go into the booth and mark for any two of these four to help oversee and manage several hundred million dollars worth of equipment and the lives of 100,000 kids over the next three years, we'll have at least a few misconceptions, lies, and errors with which to decide. Sort of like the trustees themselves, hearing the presentations of the administration...).

The first candidate is the sole incumbent, Larry Duncan of Dallas. Mr. Duncan is a lawyer with a long history of political activity in Dallas. In 2003 candidate Duncan told reporters the biggest problem with the DCS was, in short, "Nobody watches it." That problem, in the six years since he first won a seat, has gone so far unresolved. Mr. Duncan is now well-known, not so much for his current seat on the DCS board, as for his aspirations to other elected office. In February of 2007, while serving on DCS, he announced his intention to defeat 20 other candidates and be elected mayor of Dallas. He's still on the board of the DCS. In July of 2008 he advised newsmen and the public that he was interested in running in the Democratic primary to challenge County Judge Jim Foster. That race, when and if, will almost as crowded as the Dallas mayor's race, with some four other prominent local elected officials, in addition to Foster himself, having announced such intentions. The five-way Democratic primary will occur in early 2010. Meanwhile, Duncan intends to keep his name before the voters and his credentials burnished with a few months of additional service on the DCS board. During the past six years, Duncan has been named in various lawsuits by disgruntled employees who have claimed they were unfairly fired. Those complaints have so far been dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity. He's seen legal fees charged his agency skyrocket. The administration he oversees has been late two years in a row with their annual audit. And lately he has been considering plans to expand the agency headquarters on Zang Blvd by taking adjacent property via eminent domain. And he has advocated, but not won passage, of state legislation that would require seat belts on school buses and therefore necessarily add one-third more vehicles to the DCS fleet. It's not certain which of these he considers his most impressive accomplishment.

At one opposite pole from Duncan is another Democratic candidate, a native of the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. Cassie (Cassandra) Gandara is an employee and apparently a political protege of Domingo Garcia. (We'll come back to that relationship in a moment, as secondary.) Gandara is a young newcomer, a recently graduated lawyer. She took her business administration degree and graduated from UT Dallas in 2004. She was honored cum laude and specialized in Management Information systems, government and politics. She earned her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 2007 and began practice in November that year. Her bilingual abilities on top of other skills led to her position with the Garcia firm. She's also been a founder of various chapters of LULAC and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Greater Dallas. The Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance endorses Gandara with the claim she is not only supportive of gay-rights, but is an "out" lesbian. Her support of and by affinity alliance groups has as yet revealed no particular issue related to schools, or school busing, that has been recorded in local media.

Her mentor and employer Domingo Garcia, on the other hand, has a long paper-trail in Dallas. It would be unfair to attribute the problems and accomplishments of Garcia -- or his equally-active spouse and Dallas mayor pro-tem Elba Garcia -- to the newcomer Cassie Gandara. It is only perhaps worth noting that any law firm, Garcia's or others, depends to a great extent on the ability of partners and associates to act as "rainmakers" who can steer business to the firm. The DCS has, in recent years, sent a lot of "rain" to various local law firms. Whether or not electing one more lawyer on to one more government job is a good thing or not is left to Dallas County voters to decide.

A pole apart from the young, well-educated, and rapidly rising Ms. Gandara, we meet Homer Fincannon. Mr. Fincannon, in his late sixties, has been a self-employed exterminator (of rats and bugs, not political opponents) in Duncanville for decades. He has run for Duncanville city council, the city's mayor, local school district seats, the state legislature, and possibly other offices I have been so far unable to identify, all over a twenty year career in local -- often Republican -- politics. He has sometimes succeeded in winning his elections. His career has been notable for successfully avoiding deep and abiding animosity among his opponents, successors and the community. It appears instead that voters generally got the nice-guy kind of middling service they expected from a man who chooses to go by the name of "Homer" and -- sometimes -- are okay with that; although a little of it seemingly goes about as far any anyone wants or needs.

Finally, and again about as different a candidate from any of the others as can be imagined, let's look at Mary Darby. Ms. Darby is the sort of political person that every organization wants and not enough have -- organized, faithful, competent, and shy. I don't mean personally shy, but the sort of person who in general does NOT want her name out on yard signs or prominent on the ballot (as I say, poles apart from Duncan and Fincannon.) Darby has been running tea parties for the local ladies of the GOP long before "tea parties" became mobs of rabble protesting taxes and bailouts. She has run the sort of small, personal, political event which teaches us the history and importance of the Electoral College and the relationship between Republicans and Suffragettes in the late 19th century. It's a natural role for a professional teacher, who has served in the public schools of Garland (and a local prison...). The party counts on Darby, and others like her, to fill the halls at the state and national conventions; and even serve as electors to that "College" during presidential season, which Darby has recently done. A little bit more unconventional is her role in hosting ladies' night at her local shooting range where she helps teach self-defense and how to get a concealed handgun permit. But I'm sure it can be argued that teaching is teaching; whether history or gun safety -- and Darby seems to be the only one of the four candidates for the DCS seats that has any professional background in an actual school. It's a little bit scary to contemplate what might happen if an actual teacher wound up in charge of a large school system. But change is always a little scary and sometimes it turns out to be interesting, too.

So, those are the folks who have put themselves forward to watch out for your money and your kids. All of 'em seem to this writer to be okay. Any of 'em has a few problems. We'll probably muddle along whichever ones we pick. But I thought it'd be good to have the conversation about how this one or that is smart or dumb or progressive or reactionary before we voted, rather than after. What do you think?

This article was submitted by a member of the Pegasus News community.

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