Will Former Katy ISD Trustees Endorsed Trustees Win Re-Election?

Eight former Katy ISD board of trustees penned an endorsement letter as early voting in the district school board election is underway, voicing their support of re-electing trustees Dawn Champagne and Rebecca Fox.

The memo listed the two current trustees as the best candidates to serve the needs of everyone in the district and tackle the ongoing attacks aimed at weakening public schools. It encouraged voters to cast their ballots in what some may consider a low-profile election — which the handful of signatories argued couldn’t be further from the truth.

Henry Dibrell, the first trustee of color elected in the district, signed the document along with fellow former trustees Chris Crockett, Susan Gesoff, Duke Keller, Bill Lacy, Bryan Michalsky, Greg Schulte and Leah Wilson.

According to Dibrell, the community shares concerns that if challengers Donovan Campbell and David Olson are elected, the district will continue moving in a conservative direction and prioritize issues that the eight ex-trustees say do not serve students.

“The culture [of the board] dominates the outcome, and the current culture is not seeking to better themselves,” Dibrell said. “They seem to be seeking to move an agenda forward.”

The four most recently elected members, board president Victor Perez, Morghan Calhoun, Mary Ellen Cuzuela and Amy Thieme, create a conservative majority. Calhoun, Cuzuela and Thieme were endorsed by Texans For Educational Freedom, a well-known political action committee that fights the existence of LGBTQ+ content and critical race theory instruction in public schools. Perez received contributions from the Freedom Foundation of Texas PAC, a similar group.

Under this stronghold, the board has passed policies that Dibrell and others take issue with, such as the gender fluidity policy passed last year. This measure requires parents to be notified if their children ask to be addressed by a different pronoun. Since its passage, more than a dozen sets of parents have been told of their child’s request.

“They are arguing over parents’ notification about their kids’ [gender identity]. First, that is really none of the school’s business, but that definitely shouldn’t be the school’s top priority,” Dibrell said. “The whole issue with the books – again, that’s not either.”

Lacy, who served on the board from 2017 to 2020, added that he was adamantly against how the gender fluidity policy was proposed and voted on, completely disregarding community and professional input about the potential ramifications of such a measure.

“The current group realizes that they have a majority, and they’re going to do what they want,” Lacy said. “Period, end of story.”

Katy ISD also cracked down on its book challenge and banning process. It revised its board policy to allow bypassing committee review if two board members agree to a title’s removal. Trustees also expanded the language by which a book could be pulled, including the term “nudity.” This caused more titles to be taken off district shelves.

Dibrell said instead of letting national politics creep into an area it shouldn’t enter, trustees should focus on the student needs and maintaining the district’s academic achievements.

He also suggested working on wrap-around services for those who are lower income, providing early college high school, offering more trade-based education and expanding the district’s military ROTC programs.

Lacy echoed Dibrell’s request for the district to focus on quality education, “Katy is top in academics, athletics, technical education,” he said. “Keeping those standards high is what our community expects.”

He said he felt compelled to endorse Champagne and Fox for several reasons, including wanting to ensure that those voting elected trustees who didn’t take funds from political action committees not only outside Katy but also located out of state.

“The other two people running for the same positions seem to be cut from the same cloth,” Lacy said. “It’s evident that they are backed by the same groups and political action committees that backed the folks that won last year.”

“They are very one-dimensional, not only in terms of who they support but also in terms of the things that they’re trying to pass or have passed,” he added. “They don’t seem to understand that public school is there for everyone, not just one particular group.”

According to several reports, Campbell and Olson are backed by the 1776 Project PAC, a conservative pro-voucher, anti-LGBTQ+ political action committee that flaunts its stance against what they refer to as indoctrination in the classroom and their support of parental rights in public schools. The committee has endorsed hundreds of candidates nationwide in school board elections and claims to be changing education one school board at a time.

Olson is also supported by the True Texas Project PAC, another political action committee that is a part of the Defend Texas Liberty network — a group mostly funded by billionaire oil tycoon Tim Dunn — that has been classified as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to its co-leaders Julie and Fred McCarty’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Lacy said he is also against the misinformation running rampant via mailers and discussions referring to Champagne and Fox as liberals by Campbell and Olson’s respective camps.

“I’ve known [Fox] for several years,” he said. “We’ve had cordial discussions about different things, Dawn and I do when we were on the board, but we always respected each other.”

“This is a bipartisan election. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or a member of the purple-people-eater party,” he added. “It doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to make decisions. You’re supposed to be a trustee for a district, and that’s a whole different level of representation.”

Lacy noted that having a supermajority can be dangerous as everyone has the same mindset, and there may be no open conversations about district matters.

He is particularly concerned about having most trustees potentially support state efforts when the upcoming legislative session rolls around, and school vouchers are back on the table.

“I just hope the community makes a good decision,” Dibrell said. “Because the board’s culture will eventually seep into the district’s culture.”