When three progressive candidates announced their bids for Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustee positions earlier this year, they vowed to “take back” the board from a far-right conservative majority that banned books, fired librarians and removed entire chapters from textbooks that referenced vaccines and climate change.
The progressives won and will be sworn into office this week, immediately taking their seats for a board work session at 6 p.m. Thursday, December 11.
So can Cy-Fair parents expect sweeping policy changes, staff pay hikes and reinstated textbook chapters?
Well, they can expect those discussions to take place in the board room, but change, particularly measures involving the budget, won’t happen overnight, said new trustee Lesley Guilmart, who was elected November 4 along with Cleveland Lane Jr. and Kendra Camarena.
The new board members will join Justin Ray, Todd LeCompte and Christine Kalmbach, who have traditionally voted with the conservative slate, and Julie Hinaman, an ally of the progressives. A new board president will be elected at Thursday’s meeting.
Guilmart and Lane said there’s no tension between them and the current board members who supported their opponents.
“I’m a person about the kids,” Lane said. “So whatever we’ve got to do to make sure that our kids and our schools succeed, I can work with anybody. We’ve had conversations. There’s no bad blood. It’s about business now, and we’ve got to take care of this school district.”
The Houston Press reached out to Ray, a vocal supporter for Lane’s opponent and former board president Scott Henry, but he could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Guilmart, a former CFISD teacher and instructional leader for the Harris County Department of Education and the current president of the nonprofit Cypress Families for Public Schools, spoke to the Press on Monday as she was preparing to go to new trustee orientation.
She said she planned to chat with Superintendent Doug Killian at the orientation and learn more about “the ins and outs” of how the school board operates. Guilmart secured 51 percent of the vote in the November election, handily securing the Position 5 seat over Radele Walker (34 percent) and Terrance Edmond (15 percent).
“In terms of positive change that we can make and harmful decisions that we can reverse, I’d absolutely like to do that,” she said, specifically addressing the curriculum alterations. “It can be put on an agenda and it’s certainly something I’m thinking about.”
Lane said he’s also prepared to initiate those discussions.
“We’re going to sit down with the current board members and see what are the low-hanging fruits we can take care of now and then plan future actions,” he said. “We are going to see what we can do to give back to the community. That’s what they want. They truly want us to show growth and get this district back to where it’s a family atmosphere.”
Camarena, a former educator who leads economic development and partnerships in the office of Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones, could not be reached for comment this week. Camarena garnered 49 percent of the vote for her position over George Edwards’ 38 percent and Elecia Jones’ 13 percent.
It’s fair to surmise that Camarena also agrees with reinstating the missing textbook chapters. She said at an October candidates forum that she had to “fill in some of the knowledge” that her daughter missed because of the chapters removed from science textbooks.
“I want to make sure that she has access to that information when she goes to college in the near future,” Camarena said at the time.
Lane said that most of the people he talked to on the campaign trail moved to CFISD for the schools and were surprised “about the things that were going on” in the board room.
“Everyone has told us that they know we can’t change everything overnight but they’re going to be there to support us,” he said. “People want to have a normal, calm district. They don’t want to be on the news for the wrong things. They want to show what the kids are doing. When the world looks at Cy-Fair ISD, we want them to see a beacon of education.”
Tara Cummings, a parent and psychologist who previously worked as a public school teacher, vetted and elevated the progressive slate through her Cy-Fair Community Voices Coalition because she said she was concerned about the direction the district was going under former board vice president Natalie Blasingame, a devout conservative Christian nationalist who was ousted by Lane in the November election.
“The Christian nationalist agenda is designed to tear down public education,” Cummings said. “It was damaging because they were doing things that are antithetical to the best interests of growing, learning students. When you’re limiting library materials and censoring textbooks — constitutional rights aside — our students are not going to be prepared to be successful at universities or colleges or in vocational programs because they didn’t get everything they needed.”
“So many students of color reported that they felt under fire,” she added. “LGBTQ students reported that they felt like they were victimized by their school board. They were running our teachers off and they were treating them so disrespectfully. Now we have a school board majority that trusts teachers and respects teachers as qualified professionals and wants them to do what they were trained and gifted to do. Students can just be students and focus on learning.”
Anticipating a $138 million budget deficit for the 2024-25 school year, CFISD trustees voted last year to slash half the district’s librarians and cut more than 300 teacher positions. That left 42 librarians to serve 117,000 students and 88 schools, meaning library hours were drastically reduced, Cummings said.
The Cy-Fair mom said she believes swift changes can be made but understands that some things can’t happen immediately. The board typically adopts its budget in June.
“We’re still in a budget crisis so it’s not like they can just give raises and reinstate librarians because where is that money going to come from?” she said. “From my perspective, the first piece of business needs to be [revisiting] those chapters [that were removed from textbooks] because that won’t cost anything.”
Critics have said that a districtwide curriculum change shouldn’t be done mid-school year, but Cummings said she doesn’t see why not.
“Educators know how to lesson plan and they know how to teach,” she said. “Give them the curriculum. They will teach it and they will probably be like, Thank you so much. This is so much better than the scraps we’ve been working from with all these stupid nonsense limitations.”
The nonpartisan school board race polarized the community that’s home to the third-largest district in Texas, and Guilmart said she hopes to get acclimated quickly so she can look at the bigger picture of public education in Texas.
“Very soon, we’re going to have to start discussing and making decisions about the budget for the upcoming year, which is going to be really challenging, as it has been for the past couple of years,” she said. “We’re in a really difficult spot with school finance, which is an issue that goes back to the state, the legislature, Austin and TEA.”
“We’re going to have some tough decisions to make and I’m committed to making those decisions through the lens of what is going to be best for students, staff and the community,” she added.
The previous Cy-Fair school board spent a lot of time talking about a state law that mandates youth in public schools be addressed with the pronouns they were assigned at birth and went to great lengths to ensure that books with controversial subject matter like gender identity, sex or profanity were removed from inventory. Under current board policy, if any book goes missing or needs to be replaced, the board has to approve it.
The district is also named in a lawsuit brought by parents and multifaith leaders challenging the constitutionality of a state law mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom.
So what does the new progressive board majority mean for students?
Guilmart said it “means that there are now individuals guiding the district who value every single child, no matter their background, their identity and their walk of life, and who understand the complexity of educating students from all walks of life in a public education system.”
“How your leadership functions impacts your entire organization and the people you serve, so my hope is that over time, our students and our staff will begin to feel welcome and safe, especially those who maybe haven’t felt that way over the last several years,” she said.
Gulmart has advocated for paraprofessional pay increases, something she said she’ll continue to bring up in the board room with the understanding that the discussion about a living wage goes beyond Cy-Fair ISD.
“I believe that anybody working a full-time job deserves a wage that allows them to live with dignity and to thrive,” she said. “I’m in a position now where I will do whatever I can to help make that a reality. I am also clear-eyed about the obstacles to doing that, considering our budget challenges. I know that the source of our budget issues is a systemic one. It’s a state issue. It’s really important to me that we are focused on the root cause and correcting that in addition to trying to mitigate the pain for people in the short term.”
“We have got to make a change as a state, frankly, in order to get the kinds of compensation, working conditions and programming that everybody in our district deserves,” she added.
Cummings agreed, saying Texans must elect and support legislators who are for public education. “Otherwise we’re just rolling a boulder up a hill and getting flattened by that same boulder coming back down,” she said. “This is our time to extend what we did in Cy-Fair ISD to our state offices and make sure we are electing people with the best interests of public schools in mind.”
The End of a Christian Nationalist Era
Blasingame, who ran in November against Lane and fellow incumbent Henry, appeared to pose the most problems for parents in the district who supported the progressive slate.
But it seemed the one-term trustee who was elected in 2023 after two unsuccessful bids could do no wrong in the eyes of the Harris County Republican Party, which endorsed her before the filing deadline and stuck by her even after it was revealed that she’d made secret audio recordings of two GOP precinct chairs, both of whom resigned in the wake of the controversy.
The board adopted a policy barring trustees from secretly recording conversations with each other, members of the public and district administrators. Blasingame didn’t balk at the policy but accused the school board of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act for attempting to discuss it in closed session.
She admitted, however, to recording conversations, a practice she said she employs to protect herself against people who make false accusations against her.
Blasingame’s close friend Damon “Bam” Lenahan also got involved in the fray, engaging in social media attacks and threatening to release the audio when one of the community members who was recorded pledged her support for another candidate.
Blasingame filed Monday for House District 138 and will face incumbent Rep. Lacey Hull in the Republican primary.
After the secret recording controversy fizzled, the Republican-backed CyFair4Liberty political action committee distributed a mail piece in October encouraging district residents to vote for Blasingame, Walker and Edwards and using photos of the late conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk. The mailer suggested that nationwide violence has escalated as “the result of the leftist and Marxist takeover of our schools.”
“It is years and years of indoctrinating our kids to accept and normalize radical ideas,” the mailer stated. “If you wouldn’t vote for a Democrat at state and national elections, why do it locally?”
Guilmart, Lane and Camarena have all voted in Democratic primaries but stayed away from the partisan label during the election, instead referring to themselves as “pro-public education” candidates.
Lane, who earned about 45 percent of the vote over Blasingame’s 34 percent and Henry’s 21 percent, didn’t “go low” on the campaign trail and blast his opponents during public forums. Lane, an associate professor at Prairie View A&M University, “is just not a petty person,” Cummings said.
“[The progressive candidates] understood what’s important, and who they are is educators and public servants,” she said. “Our opponents absolutely helped us. Their shenanigans worked in our favor. Our coalition and supporters felt like other people could fight those battles. Our candidates needed to talk about what they were going to do.”
Lane said he stood on “who I am and what I’ve done for the community.”
“Every time I look at this trustee position, it’s always the kids over politics,” he said. “I don’t want it to ever be forgotten that we’re always thinking about the children, teachers, paraprofessionals and staff. When people lose sight of that, that’s when things start going awry.”
The Cy-Fair school board race caught the attention of Democrats like gubernatorial candidate and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, who lauded the progressive victory at an event for California Gov. Gavin Newsom in November. Guilmart got a congratulatory call from former presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“It’s a huge deal,” Guilmart said. “We’re a very large school district known to be in a conservative-leaning region of the Houston area. I think we were seen as underdogs in a lot of ways and I think it gave a lot of people hope, and folks across the political spectrum just want government to work and do what it’s supposed to do.”
Cummings said she was surprised but not shocked that a school board election was being talked about nationally.
“We had been saying since leading into the 2021 election cycle, this is a nationwide partisan effort to take over public schools,” she said. “What’s happening here is very local, but the playbook that [Republicans] are running is not local. That’s national.”
A Winning Strategy
Cummings said the strategy that worked for the progressives was turning out new voters who don’t typically cast ballots in school board elections. They knocked on doors in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods south of U.S. 290 and south of Texas State Highway 529, where school board candidates don’t typically bother going, she said.
“Our strategy was multi-pronged but probably the biggest push was for block-walking, like actually talking to voters at their doorsteps,” Cummings said. “We wanted to highlight the political circus that was happening without getting sucked into it. Like, call it out for what it is but focus on what our candidates are going to do once elected.”
Cummings said she hopes voters remain engaged and hold the new trustees accountable.
“We have really deep and really genuine relationships now. They are beholden to the community and to stakeholders, and we are stakeholders, but they are not beholden to us, like, we got you elected, now fall in line,” Cummings said. “Really the foundation of our coalition was based on the most important and only thing that matters is the best interest of the district. That’s going to be our north star in holding them accountable.”
“If you talk to them at all or see anything that they’ve been posting since they were elected, they are saying, ‘Hold us accountable.’ They ran, genuinely, on transparency and accountability,” she added. “There won’t be secret recordings. There won’t be yelling and screaming. There won’t be fisticuffs. It may just be, hey, help me to understand what this decision is about.”
The new trustees should take some time to get acclimated, she added.
“That’s such a beautiful departure from the attitudes and the actions of the MAGA trustees because when they came in, they were promising the sun and the moon and the stars from the conservative perspective,” she said. “As soon as they had the majority, they enacted the playbook but they were so focused on running through these partisan agenda items that they hadn’t even learned their jobs.”
Guilmart said she encourages those who elected her — and those who didn’t — to stay engaged.
“I hope folks will continue tuning into the board meetings, paying attention and reaching out with input and concerns because we’re going to make positive change for our district together. It’s going to take the community,” she said.
“There’s a lot to juggle and consider,” she added. “It’s a huge district. Public ed is complex. It is up to the people to guide their elected officials in terms of what is important to focus on, so I really depend on the partnership of the community to work together and make sure we’re focused on the right things.”
The trustee-elect said the district can get in trouble when people start to get complacent.
“We plan to be a stabilizing force and have zero intention of the kind of drama that we saw in the past but we really need citizens to stay engaged and continue advocating to make sure our district succeeds,” she said.
She added that she thinks the progressives won because they were unified and disciplined in their messaging but also the timing was right.
“People were experiencing in real time the harm of a board that couldn’t govern well and were ready for change,” she said.
Lane said he’s still meeting with community groups and parents, so there’s no downtime just because the election is over.
“You don’t get to turn off,” he said. “That’s the key, not just educating the kids and working for the teachers, but the families in the district have to be educated on what is going on. We ran on the fact that we were going to stay engaged in the community, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“We know that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint, but we know in the end, we’re all better off the more educated everybody is,” he said. “It’s going to be kids over politics.”
Cummings said she’ll be at the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday and expects the support of the progressive candidates will continue, as will the demand for transparency.
“I’m really excited to see them govern,” she added. “I know it will be slow work of making improvements and gaining back the ground that we lost. I feel really good about the people that they are and the trustees they will be.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.