Voices were raised and stern warnings later issued when a trustee argued for answers about how other items were added to Monday’s agenda.
SAN ANTONIO — Judson ISD on Monday unanimously voted to shut down Judson Middle School by the end of the current academic year as part of cost-saving efforts to address a roughly $37 million budget deficit.
The decision was between Judson or Kitty Hawk middle schools, with administration recommending closure of the former ahead of the vote. According to district documents, Judson Middle School is operating at 53% capacity amid an enrollment decline, which other school districts across San Antonio and Texas have also found themselves contending with.
The district also found that Judson Middle School was in need of $71 million in repairs, far more than the $45 million in repairs anticipated for Kitty Hawk.
“Closing a middle school can feel like closing a door,” Judson ISD Board President Monica Ryan said ahead of the vote. “But we must not lose sight of the doors that we are opening by doing this. Consolidation brings expanded resources, broader programming and increased opportunities for our students.”
A work obligation kept Trustee Jose Macias from attending the first part of the meeting and voting on the school closure. The board is also expected to vote on which three elementary schools it will close in a future meeting; five are at risk of closure.
“I’m just really sorry we’re here and we have to do that to families and to kids,” Trustee Laura Stanford said. “It’s not like we’re the only district that’s looking at things like this, but just know this is not what I wanted to be doing tonight.”
The meeting then turned tense when Ryan, while preparing to move the meeting into executive session to discuss potentially hiring a new interim superintendent, was interrupted by Trustee Suzanne Kenoyer. Kenoyer inquired about how those items were added to the executive-session portion of the agenda.
When Ryan said the items are a continuation of a previous closed-session conversations, Kenoyer argued that wasn’t the case.
“No, ma’am. We did not discuss changing interim superintendents during our last closed (session).”
“OK, you forgot,” Ryan responded.
“No, ma’am, it was not,” Kenoyer shot back. “This is a very destabilizing attempt to make.”
Mary Duhart-Toppen, the deputy superintendent of teaching and learning, was voted in as the acting superintendent the evening of Feb. 4, when the board voted 4-3 to recommend firing Superintendent Milton Fields III—the culmination of a contentious process that Macias called “BS.”
At that meeting, Ryan said the district was investigating complaints submitted by more than two dozen teachers against Fields, who had served in the role of superintendent since May 2023. But trustees who voted to keep Fields in the role, including Macias and Kenoyer, asserted the process has been an unfair one in which he hasn’t been able to defend himself in a public forum.
That division spilled into the public forum once more on Monday, when Kenoyer brought up concerns of what she called “another violation of the Open Meetings Act via a walking quorum.”
Kenoyer directly addressed other trustees about whether they had spoken with Ryan about placing the items on the agenda, at which point the back-and-forth escalated.
“You’re out of order,” Ryan said, before calling over an school officer in the room. “You will stop or you will be escorted out of this room.”
Kenoyer continued to assert she was trying to get clarity about the agenda items as a point of information. A uniformed officer is seen walking into frame of Judson ISD’s board meeting livestream before the audio is cut off. The back and forth between Kenoyer and Ryan visibly continues for a short while before the meeting moved into executive sessions.
At a special meeting over the weekend, trustees also discussed potentially investigating complaints involving Ryan and Macias.
After more than two and half hours of executive session, the board reemerged, this time with Kenover not in the room but Macias having arrived. He unsuccessfully motioned to delay voting to hire a new interim superintendent; the board instead moved to appoint a district outsider to replace Duhart-Toppen.
That decision, too, wasn’t without backlash from some trustees.
“The process is very troubling,” Stanford said, while acknowledging the experience of the new interim superintendent. “There’s a sense of a lack of transparency and board involvement, that there wasn’t full board involvement… I certainly didn’t have the clarity (about) the way this process was being handled.”
Macias was the only board member who voted against the new interim leader’s appointment.