So the District 8 DISD school board race (the vote is tomorrow) is between a pro-Miles candidate, Miguel Solis, and an anti-Miles candidate, Kristi Lara. This is important because there are currently four anti-Miles votes on what will be a nine-person board. (If you think that school board member Elizabeth Jones is pro-Miles just because she didn’t vote to fire him when she knew she didn’t have the votes to do so, then you’re just ridiculous.) This person will be the swing vote in whatever b.s. scandal the anti-Miles forces will drum up next — most probably merit pay for teachers, as Jim Schutze notes this week in the Observer.
Lara, you may know, brought and then dropped a ridiculous residency lawsuit against Solis. Schutze and others have wondered how Lara, who is unemployed, got super-mega-powerful-high-priced lawyer Lisa Blue to handle this case.
Let me be clear: I don’t know how. Let me be clearer: I like speculating, because blogs! So, if you made me guess, I’d say the guessing starts with Don Williams. After all, Williams has made Miles’s ouster his pet project. He made public a letter criticizing Miles, he went on TV and to the paper complaining about Miles, and then he paid three academics-ish to write “studies” saying the data suggest Miles should go.
Why do I think he could have hired Blue? Because he has before. Two years ago, when Williams’ nonprofit was trying to obtain tax credits for the Hatcher Square revitalization project (long story — takeaway, it didn’t work out well for Williams; read the decision here), he hired Lisa Blue as the lawyer, even though that’s a bit like hiring Michael Chabon to write event listings. Not only is Chabon incredibly overqualified, but his event listings would probably be unreadable. There would be endless digressions about Pittsburgh, and bisexuality, and comic books — actually, those sound pretty great. Insert a better example here. Just know Blue is WAY over-qualified for handling a local tax credits case. Just like she’s WAY over-qualified to be handling residency requirements cases from unemployed DISD school board candidates.
