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Jerry Bartos: Doing the job the school board would rather not do.

Jerry Bartos is a decent man who thought long and hard before deciding to do an indecent thing. He had worked with other business and community leaders as a volunteer for the Dallas public schools. He had learned a lot from that, and most of it was not pleasant. He had learned that the schools were in more trouble than most people thought. As a businessman, he had several commercial contacts with the district; he would come to believe that mismanagement was rampant in the administrative system.

Jerry Bartos saw what this meant for Dallas: It meant disaster. It was then that he reluctantly came to the decision to commit his indecent act: He decided to run for the school board.

For the last 30 years, with infrequent exceptions, the Dallas school board has served as little more than a cheering squad for the status quo. How board members view their jobs is easily deduced from their comments upon learning that the system’s audit recommended that immediate changes be made in the purchasing system as a result of some discrepancies auditors had discovered. (Later, we would learn those “discrepancies” amounted to $4.5 million or more in public funds that had been illegally spent.) The current board president’s response was that it was a matter for the administration and he was sure it would do a good job. Another board member said he had noted a few peculiarities in reports the board had received, but had refrained from asking about them because he didn’t want to embarrass anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings. The former board president, answering rumors that the board may have known about the illegal expenditures, said that was impossible and, as evidence, put forth a wholly believable theory: Since board members rarely bothered to read the district’s audits, how could they have known that the problem existed?

But Jerry Bartos did read the audit, and he blew the whistle. It wasn’t the first time. A few days after he took office a report showed a probable shortfall in bond funds voted in the last election. When other board members excused the shortfall as an unfortunate result of inflation, Bartos reminded them that inflation had been taken into account in planning the bond program, and an explicit promise that the amount voted would be sufficient for the district’s needs had been made to the public in selling the program. The cause was overspending by the board, not inflation; the result was not an accident, but a fraud.

Jerry Bartos looks for abuses of public money and tries to correct them; he knows what good management practice is and intends to enforce it. He does his job. The other members of the board may believe that in avoiding unpleasantness or glossing over difficulties they are actually being helpful. In fact, they are being cynical. Why bother if bond funds have been spent before bond projects have been completed? Everyone knows prices are rising. Why get upset about a few million dollars spent illegally? Everybody knows a budget as big as the DISD’s can’t be controlled. Why worry about disastrous test scores in South Dallas high schools? Everybody knows blacks never perform in basic skills as well as whites.

Cynicism is the product of incompetence: When people are ineffectual in getting a job done, the easiest attitude to take is that the job can’t be done.

But it can be. And everyone but the cynics (and the racists) knows it. We have a superintendent with the ability to manage the district; the time has come to stop talking about his potential and start looking hard at his results. We have good teachers who are still dedicated to public education. We have a city that is very healthy economically, and a city government that is run efficiently and fairly. We have the strongest business support of public education of any city in the nation. We have everything, it seems, except a school board with courage, imagination, and the will to lead.

So I hope Jerry Bartos can bear the indecency of being a public official who raises unpleasant questions. Nobody will call him a hero. Nobody will stop him on the street to shake his hand. But he deserves that handshake. By doing his job, he is giving Dallas a glimpse of how a strong school board could make a difference. If Dallas takes the lesson to heart, Jerry Bartos could be the start of something very good.



Our readers judge the city- and themselves.



Each month we subject you to our opinions on everything from public schools to new restaurants, but now and then we like to turn the tables and report your opinions on a variety of topics.

In a survey we ran last month, we asked an open-ended question: “What are the one or two most important problems facing Dallas?” We merely left a blank space and asked the reader to fill it in. Fifty-one percent made it clear that transportation is the single most important item on the city’s agenda: Some wrote in “mass transit,” some “traffic congestion,” others “Central Expressway,” but the message was loud and clear. Other problems listed by readers were, in descending order, education, revitalization of downtown, crime, rapid growth, housing costs, and road maintenance.

When asked how well Bob Folsom is performing as mayor of Dallas, our readers responded overwhelmingly that he is doing an outstanding job. Sixty-two percent rated his performance as excellent or good, 20 percent as only fair, and 6 percent as poor; 12 percent had no opinion. (How unlike a D Magazine reader to have no opinion!)

Our readers are overwhelmingly in favor of a new fine arts museum: 73 percent said they would support it. Seventy-two percent favor construction of the Reunion Sports Arena, which means that all the controversy surrounding it hasn’t dented public support.

Half of our readers think of themselves as conservative and as Republicans, which is to be expected in the nation’s most Republican area. Only 18.5 percent would claim the distinction of being Democrats, and even fewer – 13.5 percent – would own up to being liberals. (The rest were “independents” and “middle of the road.”)

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