EDUCATION Can Yvonne Gonzalez Survive?

THE INITIAL FEELING ONE GETS ABOUT Yvonne Gonzalez is that maybe she ought to be somewhere else, like back in adobe-happy Santa Fe. Otherwise, why would she be lobbing frank, to-hell-with-it reality at this city’s ever-racial climate?

“It’s ugly here, and not just with me,” she tells me, sounding very much like the pioneer woman tired of being whipped. “It’s the venom aimed at any white person.”

The topic is this firestorm that has greeted her arrival in Dallas, a festering wound of ethnic distrust that has some in the local black community looking at her as if their perceived political demise is solely her doing.

“Marvin Edwards (an African-American superintendent who preceded her Anglo predecessor, Chad Woolery) didn’t get these kinds of attacks for not doing anything for Hispanic kids,” she goes on. “That’s been very unfair.”

I’ve been with Gonzalez lately, talking politics at DISD’s grimy white headquarters on Ross Avenue. Wondering if, as she begins her first full year as superintendent, she’ll be the one to reverse this worse-with-each-passing-year image collaring the district. Wondering if, as the city’s biggest dreamers believe, she’ll be the one to offer up hard medicine for the disarray many citizens insist is a huge part of the schooling problem. I’ve been with her at an elementary school and seen bright-faced kids of all skin color give her hugs accompanied by the sort of respect only they can dispense anymore. Knowing something about the harsh politics of her job, the scene is a clash of the beautiful and the weird.

Weird because the education of the rookie superintendent has come not in conversation with a fifth-grader voicing opalescent dreams, but at the receiving end of insults from adults questioning her appointment, her every move. Fueling this latest storm is a vocal slice of the black community believing Gonzalez is a “Barbie” superintendent, insisting that the color of hereyes and hair are her only qualifications.

I ask her about all this zumbido, as they say in Spanish of noisy conflict, and she doesn’t blink: “My gosh, what is it that these people want?”



IN HER MID-40S. YVONNE GONZALEZ IS old enough to need golden moments of the kind ranchers steal between feedings and brandings-quiet minutes in the long workday they call “waiting for rain.” But where a ranch hand might grab a quick smoke atop the corral fence, she likes to breathe fresh air at schools such as Leila P. Cowart Elementary in Oak Cliff. That is where I find her one day, celebrating Cinco De Mayo. Allowed a little festivity, students gathered in the auditorium till the hall with idle chatter, their mood turning happiest when the welcoming committee escorts Gonzalez to the stage.

I see Yvonne Gonzalez; it seems they see the golfer Tiger Woods.

There, Dallas’ first female-and first Hispanic-superintendent accepts roses before being handed a charro hat needed for deliverance of the resounding Grito de Dolores, the battle cry that fueled Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1810. Bom in Brownsville and raised in Laredo, Gonzalez is a spirited daughter of the Texas-Mexico border. In her mind, Dallas wants her to take charge, to do whatever needs to be done. With her background, with those tough days in border schools of the ’60s and ’70s, Gonzalez always had wild dreams of performing on a stage as big as Dallas offers. At this Hispanic elementary school, she quickly grabs the mood and is smiling broadly by the time a red-headed, Anglo kid rises in the audience to show off his book learning-to tell her the holiday honors Mexico’s triumph in 1862 over invading France.

Shortly, she is deeply into El Himno Nacional-Mexico’s anthem.

“Mexicanos al grito de guerra,” Gonzalez sings alongside another invitee, State Rep. Domingo Garcia. El Himno is inspiring, speaking of ready cannons, battle-geared horses and warring countrymen eager to lob artillery. As prideful Spanish bounces off the walls, Gonzalez’s gaze is drawn to the school’s music teacher, a black lady, providing piano accompaniment. It is then that one spots a tiny nod of approval on the superintendent’s face. For a moment, this one frame in what has been weeks of discordant scenes reminds Gonzalez of the dream that so far eludes her grasp-seeing that cast of all-happy, all-ethnic troopers working together.

In the color-whirled world of Dallas school politics-lately an assembly of Edvard Munch screamers-it is something to fantasize about.



AUTHOR CYRIL CONNOLLY ONCE SAID truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between those arms, he wrote, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river. Such is one way to look at the runaway emotions in school politics. The River Gonzalez is wild, reuniting.

Her appointment (at an annual salary of $175,000) delivered joy in Hispanic quarters, Suddenly, the ethnic group had what it had been screaming for during the past decade-a Hispanic educator heading a school district where the largest portion of the enrollment was of Hispanic descent. Not that it came easy. Crazy board meetings chased the honeymoon at every turn, with a small group of black protesters telling everybody they did not concur. There followed a series of administrative moves by Gonzalez that blacks said carried racial markings. They damned an investigation into wrongdoing by hourly employees suspected of padding timecards. The N AACP’s Lee Alcorn roared that it singled out blacks because they make up the larger portion of timecard workers.

Then came Gonzalez’s shuffling of principals and administrators.

Blacks crowed she was mostly demoting blacks. They drew on the case of senior educator Shirley Ison-Newsome, once chief-of-staff for Woolery. Ison-Newsome, they screamed, was being dropped several rungs, to principal!

Gonzalez countered by ignoring the Ison-Newsome lamentation and saying that wrongdoing has no color; blowing it is blowing it. And then firing a few more senior employees-again, blacks-she said were not tending to their duties.

It is this damn-the-ten-percenters attitude that has placed Gonzalez at the center of a hydra-headed cockfight between blacks and Hispanics. Ignoring the mission of education, talkers on both sides of the political football have hunkered down, seemingly bringing an end to a relationship that had long seen blacks treat Hispanics with all the propriety of a coonhound.

Gonzalez has come in blades ablaze.

Her management style is from the books of Nixon and Reagan-a tad of Charles Colson, a lot of Margaret Thatcher. If accounts out of Santa Fe are true, Dallas has bought into a Doris Day with more than pluck: with fire. As Gonzalez freely admits, she is a guatosa, Spanish for a woman who courts drama. She is of the opinion that, this school district is wallowing, its employees in need of spanking. Bloodline tells you she’s up to it. Her father was an Army counter-intelligence officer and grandpa a colonel in Mexican President Porfirio Diaz’s army. Diaz, in fact, was a dictator. For evidence, look to the principal in Santa Fe who one morning found herself managing food services.

Gonzalez’s reply?

A matter-of-fact: “She is better suited for that job.”

As those who practice such style know, it is one open to criticism. And, yes, there are clues she is not the angel painted by the media. If one’s past is a pattern. Gonzalez may spring a surprise. The credentials are there: a bachelor’s degree in political science from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, a master’s from Stephen F. Austin and a doctorate in educational administration from Texas A&M.

What she lacks is experience at the top.

In San Antonio, people recall her as the sort of principal who always did her job and a little more. Coach Phil Rodriguez remembers Gonzalez was not pleased by sideline profanity during games. And so she confronted the football coaches, quickly giving notice that cursing would not be tolerated. In Houston, where she went in 1990 after uneventful professorial stints at Texas A&M and at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, she is labeled a skilled administrator who helped quell racial unrest.

Then came Santa Fe in 1994.

There, words of disappointment abound. Of the superintendent from Texas, attorney Michael Gross says: “We thought we’d found this wonderful female Hispanic, and we did have high hopes, but she left in a hurry.” Gross recalls Gonzalez “left no mark on this school district. In fact, she is held up as an example of a bad hire.”

“She is still the butt of a few jokes in town,” he says in a telephone interview. “There is sentiment in town that she’d left a puddle of pee behind.”

Santa Fe school board president Lynda Kellihan was instrumental in hiring Gonzalez, and, as such, was a strong supporter. About Gonzalez’s decision to leave before fulfilling her contract, Kellihan says, “It was probably best all the way around. Although she was trying to do what was needed, her style alienated everyone.”

Others are equally brutal. Trustee Jimmy Martinez says Gonzalez focused on inconsequential matters-whining one day about inferior office furnishing, another about employees unable to craft proper memos. Her deputy, Eleanor Ortiz, remembers she often found Gonzalez on the telephone with her husband Chris-discussing either his failure to find a job in town or their inability to sell their home in Houston.

“Everybody thought she could walk on water,” Martinez says. “And when she decided to leave, she left. She knows the political game. And that’s where she comes from. She has not spent too much time in the classroom lately. She did it, but she’s never looked back.”

When she left Santa Fe in April 1996 to become deputy superintendent here, Gonzalez bid New Mexicans adios Thatcher-style, saying that she’d not miss their “Neanderthal comments.” Santa Fe raked back by blackening her fiscal skills-pointing out that her plan to save money by canceling contracts for private speech therapists, audiologists and other medical professionals backfired, costing the district almost $500,000 when it later had to hire its own specialists.

“Santa Fe was really the scenic route for me,” she reasons, blithely. “My life has been in big city districts, and Dallas has been much more comfortable than Santa Fe ever was.”



DALLAS HAS BEEN “COMFORTABLE” IN-deed: “Lee Alcorn and John Wiley Price have been treating me like dog poop since I got here.” She says the problem of educating kids here comes at her from many angles. Too many students have only one parent at home. Too many teachers are incompetent. Business, a huge backer of the Dallas schools, also contributes, Gonzalez says, laying harsh blame on “arcades, alcohol, cigarettes….”

Gonzalez is steeled to take the political hits, acknowledging that “being a woman you get extra grief.” For her, the battle is not for ethnic turf. Shaking off the sentiment of oppression expressed by her critics, Gonzalez says a school district spending SI billion annually is hardly ignoring the task of education. She’s marshaling a war against failure in the classroom. It is blacks who want that fight, she’ll say in her plucky way. But she’d quickly agree with one black-a critic, at that-on one point.

“Blacks and Hispanics are going to have to forgive each other,” says Ora Lee Watson, DISD’s director of Magnet Schools curriculum and a former trustee. “If we don’t get it together for our children, in this the age of high-technology, our children are going to be the slaves of the 21st Century.”