Former EPISD Superintendant Lorenzo Garcia Stole Your Money And Your Kid’s Futures [OPINION]

I live in the El Paso Independant School District, so I'm pretty pissed off to find out that Lorenzo Garcia funneled a 450 thousand dollar contract to his girlfriend that was in reality only worth about 150 thousand dollars.  I'm also pretty pissed off that he also screwed up countless kid's lives as well...

The money thing is bad enough.  He used other school district employees to make sure that the contract was inflated and steered towards his lover, and now those people are probably going to be prosecuted for their part in the scheme. 

His girlfriend is the one who said the contract wasn't worth as much as Garcia gave her, but as far as we know, she didn't refuse the money, nor did she call the Feds and tell them what he was up to, and I don't see her trying to return the money he gave her now, so I think she should go down for her part, as well.

As a parent, though, I would be looking very closely at the TAKS test scores of my kids.  That's because in addition to lining his girlfriend's pockets with your property tax money, he was fixing TAKS test scores by moving kids to different grade levels, not letting kids enroll in EPISD schools, and telling even more district employees to "do whatever they had to do" to make sure the district's TAKS test scores made him look good. 

Why did he do that? 

Because in his contract, there were bonuses that were tied to good TAKS test scores, and he wanted those bonuses.  Nice.

So, one man, Lorenzo Garcia, has not only taken himself down with his greed, but he's also going to affect the lives of the employees he coerced into helping his steal your money, and he's affected the lives of kids who needed to take a standarized test that would affect their graduation from high school. 

People could lose their jobs, could go to jail, kids might have dropped out, all because of one slimy guy who wanted to put money that wasn't his into his pocket. 

I know I get on my soapbox about stuff, but we all need to do more of that, because if we don't, if we just assume that's how things are done and we can't do anything about it, things won't change. 

Vote!  Go to school board meetings!  Ask questions of these people who are paid by our tax money!  They cash a paycheck we sign!  I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!  Are you with me?

Remember this face the next time you say, "Meh, politics.... I don't really pay attention to that stuff."