I listened to Hinojosa yesterday in an interview on KERA. In response to the query regarding the continual fraud in DISD, he responded that he had talked to other CEOs, and that they also had this problem (totally pathetic response).

I have two issues with this response. Hinojosa is a school superintendent and a public servant, not a CEO. The title of CEO is granted in the PRIVATE sector where goods and services are sold by choice. The consumers of those goods and services CHOOSE to pay either for the goods and services or for the stock if the company is public. Consumers also have the choice to vote with their pocketbooks in response to shoddy goods and services, and the market can respond in kind in terms of stock prices.

All of us pay property taxes either in the rent we pay to owners or for our own homes and businesses. We have no CHOICE in paying those taxes. That tax money is sent on to DISD regardless of shoddy academic performance or whether employees spend part of their day embezzling it. We cannot take our property taxes back in response to continual graft in DISD, nor can we decide we will no longer pay school taxes when the public's monies are stolen once DISD receives them.

This response that other CEOs have the same problem is doing nothing to satisfy the fact that many of the employees who took their DISD credit cards to Walmart and bought untraceable gift cards with the public's money will be right back in their same positions this fall. Some of these same folks have been in trouble over the same issues before, i.e., they used public funds outside district guidelines.

Superintendent Hinojosa may aggrandize himself with a CEO title, but the fact is he has allowed grand theft of public monies to go mostly unchallenged. The board members in DISD are giving the public the impression that this is acceptable since no other action has occurred. Hinojosa and the board need to understand this latest fiasco is beyond the pale, and the public is not going to forget it because of the grand delusions of the superintendent. And by the way, in the private sector when this kind of financial fraud occurs, the CEO is usually shown the door.

[Ed Note: While I appreciate some of the sentiments, we're playing semantics with a title. I agree that the accountability isn't there--and when they roll out their plans to hit the voters up with a bond referendum, several people are going to push the "unaccountability" issue including me.]