PSJA ISD Board of Trustees Can’t Decide

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

At the PSJA ISD Board Meeting Monday night, the lowest bid submitted for a $1.5 million door project failed to get board approval, despite the superintendent, Dr. Alejandro Elias, telling the six trustees that if they didn’t select a vendor Monday night, the job might well be delayed into the fall semester, since the next board meeting isn’t until July, and the job now has to go out for re-bid.

The time to replace the doors is now, he said, while summer is here, the hallways empty, relative to the busy school year.

Still, the board voted 3-3 against choosing the lowest bid.

Carlos Villegas, Diana Serna, and Cynthia Gutierrez voted in favor, while the two Zambrano brothers, Jesse and Jorge, voted with Yolanda Castillo against awarding the job to the lowest vendor, who already has done work with the district in the past.

The entire job would entail replacing approximately 250 doors, including the frames, spread out across 23 campuses, which have been deemed unsafe after an audit, said Elias.

Only three vendors submitted bids: Center Stone Services, Weslaco; Val-Tex (Figueroa and Sons, Inc.), Edinburg; and EDCON, PLLC, Pharr.

School staff vetted the three vendors, checked their past work both inhouse and with other districts, like McAllen and Edinburg, and then a district committee looked at the numbers, the points given on the rubric (a scoring guide used to evaluate the bidders), and chose Center Stone.

In explaining his decision to vote against awarding the bid, Trustee Jorge Zambrano said that when he saw three rows of zeroes (points on the scoring guide), he had some concerns.

“You shouldn’t be concerned,” said Dr. Elias, “because it’s student safety that we’re talking about.”

The major hang-up with Center Stone seemed to be that the company had never done work of this magnitude before — 250 doors and frames.

No matter, the new doors and frames are going to have to wait.

With the death May 19th of the seventh trustee, “Jesse” Vela, there was no one to break the tie.

On top of the door jam, the board also couldn’t agree on how to replace Vela.

Two names mentioned as replacements for the long-tenured trustee — Ramona Barron and Alonzo Garza III — couldn’t gain a vote majority, so the board voted to open up the process to the community, allowing its members to submit names as a possible replacement for “Jesse” Vela’s trustee seat.

The money to pay for the $1.5 million project, by the way, is part of a $6.2 million grant from TEA (Texas Education Agency) that the district fought hard to get, which is meant to offer added security to Texas’s public schools.

Like doors leading outside that can be opened without too much effort.