On June 1, the state of Texas removed Elizabeth Santos, an elected school board trustee, from office and replaced her with Janette Garza Lindner, the candidate she defeated in December 2021.
The ousting was part of a larger takeover of the Houston public school system by the Republican-led Texas state government — a process that began in late 2019 and became formalized June 1 when Mike Miles, a charter school owner whose school administrator license lapsed five years ago, was installed as the new superintendent of the district by Gov. Greg Abbott along with an appointed Board of Managers.
As a result, decisions for the nearly 200,000 mostly Black and brown students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the state’s largest, are now made entirely by Abbott’s administration, while Miles oversees day-to-day operations. Meanwhile, a team of New York-based “social impact” consultants are managing tens of thousands of professional educators, with nominal oversight by the unelected Board of Managers who can be vacated by the Abbott administration at any time.
This is just another step in their crusade of ethnic cleansing. They can’t force people out, so they’re just attempting to be as inhospitable as possible so the people they don’t like leave on their own. They already failed at bringing in new voters, so they’re going for the next wave of voter suppression tactics by getting people moved out.