“Grievance About a Grievance”

KISD Blog by Elizabeth Ramos

11/3/2019

Raise your hand if you have ever filed a grievance! I haven’t. Ever. I usually try to solve issues and give a person the opportunity to fix any issue first. Usually they do. If they do not it usually ends up in court. I don’t lose a case if I go to court, mediation or a hearing. I go knowing I will win otherwise I don’t waste my time or money.

Why am I telling you this? I’d like to think of myself of someone of some knowledge on how legal processes work because I have been there done that in my short life. I know the basics, enough to get by. There are many people in the US and in Kingsville that don’t understand this process and don’t know where to begin. Let me take you on a journey into the ignorant mind of someone trying to file a grievance that has never done anything like this before. Again, I have never done this before. So, buckle up for this fun, frustrating, confusing and overall personally insulting process that is filing for a grievance with KISD.

Your first stop on this crazy ride is wondering if you are insulted enough by someone not doing something right or as they should and contemplating whether this is an issue worth taking up a notch on the complaint ladder. I will use my experience for example. Greenwood called out Bera in a Sept, 9th board meeting. The Kingsville Record reported the following, “Greenwood concluded his statement by asking Bera if a current board member had ever told her that their spouse was “ready or due a promotion,” and if she had been asked about promoting any current board member’s spouse. Bera replied “yes” to both questions.” The only board member with a spouse that was getting a promotion that day was Nick Prado for his wife Norma Prado. As some of you know this is NOT LEGAL. What is the legality of it all? Well, you might wanna be a lawyer to figure that out. I looked and found that it was “Official Oppression.” Under KISD policy it is also bribery, found in BBFB (LEGAL), Ethics Prohibited Practices. So, I grabbed a grievance packet for a parent, since I am one and dropped it off at KISD.

Second stop to thinking you are on the right track leads us to the KISD administration building because it is the only place to get a grievance packet. I already had one. I dropped it off on Sept, 18th after I filed complaint with TEA and their response was for me to file a grievance at the school level. On Sept 25th, Nick Maddox mailed me the following response: “Our firm serves as General Counsel to the Kingsville Independent School District. The District is in receipt of your Sept, 18th grievance. The District will hear your grievance at Level III before the Board of Trustees at a properly posted board meeting. We are working with the District in scheduling your grievance hearing and will provide you notice of the date as soon as possible.”

I followed up after waiting almost a month on Oct 18th and emailed Nick Maddox and sent a letter to Ms. Adams the following: “I am requesting my Level III Grievance to be heard in open session when brought to the Board of Trustees at a properly posed board meeting of your choosing, blah blah blah.”

Promptly I received the following response dismissing my grievance altogether. They changed the verbiage in the letter from a Level III to a Level I/III complaint. Hmm, I never even received notice of a Level I. They are trying to cover their steps on that one. It states I filled out the wrong grievance packet and that this does not pertain to students’ rights. I do believe that not matter what packet I fill out the students are now dealing with a woman who was wrongfully voted on for a promotion because her husband went too far. Same for parents or anyone in the community. I quoted Texas Penal Code and they do not hear on that. I did all this as someone who hasn’t a clue on the process and got no help from KISD during the process and look where it got me. I used the incorrect terminology is what it amounted to. From the first time I sumbitted complaint it took 36 days to get to this.

As you are on your stop to file a grievance at KISD you have to sign into the front of the admin building, tell the person up front what it is you are here for. No biggy. You will walk all the way down the hall to the finance office. Yes, I just stated finance office. Once you are at the finance office to file a grievance you speak to a finance secretary. Yes, I just stated that, finance secretary. I pick no bones with these people at all. It is not their fault this is asinine. Would you really think someone who is a secretary for a finance office to know anything about board policy or the correct way to file a grievance? I don’t. Common sense says so. She will ask you why you are filing or what you are. Meaning are you a student or a parent. See where my problem first started? If you say you are not sure then she will ask what the grievance is about. So now you are stuck up there, hopefully receiving the correct packet and telling someone who is a secretary for finance your personal information. It is like going to a pulmonologist and telling them about your herpes problem. Also pointed out to me by someone in the community, that if this is a student problem pertaining to education it very well may be a FERPA violation. *Enter me banging my head on my desk*

When you get your packet, you will have to fill one of these puppies out. Speed bump! You know what these are? These are to keep track on what packets went out and what actually came back. This is KISD’s way of spying on you. Mine was for a public complaint and it doesn’t have anywhere for me to put my name as one and then follows up with, “I have received a packet relative to Board Policy FNG (Local):Student/Parent Complaint Grievance.” There wordage is all messed up. Hence more confusion on what packet I should get and what I actually got. Lord have mercy! KISD’s lawyer Nick Maddox wants to nit-pick my grievance yet there is so much to nit-pick about the process! They keep tabs on this to make sure it comes back within the timeframe to file a grievance legally. (You can still sue them anyway, courts just prefer you to try to resolve problem prior to court. Makes you look like you tried.)

Third stop to filing grievance is to say “the hell with it” and dig deep in your pockets to hire a lawyer because KISD likes to play games. Here comes the waiting game. In the packet and in the board policy it states you have 15 days of the date you knew about issue to file. If you are a parent and you have spent 25 days dicking around with administration trying to resolve you issue you knew about, you may have gone over that time. Or if allowable, they will take over a month to give you a dismissal and you can hope and pray you can start again given the time frame they allow. I was told by three different administrators at KISD admin building that I have 10 days to bring my packet back. The policy states 15 days. Makes me think this is what they want the public to know. Public may think on the 12th day, “aww shoot, I missed deadline!” but in reality, they have 3 more days. There is a board policy they attach to these packets. I hope you can understand them. Yup, administration that is giving out and telling you how to do this gives the public misinformation. So, why should I take this process seriously when the people dealing with this don’t know what the hell they are doing? No offense to them. They do their best.

In the grievance packet it states, “if the complaint is not filed with the appropriate administrator, the receiving administrator must note the date and time on the complaint form was received and immediately forward the complaint form to the appropriate administrator.” Mine was not handled this way. If I filled out the wrong packet, someone should have informed me and I could have corrected it.

They aren’t following their own procedures. Instead they tell me a month later it was wrong after being promised a Level III hearing. A citizen from Brownsville went up to the Board of Trustees (BISD) at a board meeting with a grievance and they stopped him and told him to talk to the lawyer and board secretary and they can direct you to the appropriate policy that is concerned. They tried to be helpful. I called KISD pretending to be Maria for several days. They directed me to Hope who said that she doesn’t know the policy on how to file a grievance on a board member then was directed to Pena in HR and she didn’t know either. Everyone was super helpful! NOT! No one knew what to do! No one would hear what my complaint was and point me in the right direction on what policy was broken by Prado. During this process I lost 3 days of grievance time.

Last stop to “This is time consuming and beyond ridiculous town.” You bet your ass I filed it again. I made is a vague as possible to see how they would respond. Are they going to help me? Will they tell me that I missed the time frame to file? What will KISD do to sweep this blatant violation of the law under the rug? I also filed a grievance about the grievance process. Each level of grievance gives 10 days to respond. If you add them altogether 30 days could go by to get to a level 3 hearing. Know they need to respond to you in 10 days, doesn’t mean you will meet with them within 10 days. They may contact you on the 10th day and set a meeting 4 days later. If you add that together for each grievance it is 42 days, 57 days if you add the 15 days to file a grievance with the district. Is it even worth it anymore? Do you have the patience? Do you still care? Have you been beaten down with two meetings and all this paperwork and lawyer verbiage you have to read? KISD gave me a Level III grievance and took it away. From the date it was promised to the date it was dismissed was 30 calendar days. A month wasted. They just hope I go away. They hope you go away. Me, I hope these grievances have him and others running around worrying about it as they should. I can be petty like that.

In this experience of filing a grievance I hope the staff at KISD didn’t tell everyone around town about your complaint. (Not that I think that they do or that I have any reason to not trust them. If anything, they have all been super nice to me in this process, yet uninformative or helpful in that way, but altogether really friendly people from what I see. But in the Kingsville community it is pretty much known that news about anything spreads like wild fire and there is a concern in the back of my head that maybe a complaint could end up the town rumor. Who is to make sure it doesn’t?) There is information about myself and my family no one in town should know about but certain people know about it...which is actually illegal. But my time frame to file on this has expired. Anyone confused by now? I got a life. I cannot be messing around with this. TEA already has my complaint. It is up to TEA now.

The board members are above the law, we all know that. It is time to change some policy and I guarantee you they won’t and most people who will run for board this spring won’t either. They will keep making this impossible for everyone. Either way, I plan on running against Prado or Corando, we all know that. I am not sure yet. I want what is best for the district and the community so I will see how this plays out. He is already trying to get the public to forget about his wife’s illegal hire by buttering up teachers and administration with his suggestions in board meetings. If the public really wants this guy to be on the board instead of someone like me, then they can have him. That is all on ya’ll. He will keep yelling at people over the phone. He will keep telling people around town who will be hired prior to vote. A bunch of other things he will do which I cannot disclose because of other’s privacy which I have respect for concerning him.

I will put out some mini blogs in the next two weeks about other opinions and experiences. Keep a look out for them. I do have something to say about the last couple of board meetings. I will have a longer one for those.

I don’t need KISD to hear the grievance against Nick Prado. Hopefully the community of Kingsville heard my grievance and will remember it come election day, which is May 2nd 2020.