Pedro Strikes Back

Six months after his ouster as Metro schools director, Pedro Garcia is lashing out at the education board members who sent him packing. In a scathing memo that he agreed to make public this week, Garcia painted board chair Marsha Warden as a kind of stooge for neo-segregationists and suggested that at least some board members may have violated the state’s open meetings law by deliberating secretly about the city’s emotionally charged school rezoning plan.

In the memo, written in January, two days before Garcia agreed to resign, he accuses Warden of shoving him out as superintendent because he opposed the rezoning plan and saw it as a re-segregation of schools. He says Warden was succumbing to political pressure from white constituents to remove black students from schools in upscale Hillwood, which she represents.

“I know that the situation I find myself in today, and the pressure exerted upon me by Marsha Warden, is the direct result of my decision to fight against her desire to move the African American children from the Hillwood cluster so she could be re-elected,” Garcia wrote. “Unfortunately, this is a racially charged issue. I took the stand to oppose re-segregating the district. It was the right stand and I would do it again.”

Warden, who decided in April against seeking another term in next month’s elections, denies Garcia’s accusations. She insists the rezoning plan, which has outraged the city’s black leaders, is aimed—not at placating white parents—but at making the school district more economical.

“This is no more racially motivated than the man in the moon,” she says. “I doubt the veracity of this memo, OK?”

The plan, hailed by proponents as a return to neighborhood schools, would stop the busing of hundreds of black children from North Nashville to Hillwood and elsewhere in mostly white suburbia. Instead, they’d go closer to home in the Pearl-Cohn cluster of schools. Advocates say it would save almost $5 million a year by closing underused schools.

“We can pay for bricks and mortar and transportation, or we can pay for kids’ education,” Warden says.

Garcia wrote that on Dec. 12, after he came out against the rezoning plan, Warden told him in a meeting “that my coming evaluation would be very bad for me and I ought to do everything possible to avoid it. I again said what I always have said, ‘I am not afraid of my evaluation. I consider the evaluation to be a tool for improvement.’

“After my comments, Marsha Warden added, ‘You have lost the confidence of the mayor, the confidence of the chamber and the confidence of the board. You need to leave.’ ”

Garcia also writes that in a meeting last November, board member Steve Glover told him he already had secured a majority of the board to vote for rezoning. “He indicated to me that he had five votes for the plan that had been proposed,” Garcia writes.

The open meetings law was weakened somewhat in the last state legislative session, but at that time it prohibited two or more members of a governing body from deliberating or deciding an issue except in a public meeting. So how did Glover, a white board member from Hermitage, know there were five votes for the plan without discussing it with other members?

Glover, who Garcia describes as “often intimidating the central office and the principals” by “yelling and being angry,” wouldn’t return phone calls for comment. But at least two board members, George Thompson and Ed Kindall, both of whom are black and against the rezoning plan, think Glover may have broken the law by holding secret deliberations.

“This is the kind of skullduggery that’s caused this school system to be pushed down into the ground,” Thompson says.

Garcia sent his memo to Kindall, who says he released it to the media with Garcia’s permission to try to derail Tuesday night’s scheduled board vote on rezoning.

“I was hoping that this zoning stuff would resolve itself in an amicable way but it appears people are pushing it to the point where they just want to ram it through,” Kindall says. “Mr. Glover was saying he had five votes. That worries me. We operate under what’s called the sunshine law. You’re not supposed to have five votes before we get to the meeting, are you?”

Garcia writes that he decided to oppose the rezoning plan after visiting Brookmeade Elementary School, which is scheduled to close. Teachers told the superintendent that the school should stay open because they said white students then attending private schools would return if black children were sent elsewhere.

“The faculty, after some conversations about the proposal, indicated they believed the school did not need to close,” Garcia says. “They believed that after the black students presently attending Blackmeade Elementary were moved to Metro Center, as the student assignment plan recommended, many white families would come back to the school. The faculty, in general, indicated the school would be full of white students presently attending private schools. After that meeting, I considered the implications of the plan.”