A controversial meeting of the Aledo ISD, Texas, bond steering committee on Aug. 3 — which was not announced beforehand to the public or media — resulted in the firing of a consultant from the district's architectural firm, according to the district.
"There was a meeting held just prior to last Thursday night's board meeting. It was my responsibility and mine alone to make sure the board, community and particularly the press (knew) that the meeting date had changed," Superintendent Derek Citty said during a special board of trustees meeting on Monday. "I did not let the press know and I effectively did not do a good job letting the community know."
The consultant, Ronna Johnson, had her contract with VLK Architects terminated on Aug. 4 for directing the committee to form a pro-bond Political Action Committee (PAC), VLK representative Leesa Vardeman told the board of trustees at a special meeting on Monday.
"During her presentation I feel she veered off that [our instructions] to some degree. Obviously, it didn't sit well with the community and I apologize. I have discontinued the use of that consultant with respect to anything we're doing here." Vardeman said. "Our intent was for her to talk specifically about the election climate, to talk about how you as educators can only educate, and that the community are the only ones who can advocate."
The Aug. 3 bond steering committee meeting was originally scheduled for Aug. 7, committee member Ella Bullock said.
The date changed when two trustees requested the bond steering committee meeting be moved up so the board could discuss the committee's work at a special meeting of the board of trustees on Aug. 3, Board President Jay Stringer said.
"That triggered making adjustments to the board of trustees meeting schedule for the month of August and moved the bond committee's recommendation up sooner," he said.
The intention of the meeting was for committee members to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of the bond proposal before making a presentation to the board, Vardeman said.
"At the end of the last bond committee meeting, we surveyed them to see if the members wanted to do a SWOT analysis," she said. "That would help us better communicate the bond to the community."
Several elements of the meeting struck Bullock as odd.
"Prior to this meeting, there were at least two and sometimes as many as five or seven district employees at every bond committee meeting," Bullock said. "There were no district employees at this meeting. The facilitator, Lizzy [Ashbury], was there, VLK (the district's architectural firm) was there, and Ronna Johnson was there, though I didn't know that at the beginning of the meeting.
The meeting was arranged with no district employees present so the bond committee could have "open discussions," Vardeman said during the special meeting on Monday.
"We collectively felt it was important for the committee to have open discussions because before, the administration has been in the room for their discussions and they felt restricted. If we were going to fully explore what our challenges were, we felt we needed to that," she said.
After the committee finished the SWOT analysis, Johnson, the VLK consultant, began her presentation.
"It was basically a 15-minute presentation about how we would set up our PAC and be the pro-bond PAC," Bullock said. "I was immediately taken aback by it because I have some background in campaigning and public service. And immediately I recognized that she was either a political consultant or a campaign manager.
"She proceeded to basically tell us that the next steps for the bond committee are to form a PAC (Political Action Committee), and that we would have a 12-week campaign, and outlining dates when mail-in ballots would be sent out, when early voting would start. She talked in particular to several members of the 2025 bond committee and asked them if they still had their PAC set up. She said 'We'll be organized, we'll have a committee for the PAC,' and basically laid out for us how we were going to start our PAC and be a pro-bond PAC."
Johnson also named groups that would oppose the bond, Bullock said, and told the group to "get on their neighborhood sites like NextDoor, since that's the way people are campaigning for these types of things."
"I didn't sign up to be on a PAC," Bullock said. "And I wondered if anyone else realized what was going on... I've heard there were some people who didn't have a problem with it, but I haven't talked to anybody who didn't have a problem with it. But I also haven't talked to everyone."
Community member David Denman, who served on bond steering committees in 2014 and 2015 and recently ran for the board of trustees, said the situation was "shocking" and that this wasn't the first time VLK sent Johnson to AISD bond committee meetings.
"This is a pattern of behavior. This isn't the first time this has happened. The district brought this person in to moderate the 2025 committee after the bond measure failed the first time," Denman said. "That's who they had run the whole meeting. We knew she was a VLK consultant. But I thought it very odd at the time -- a lot of us did -- that it was no longer a citizen running the meeting, but an outside consultant. But VLK brought in a lot of consultants, a lot of great people with great information.
"We didn't realize what her involvement was because we figured she was one of those architectural consultants. But she is a campaign consultant. That's what she does. That's what her own advertising says."
The district's response to the situation was "underwhelming," he said, and raised more questions than it answered.
"If we thought it was serious, I think we would have taken more serious action," Denman said. "I think we have to step back and look at why the district and architect is allowing a campaign consultant to be part of the process. That's the bigger question."
