Where are Tarrant County leaders to speak against Keller ISD’s secret-squirrel games? | Opinion
District Attorney Phil Sorrells, where are you?
County Commissioner Matt Krause, where are you?
Judge Tim O’Hare, where are you?
Why haven’t we heard from any of you?
What’s taking you so long to speak out against the secret-squirrel antics of the Keller school board?
I have no idea whether it would have been good or bad if suburban Keller got its own school district of about 9,000 students and split off the other 22,000 students in suburban north Fort Worth.
Most of Keller’s seven school trustees said it would have been good.
But skirting the open-meetings law, lies and deception are not the way to prove that.
Sorrells, Krause and O’Hare are all lawyers. They all live in Northeast Tarrant County.
They know what’s right.
Maybe they don’t want to take sides for or against Keller’s church-clique politicians.
But certainly these elected officials can stand for upholding our laws, protecting the public and defending open government and honesty in Texas.
Voters and residents deserve to see what’s going on, both when Keller trustees hatched this plan and when they suddenly abandoned it.
Yet Sorrells, Krause and O’Hare are like the proverbial three monkeys ignoring wrongdoing.
Look up “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
Keller school board President Charles Randklev and several trustees — all Keller residents — sprang this surprise Dec. 19.
That’s when Randklev stunned two other trustees by telling them behind closed doors in executive session that north Fort Worth children and schools might be “detached” from a Keller-centered district.
The trustees behind the plan live in Keller. They claimed that both districts would get more state money that way, but that doesn’t appear to be true.
At any rate, that sounds like gaming the system.
If Keller simply splits in two yet gets more money, then other children somewhere in Texas will lose.
When Randklev and others dropped this shocker in executive session, it wasn’t even listed on the public agenda as a possible topic, as required by law.
Since then, Keller school officials and trustees continued to treat the plan as if it was the biggest secret since the sealed files from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
On Feb. 5, a staff and parent advisory committee gathered to discuss the split.
But the meeting wasn’t open to the public or livestreamed. The district won’t even say who was there.
It was done to protect “privacy and security,” a district spokesman said, contending there have been threats.
As proof, the district only showed one crude unsigned Instagram comment published Jan. 31 on an obscure page of juvenile bathroom-wall-quality comments about teen life.
It said, “once I find where the Board members live it’s over fr [for real].”
Last year, the Fort Worth schools’ Racial Equity Committee met in secret to protect confidentiality in the face of threats.
Naturally, conservative activists screamed. This newspaper said it raised suspicion.
The same is true in Keller.
Look, there’s a reason this board got elected two years ago. Conservative voters wanted to straighten out a district that no longer adhered to the Republican Party platform.
But the way to model good Republican leadership and core Christian values is not by hiding.
We have laws in Texas about open government.
I think they even apply in Keller.
This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 10:34 AM.
