The 2025–2026 GPISD Budget Report: Part Two of Our Reporting
GPISD Board Trustee Conduct in a School-Choice Era: The Real Cost to GPISD
The video above is from the August 14 Regularly Called Board Meetin, found on the district’s website.. The video was run through the transcript generator in Substack, which you as the reader now have access to.
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Correction, Aug. 25: An earlier version of this article stated that Trustee Terry Brooks was absent when the board returned from closed session on Aug. 14. In fact, Brooks was present, meaning the board still had a quorum. Two trustees — Gloria Carillo and Nancy Bridges — did not return. This correction has been reflected in the article.
n Part One, we examined the upcoming vote on Disaster Pennies and its short-term financial implications. Yet in this school-choice era, GPISD’s biggest budget threat isn’t taxes — it’s enrollment. According to the district’s District Improvement Plan released in May 2025, recruitment and retention of students is the district’s number-one challenge, embedded under its core value to “Grow, attract, and retain students and staff through high-quality programming.” Every student who leaves GPISD annually represents a loss of approximately $15,000 in state funding. That’s not a theoretical figure but cold, hard cash — and it means each trustee’s behavior creates a real-time risk, or opportunity, to stabilize or shrink the district’s bottom line. And yet, in the District Improvement Plan, trustee behavior — which in practice functions as the district’s most public-facing form of public relations — is nowhere to be found.
Nepotism and Personal Agendas
There’s always a concern with nepotism and personal agendas shaping and influencing leadership decisions, particularly at struggling campuses, and this isn’t new to any school board. When trustees are related to campus administrators and it’s as obvious as sharing a last name, and that school isn’t doing well and nothing happens, it becomes difficult to ignore. Families watching from the sidelines see the same pattern repeated: poor results, little accountability, and leaders moved around instead of replaced. Parents who lose faith in accountability do not simply wait for change; they enroll their children elsewhere. And each departure costs GPISD another $15,000.
Racial Representation and Fairness
A flashpoint has been the approach of a few trustees who have been public about campaigning on platforms that prioritize one racial group — which, in GPISD, is also the majority population. But true inclusivity means ensuring that all families feel represented, not just the majority. When trustees appear or directly say they’d like to elevate the needs of one group at the expense of others, it is not inclusivity — it is exclusivity. That perception leaves many families feeling alienated and undermines trust.
It’s worth noting that Grand Prairie as a city is more diverse than GPISD’s student population itself. That gap suggests that many families — particularly from underrepresented groups — are choosing other options such as charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. In that context, any appearance of favoritism by trustees only deepens the challenge of attracting and retaining a balanced, representative student body.
One Trustee’s Conduct Toward the Public
One trustee’s conduct toward the public has been especially troubling. David Espinosa has used his official GPISD Trustee Facebook account in ways that violate the expected conduct of a public officer — insulting the alumni of an entire high school and antagonizing residents, amongst other problematic posts that should probably be covered in detail in a separate article. Beyond his own words, the content he chooses to promote also sends a message, such as sharing books that refer to “handling gringos” on his profile. These are not minor slips — they are public statements and signals by an elected official, visible to parents, taxpayers, and alumni. Other trustees took notice and added this behavior to the August 14 closed session agenda.
However, Espinosa chose to avoid this meeting, which was the second meeting in a row that he missed — showing he was not ill or unable to attend, but simply chose not to. This is a clear sign that he doesn’t respect his colleagues, the process, or his constituents. That kind of avoidance not only sidesteps accountability, it undermines the board’s ability to follow its own governing procedures and model the standards it expects from district staff.
Lack of Respect for Procedure
And Espinosa was not the only concern. At the August 14 meeting, Trustees Gloria Carillo and Nancy Bridges went into closed session with the rest of the board but did not return when the session ended. Trustee Terry Brooks, originally reported as absent, was in fact present, meaning the board still had a quorum. Even so, no vote was taken on the items listed, despite the agenda indicating that an action item could follow. What was missing was any acknowledgement from President Amber Moffitt or the board about why a vote did not occur, or why two trustees chose not to return from closed session.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated problem. For the past couple of years, a lack of respect for procedure has underlined board business itself. Even if people can’t pinpoint exactly where Robert’s Rules of Order are not being followed, the entire thing has simply become “messy.” The behavior and conduct is just messy — and people don’t want to deal with messy when they have the choice to go somewhere not messy. In a competitive school-choice environment, that kind of instability is enough to push parents to look elsewhere.
Teachers Deserve Better
The sad part is that inside classrooms, GPISD teachers and staff are doing their very best. Every day they work to serve students, support families, and uphold academic standards in the face of shifting policies and limited resources. They deserve mature representation at the board level — leadership that follows procedures, exercises self-restraint, sets high expectations for administrators, and shows fairness to every student who walks through a campus door.
It’s also not fair to the district’s new superintendent, who chose to come to GPISD in the spring because he loves this community and believes in its potential. Instead of being fully empowered to lead, he is forced to deal with poor trustee conduct, which leads to unnecessary roadblocks to improvement. And since the board is technically over the superintendent, this isn’t something he can fix. This is something the board must fix — and something voters must ultimately address when it comes time to choose better representatives.
The Bottom Line
The reality is simple: board behavior is not just about perception — it is dollars and cents. Each student who leaves represents roughly $15,000 drained from the budget every year. In a district already fighting to balance its books, GPISD cannot afford trustees whose actions drive families away. What’s most concerning is that the trustees are not operating in a way that reflects an understanding that they exist in a school-choice environment, where parents can and will take their children elsewhere if they lose trust. If the board is serious about solving its enrollment crisis, it must begin with accountability, respect, and fairness. Anything less risks not only the district’s finances, but its very future.