Nolan Estes Returns! Hold On to Your Wallets!

 Oh, joy. Among the candidates for interim DISD superintendent is none other than Nolan Estes. For eight halycon years in the late 70’s, Estes increased the DISD budget by ten times while enrollment fell by more than 10,000 students. That was great salesmanship, and Nolan Estes is nothing if not a great salesman. But it was his novel sense of personal entitlement that charmed me. There was the 75-horsepower outboard motor he borrowed from the district: it turned out he had “borrowed” it for eight years. There was the auction of valuable antique schoolhouse furniture: except the auction was never publicly announced, and the only bidder was Nolan Estes. And then there were the land buys next to sites where DISD was about to buy or expand. Former political reporter Phillip Seib published the details of those in the September, 1981, issue of D Magazine. An excerpt:

It isn’t easy to determine how much money Estes made or will make on these deals, since the deeds for many of the properties merely indicate “all cash.” One holding for which complete financial records are available shows that Estes knows how to turn a profit; a property he purchased in November 1978 for $4250 was sold in September 1979 for $18,000. The property is three blocks from J.H. Reagan School -a school that in the summer of 1979 received an allocation of $2.2 million, using almost half of the remaining funds from the 1976 bond money to renovate several schools.

Then there was the Foundation for Educational Quality, a scam Estes founded with the late James Bond. It was supposed to build a private-public complex called the Eastern Gateway. It ended up costing the district hundreds of thousands, but Estes somehow managed to use it to get a personal contract with EDS for software development. And, of course, we can’t forget the consultant scam. Estes would hire as a “consultant” a superintendent from another big-city school district. Soon enough, that district would find a pressing need to hire Estes as a consultant. But no worries: he assured us his “consulting” was done on private time.

 Now its board is seriously thinking of inviting this fox back into the hen house? Fabulous! The good times, they are coming back!