(Geronimo) — A familiar face has been chosen to lead the Navarro ISD for the next school year. The Navarro ISD Board of Trustees met over the weekend to name Luke Morales as acting superintendent.
Over the last 20 years, Morales has served as the district’s deputy superintendent and the principal of Navarro Junior High School.
Morales says he is humbled by the opportunity and looks forward to this coming school year.
“Of course, we are extremely excited about the opportunity. I want to thank the board for having the confidence in me to put me in that role and not just that, but I really want to thank our board for their due diligence. They have done an outstanding job of making sure that they run through a whole process to make sure that they put the best possible person in that role to make sure that we can lead the district forward especially with all the challenges that will be coming up,” said Morales.
Hank Dietert, the vice president of the Navarro ISD Board of Trustees, says the district is confident in its decision.
“I think as a board and I can’t speak for any of the individuals on the board but as a board, I think we were looking for some stability and I think Mr. Morales was going to be able to give that but I think the fact that he was being looked at as the sole finalist for Stockdale ISD kind of escalated it to a point where we needed to make a decision and I think as a board, we had to come together and see what was best for the district to continue the search or not and then look for an acting superintendent which is Mr. Luke Morales,” said Dietert.
Morales potentially brings some stability and healing to the district. That’s after some community members began to openly question the leadership of former Navarro ISD Superintendent Wendi Russell who announced her retirement in the spring. A search for her replacement began soon after.
Although it was not a pressured decision, Dietert says the board understood that a decision needed to be made.
“But we had to make the right decisions by using due diligence in the fact that as a board, we had to make sure things were right. We had a special meeting last Wednesday and that special meeting took us into more in-depth issues and concerns that we had to overcome and look at with legal counsel and then we took and had to have that other special meeting which happened over the weekend but we were under a time crunch but we weren’t under pressure sort of speak because we felt comfortable as a board of what we were doing in the route that we were taking,” said Dietert.
Morales says having served the community for several years, he feels he has a handle of the district’s needs and what the community has come to expect.
“But also, knowing our community and being able to have the support of the community, good working relationships with our community and their support in their decisions that we make in moving our district forward I think are going to be critical. I’ve been very fortunate these last 20 years that we have established very good working relationships with members of the community and that will go a long way in helping prepare for the future,” said Morales.
He says now in this new role, he hopes to tackle the challenges ahead and is looking forward to ensuring that the needs of each child are met districtwide.
“We are going to work extremely hard at making sure that our students are well taken care of, well prepared and that we are going to move our district forward. I know it’s been kind of unstable lately. We are going to be steady. We are going to be very stable in everything that we do and very calculated in making sure that we are meeting the needs of our students and our community as we begin to grow. Our district is going to be in good hands. I think the board and myself will have a strong working relationship and we will be able to lead the district forward,” said Morales.
Dietert says the district has felt fortunate over the last few years to have someone like Morales on its leadership team.
“I think Mr. Morales is committed and he shows a lot of integrity. His characteristics are always of good moral character, and we feel like the staff that works with him now under the junior high trust him. They really trust him as far as what he says is the way it is – no matter whether it’s good or bad so some of those things we can say goes all the way back to his 19 years there at Navarro. He’s been able to create stability in the fact that he has integrity and is trustworthy,” said Dietert.
Morales’ immediate appointment was unanimously approved by the school board and was made official during a special board meeting Sunday afternoon. Morales’s appointment officially cancels the school district’s superintendent search.
