Member of La Joya ISD executive leadership team to resign

Orlando Reyna, one of La Joya ISD’s executive directors of school leadership, will resign at the end of January after a months-long suspension prompted by the district’s discovery of a fatality wreck he was involved in in 2016.

 

 

In September of that year court documents say Reyna was driving down a highway in Houston one night when he crashed into some construction barrels, causing his truck to launch in the air and land on top of a car driven by Bertha Lazcano, killing her.

 

Within two weeks, Lazcano’s family sued Reyna and other potentially negligent parties.

 

At the time a Houston ISD principal, Reyna’s involvement in the accident and the litigation attracted media attention.

 

News outlets reported that Reyna had been at a bar before the wreck and had declined to take a breathalyzer test at the scene of the accident.

 

FOX 26 Houston reported that police officers at the scene couldn’t detect any evidence Reyna was intoxicated and that the Harris County District Attorney’s office said it lacked probable cause to obtain a blood sample from him, though the Lazcanos’ attorney criticized the investigation.

 

In 2019 the Lazcanos settled their lawsuit.

 

 

Reyna kept working for Houston ISD, moving up from middle school principal to high school principal in 2020 before successfully applying to work at La Joya ISD last year.

 

Around the beginning of the school year, La Joya ISD became aware of social media posts circulating news stories about Reyna’s wreck in 2016.

 

The district suspended Reyna with pay on Sept. 10 and launched an investigation.

 

A letter Reyna received later that month informed him the district was investigating allegations of an ethics violation.

 

On Oct. 9 the district’s board of managers voted to propose Reyna’s termination.

 

Superintendent Marcey Sorensen wrote him the next day, saying he’d failed to meet La Joya ISD’s standards of professional conduct because of the wreck.

 

“The publicity of this incident and the knowledge of this incident among students, faculty, and the community has impaired and/or diminished Mr. Reyna’s ability to effectively do his job,” Sorensen wrote. “This diminished capacity fails to meet the District’s standards of professional conduct.”

 

Sorensen also said Reyna had failed to sign and submit his employment contract by an offer deadline.

 

Reyna’s attorney, Christopher Tritico, said the district’s decision to move toward separating itself from Reyna perplexed him.

 

“Literally, he hadn’t done anything wrong, so in our view there wasn’t any reason for the superintendent to ask him to resign — which she did,” he said.

 

Reyna originally requested the Texas Education Agency appoint an independent hearing examiner to conduct a hearing related to his proposed termination.

 

Sometime after that, however, Tritico says Reyna decided to resign.

 

“When you’re dealing with an appointed superintendent, a board of managers, it’s really hard to move in and to get things done, because they’re not accountable to anybody,” he said. “And so it just made it really difficult for him to move into the community and get started. And coming from so far away, it just made it impossible.”

 

Reyna was part of a cadre of new administrators hired as part of an overhaul of the district’s leadership structure conducted by Sorensen and La Joya ISD’s freshly installed board of managers last year.

 

According to a payroll record from last year, La Joya ISD was paying Reyna about $119,000 annually.