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Exclusive: Hidalgo staffer says he was ‘blindsided’ by the use of children in chaotic meeting
When Jesse Ayala got ready for work Thursday morning, his stomach was already churning.
As special projects director for Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, he felt prepared for a high-stakes vote on an early childhood education tax proposal he’d helped craft over five months. He also felt prepared to lose.
“I was never suffering under the illusion that it was going to pass,” he told me over the weekend.
Ayala, a 56-year-old former lobbyist and government lawyer with experience in finance and early education policy, said he was tapped by Hidalgo in March to find a way to continue the county’s early childhood programs before the federal COVID relief funding expires in 2026.
He knew the rollout was rushed, that the timing coincided with budget woes and that even Democratic commissioners who generally supported early childhood education weren’t keen on asking voters for a tax increase.
Ayala said he couldn’t fault Hidalgo for at least trying to persuade commissioners. She was asking them to send the issue to voters, who'd be asked on the November ballot to approve a so-called “penny tax” that would fund summer camp, educator training, and high-quality childcare and preschool slots for 800 children.
The most Ayala hoped for on Thursday was that a high-profile discussion among commissioners would advance the cause of a permanent county-funded early education program. He thought the four Democrats would at least reach the consensus that such a program was a worthy goal.
He never expected the proposal to implode so spectacularly in a scene in Commissioners Court chambers that he could only describe as “surreal.”
In a desperate display that became national news and social media fodder, Hidalgo broke decorum several times, interrupting her fellow members of the county's governing body, shouting over them, and deploying a pressure tactic many found distasteful if not exploitative: She egged on a crowd of children she’d invited to the meeting, encouraging them to disrupt the proceedings, chant from their seats and eventually descend upon the dais as agitated commissioners neared a vote.
Afterward, Hidalgo became the first top executive in Harris County history to be formally censured by her colleagues. The lone Republican, Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey, has called for her removal.
“I was fully prepared to lose a debate,” Ayala said. “Not like that. Not descending into chaos like that.”
Ayala knew that children had been invited that day, in part to remind the commissioners of the real lives and futures affected by their decision, but he said he “had no idea” that Hidalgo would drop the kids right in the middle of the contentious political dispute.
“It’s one thing for them to be a visual; it’s another thing for them to be a prop,” he told me Tuesday. “When you’re asking for action from those kids, ‘Hey! Come on down,’ I was shocked when it turned to that. I was blindsided.”
Speaking up
Ayala agreed to go public with his concerns because he said he and many others “risked their credibility” to support Hidalgo’s campaign. He’s one of half a dozen people I interviewed on the matter but his willingness to speak candidly provides a rare, behind-the-scenes perspective that’s valuable in understanding why yet another early childhood education effort has failed in Harris County.
Hidalgo didn’t respond to my request for comment but her office sent me a statement saying that “Thursday’s moment with the kids was completely spontaneous and genuine – not scripted, not planned, not political. It came from a place of genuine joy in seeing young people engaged and inspired.”
Also on Tuesday, Hidalgo told KPRC 2 that she's "never going to apologize" for taking a strong stand on a program that helps so many families.
Ayala worries that last week’s episode could set back local early education efforts even more. He said he wants to distance that important cause, and all the advocates that he'd encouraged to join Hidalgo’s efforts, from the embarrassing display.
“A lot of people will look at last week and say ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do anything. Look at the mess it is,’” Ayala told me. “The visuals were not good, and I think there are so many other priorities in our region that this one is going to be put on the back burner and probably won’t be set on the reset button for a few years.”
Not everyone feels that way. Bob Sanborn, CEO of Children at Risk, said the optics didn't help but he didn’t expect them to taint future advocacy.
Hidalgo’s passion is real. So is her frustration with fellow commissioners who will approve constable pay raises the county can’t afford but won’t even let voters decide whether to fund preschool.
Hidalgo has talked about county-funded early childhood education since she first ran for office in 2018. She either doesn't have the will or doesn't have the ability to summon the leadership skills to get it done.
Hidalgo hasn’t said whether she’ll run for a third term but last week’s shameful circus should prompt honest reflection.
Routine, petty sniping on Commissioners Court over the past few years has been bad enough when the issues are contentious. If commissioners are discussing the budget, or guaranteed income payments, or tighter ethics rules, you’d expect things to get tense.
But what do we make of a leader who can’t get a single colleague, including members of her own party, to vote for a concept he or she probably agrees with?
Decades of research shows that high-quality early education can be life-changing for kids, and a potential windfall for communities that earn back their investments by ultimately paying less for things like reading remediation and incarceration. Of course, "high quality" is the rub. For programs to succeed, they must be well-funded and carefully designed, a process that takes time, thoughtful collaboration and community involvement. Ask advocates in Travis County, who got it done in November.
It's not clear if Hidalgo understands this. In her interview with KPRC she seemed to suggest that any preschool program is a good one.
“Are we going to evaluate public school to see if public school is working?” she said. “Of course if you give schooling to children 0-4 that’s good. You know, we’ve known this for decades, all around the world. Like, do we need to prove that the sky is blue?”
Actually, yes, we evaluate public school performance. And, no, not all schooling for very young children is quality or worth public investment. It’s true that cooler heads than Hidalgo’s have failed to establish a Harris County-funded pre-K program. I covered hopeful campaigns, including Early to Rise and Early Matters, that ended in disappointment.
The reasons this one failed seem different. Hidalgo appears to have dragged her feet since last year and then tried to push it through so hastily that commissioners found out about the proposal when she did an interview with ABC13. As a crucial deadline neared, she ran out of time to convene and so she resorted to confronting and castigating her colleagues.
Under it all is Hidalgo’s failure to cultivate allies and coalitions necessary in politics. It’s not clear why. Her commitment to ethics reform and modernizing a once-opaque, good-old-boy institution was certainly a good thing, but maybe she’s such an idealist that she can’t bring herself to dirty her hands on the levers of power. Brainy as she is, she struggles to connect with different constituencies.
“You at least have to fake it until you make it, right?” Ayala said. “You have to pretend you like someone, you have to horse trade, you have to understand that they have their constituency. I mean, if you don’t get to three on Commissioners Court, you’re not going to do anything.”
Political shortcomings
Hidalgo's disdain for political sausage making was evident the first time I interviewed her, alongside County Judge Ed Emmett, in 2018 for an editorial board candidate screening. Emmett, a popular moderate Republican, had stockpiled social capital throughout his long political career. But Hidalgo, then just 27, seemed dismissive of the idea that she’d need people, and not just intellect and moral high ground, to win battles.
“She is committed to caring about the most vulnerable among us,” read our editorial at the time endorsing Emmett. “That passion, however, also comes with a disregard for the reality of how political relationships define the boundaries of possible policy.”
Not much has changed. Hidalgo’s tenure has been marked by dysfunction on the court, high staff turnover and public bickering with colleagues and officials from Mayor John Whitmire to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Ayala, during the past several months in the trenches of Hidalgo’s office, saw the limitations of her style.
“She’s very smart but, I think, impulsive,” he said. “And if you start taking too long to tell her something, she wants the quick and easy answer.”
She might disregard information that doesn’t suit her narrative, he said: “She’s very well intentioned but if something doesn’t further what she wants to do, it gets filtered out.”
Ayala said he signed on to the early education effort because he believes deeply in the cause. He had worked on a similar effort at the Greater Houston Partnership.
Growing up in San Antonio, Ayala says his mother, a typist, sacrificed to send him to a well-regarded Montessori school at age 4. He knows the potential in early education. He knows the data. He knows the need.
“The continued thriving and growth of our region is at stake,” he said. “You drive around, you see the homeless problem, you see the poverty problems. And the haves and have-nots that just keep growing. And I think that’s what’s at stake for our communities: opportunities for a vast number of people who aren’t going to be C-Suite people but who shouldn’t be $15 entry-level phlebotomists, either.”
He didn’t know Hidalgo well but he liked her passion and thought she was getting an unfair shake from critics.
As he dove into the job in March, working long hours, building on previous work by Hidalgo’s staff, he tried to identify obstacles and untangle a labyrinth of competing interests. He sought guidance from local education experts, community leaders and a national group that helps municipalities navigate the winding process of establishing early childhood education programs.
After intense study, Ayala became convinced that the most successful model was organic, community led, with a timeline of at least two years. But he said Hidalgo and her staff made it clear that wasn't an option – they had to make the November ballot. It wasn’t just that the clock was ticking on federal funds, it was the worry, he said, that if they waited until 2026, Democratic commissioners up for re-election would never back a tax increase proposal on the same ballot that listed their names.
Ayala also wonders about other motivations: “It seemed like they were trying to develop a legacy issue – in a very short manner, when legacies take time to develop.”
Nevertheless, Ayala stayed on: “I wanted to be a part of the effort to try to steer it in the best possible way.”
While the effort had strong partners, including Children at Risk and Collaborative for Children, Ayala said too much time was spent on rabbit trails, things that seemed to complicate an already complicated endeavor, such as soliciting letters of support from local school districts that had other priorities. Too little time was spent on collaborating with commissioners, he said. In the days before the vote, Ayala said he found himself essentially sidelined after pushing back on some of Hidalgo’s contentions.
“It just absolutely fell apart at the end,” he said.
Although Thursday’s proceedings started with a respectable press conference and procession of supporters speaking at the mic, the dialogue quickly soured as commissioners tried to have their say and Hidalgo kept interjecting loudly.
“When she started encouraging the kids to chant, and interrupting Ramsey, and then when I saw her reaching for the charts, it just seemed like things had gotten so far out of control,” Ayala said.
Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones insisted that she couldn't decide whether current programs were worth a permanent investment until she had more data – and an independent analysis wasn't due until next year. Hidalgo insisted that other evaluations had shown the programs were effective. But Ayala said Hidalgo was extrapolating from partial data.
"These programs are only partially complete," he told me “They were rolled out – I don’t want to use the word ‘piecemeal,’ but it was a rollout of, you know, various programs started at various times.”
The fracas in Commissioners Court ended with the measure failing to pass and Hidalgo abruptly declaring a break and walking out. Ayala said he was dumbfounded when he saw her staff shooing supporters, including the kids, into an elevator for a second press availability.
“What is happening?” Ayala remembers thinking. “The judge was thanking the staff who worked hard in front of the media and the kids. It just felt really hollow. It just felt like – is there any sense of shame about what went down here? Because, in the immediate, I didn’t see it as ‘we’re winning, we’re fighting, we’re making a statement.’”
He saw it for what it was: a missed opportunity, a failure to communicate, an unnecessary blow to a good cause that needs all the help it can get.
After six years, Hidalgo still hasn't shown she can do the slow, unglamorous, vital work of persuasion. That shortcoming is failing some of the people she dearly wants to help.
Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered her home state of Texas for 25 years. Share your thoughts with her at Lisa.Falkenberg@houstonchronicle.com and sign up for her newsletter here.
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