AISD Parents and Students Brace for School Closures as Board Prepares to Vote

On Sunday, Oct. 5, outside of the colossal Texas Education Agency office, just blocks down the green on Congress Avenue from the Texas state Capitol, a group of about 50 parents, teachers, and small children cloistered by one of the basement doors. 

A young child held up a piece of wrinkled orange construction paper on which he had scrawled “I love barrington” with a marker, quickly running out of space for the rather long name of his elementary school. Children wearing their class T-shirts held up a long banner that read “Yo ♡ a Sánchez porque…” with a collage of crayoned sticky notes underneath.

In early September, the TEA mandated that Austin ISD close or restart, or “turn around,” 23 schools that have received at least two unacceptable ratings in a row from the state agency, derived from STAAR test results. The schools will see an overhaul of teachers and principals who will need to be rehired by either the district or a private charter company, with turnaround plans (and nine additional Targeted Improvement Plans) due to the state Nov. 21.

If any public school receives five unacceptable accountability scores from the TEA, the state agency takes over the entire school district. The locally elected Board of Trustees is replaced by a state-appointed board of managers. It only takes one school to trigger a state takeover, and Dobie, Webb, and Burnet middle schools are on “F” number four – thus, the urgency.

To avoid this, last Friday evening, Austin ISD released a draft consolidation proposal that redraws school zones for nearly the entire district, and recommends closing 11 elementary schools: Barrington, Becker, Bryker Woods, Dawson, Maplewood, Oak Springs, Palm, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley, Widén, and Winn Montessori. Most are in Central and East Austin, scattered across both sides of the river. 

Bedichek and Martin middle schools are also recommended to close, though the district is considering keeping both buildings for future use. International HS, for high schoolers entering the district from other countries, will also close. 

“My son asked me the other day, ‘Why do they say it’s our fault?’” Daisy Ramirez said in Spanish outside of the TEA. Her son references the failing STAAR rating the agency has given Martin MS.

Beyond closures, neighborhood boundary lines have been redrawn across the city, which means the vast majority of AISD students – thousands of families from 98% of AISD schools – will be zoned for a different neighborhood school starting next fall. Families can use AISD’s new interactive map to find their updated neighborhood school. “This is seismic,” AISD Board President Lynn Boswell said. For instance, even though no high school buildings are closing, every single non-magnet high school will be broken up in some way by the new boundaries.

Maplewood Elementary School in East Austin’s Cherrywood neighborhood, also slated for closure Credit: Sammie Seamon / Design by Zeke Barbaro

The district offers families a grandfathering process: If they want to, students now zoned to a different school can stay at their current school (unless it’s one slated for closure) through the final grade offered. Otherwise, they can enroll at their new neighborhood school next school year, apply for the now-relocated dual language or Montessori programs, or apply for a general transfer to a different school.

Five elementary schools are also proposed to become non-zoned schools: four schoolwide (“wall-to-wall”) dual language schools (Odom ES, Sánchez ES, Pickle ES, Wooten ES), one Spanish and Mandarin immersion school (Joslin ES), and the district’s new Montessori campus (Govalle ES, replacing Winn Montessori).

This will displace and reassign the neighborhood students who currently live around and attend those schools, unless they apply for a transfer back into their own school. The five non-zoned schools will now be 100% transfer students with no school bus service. That could rule out those schools for families who cannot drive their kids to school in the morning.

At the protest, a small group of Becker parents expressed concern for what these non-zoned campuses will mean for the receiving neighborhoods. They’ve been notified that their kids will get transfer priority in following Becker’s schoolwide dual language program to Sánchez ES. The district has encouraged emergent bilingual students learning English to stay at Sánchez, but the Sánchez neighborhood kids will now be rezoned to Allison, Zavala, and Travis Heights elementaries. “We don’t want to be the ones to transfer in and take their school away from them,” one parent told the Chronicle, concerned that the existing school building won’t fit essentially two schools and every child who wants to be there.

Even with the grandfathering option potentially delaying immediate changes for many families, the release of the plan was like that of a held breath. Many families are now mourning the potential loss of their school communities. The closure list includes old, historic elementaries that are institutions in those neighborhoods. 

Nonetheless, AISD desperately needed a dramatic solution to pull the district out of financial crisis. The district is predicted to run out of money by next year under a $19.7 million budget deficit. The school closures will immediately save the district $25.6 million. The district has also long wanted to clean up its feeder patterns, allowing elementary schools kids to funnel to the same middle and high schools and grow up together. The new schoolwide dual language locations are also now closer to where emergent bilingual students actually live, allowing for a close to 50/50 ratio of English- and Spanish-speaking students to learn curriculum and language together. The change opens 590 additional DL seats for Spanish-speaking children who need them.

The plan is quite literally meant to “save the district,” per district officials, but students will bear the immense cost: split from their friends, their longstanding school communities dismantled, and dual language students needing to find their program elsewhere. Faculty at schools recommended for closure find themselves potentially suddenly unemployed, though the district has said they will do their best to retain and replace teachers.

Under the shadow of the TEA office, AISD families placed the blame for that on the state. Another mother of AISD students took the mic on Sunday.

“This isn’t about improvement. It’s dismantling trust. It’s disconnecting communities. It’s disruption by design,” she pressed. “What kind of accountability punishes students, holding them back and narrowing their options, instead of helping them grow? What kind of support starts by removing the dedicated teachers and staff who care about them the most?” 

The Board of Trustees will review the plan at their meeting this Thursday, Oct. 9, at the AISD central office. The consolidations will not be finalized until the board votes Nov. 20 – families are invited to give feedback during a series of open houses this month. On Friday, Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu released a statement that she plans to vote no on the draft as it stands.

“Today, the boot of the State is on AISD’s throat and we are forced to make decisions that will change our community for generations,” Whitley Chu writes. “We should not be closing schools that are in demand and have strong academic results. … And we need to have the patience to allow the community to study the proposal and effectively weigh in.”

“Districts throughout Texas are in the red and face state takeover. When so many school districts are in this situation, it is a failure of leadership at the state level,” she emphasized.

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