Parents at two Austin middle schools have until Oct. 15 to use the only formal say Texas law gives families when a school fails five years in a row, and as of Sept. 28 neither school community had formally begun collecting signatures, Austin Current reported.
Burnet and Webb middle schools each earned a fifth straight F in the state report cards released Aug. 14, and state law says what follows: the education commissioner “shall order” either a board of managers, appointed by the state to govern the district in place of the elected school board, or closure of the campus. Burnet scored 59 and Webb 58, KUT reported; a 60 would have been a D and broken the streak. Austin ISD appealed by the Sept. 11 deadline, and the Texas Education Agency has not said when it will rule.
The petition is the exception. If the parents of a majority of the students enrolled at a campus sign a petition naming one of those two remedies, the commissioner “shall order” the one they request, according to the same law and the agency’s guidance. Under a commissioner rule, the petition must be finished and given to the superintendent by Oct. 15 to be checked, and the superintendent must send valid petitions to the commissioner by Dec. 1. The school board may ask in writing for a different remedy, but then the commissioner “may,” not must, agree. A petition does not prevent state action. It chooses between two forms of it.
Superintendent Matias Segura has said the district will not organize a petition, but he told families the petition is “the only way that the commissioner is legally required to consider what our families think is best,” Austin Current reported. Mayor Kirk Watson has urged parents to ask Commissioner Mike Morath to close their schools rather than see the whole district taken over, the Texas Tribune reported.
Some parents are unconvinced. Maria Galvan, whose child is the fifth of her children to attend Burnet, told Austin Current she did not expect to sign, in part because as an immigrant she worried about putting her name on a petition. Samantha Catalan, another Burnet mother, said she would sign anyway. “I feel like we are being put between a rock and a hard place,” Catalan said in Spanish.
The same question, who gets a voice, framed a Sept. 25 panel at the Texas Tribune Festival. State Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., D-Houston, who championed the takeover law a decade ago, said, “People are trying to paint me as saying that I’m for big takeovers. That’s just the opposite of what I am,” the Tribune reported.
Houston ISD trustee Maria Benzon argued that takeovers leave communities without a say and said, “The other thing is, if this takeover was working, you would have the community in total support.” Miguel Solis, president of the Commit Partnership, answered that “what is threatening is a child who can experience their entire elementary experience in a failing school.”
What a takeover looks like is already visible in Fort Worth ISD, where the TEA replaced the elected board with a nine-member board of managers and named Peter Licata superintendent March 24. Preliminary spring results showed students mirroring statewide gains while staying well behind state averages, and by July the appointed leadership was weighing closing a campus while a $49.8 million shortfall loomed, according to reports by WFAA and the Fort Worth Report.
Austin is a larger version of the same test. The district of about 66,000 students is borrowing $140 million to make payroll, and nine more campuses have four straight failing grades, the Tribune reported Sept. 1.
Petitions are due to the superintendent by Oct. 15, valid ones go to the commissioner by Dec. 1, and final ratings are expected in December.