Celeste Quesada reflects on daughters' time at Becker Elementary ahead of potential closure

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Celeste Quesada and her husband, Adrian (you may know him from the Black Pumas or Grupo Fantasma), come from “strong cultural arts backgrounds,” in Celeste’s words. They’ve shared that background with their two daughters throughout the girls’ upbringing.

Though in high school and college now, the Quesada girls are graduates of Becker Elementary School, one of the schools slated for closure in the Austin Independent School District’s plan to close several schools and redraw school zone boundaries districtwide.

The Quesadas (the parents) were very involved with the school when their daughters were students there. Celeste said she and Adrian were “extremely involved with the PTA” at the time.

“Because I, as well as my husband, come from a strong cultural arts background, that’s what we could offer the school,” Celeste said. “So we had come up with this program called the Pachanga.”

She said they were able to tap into their community within the music industry and bring DJs to put on big dance parties in the gym.

“We turned down the lights and brought in a disco ball and just had people from, you know, 4 to 45 dancing around. Teachers could let loose, kids could interact, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful time, Celeste said. “It was a fun fundraiser, but it was really a time to just bond on the dance floor and see everybody’s funky moves.”

The Becker Elementary Pachanga, the school’s annual “art/music/dance festival,” started in 2012 and is still held each year.

The annual fest is just a piece of Celeste’s fond memories of the school.

Becker Elementary gave the Quesadas strong foundations and community

Celeste said Becker was a solid foundation for her daughters, who are now 15 and 20.

“I think that was a real foundation of their childhood memories and of who they are today,” she said, reflecting on the girls’ time at the elementary school in the 2010s. “They still have a tight friend group from their Becker Elementary days… Both daughters have their very best friends that they met from Becker Elementary.”

Celeste was born and raised in Austin and joked that when people find that out, they’ll tell her she’s “a bit of a unicorn,” and now she’s raising her own “little Austin unicorns.”

“When we have such a very fast-paced, ever-growing, dynamic, large city, a small environment for a child is really, really important,” Celeste said, noting the school’s relatively small size at the time of her daughters’ attendance.

“And these generations are pivotal to our future. And, I really do believe that it starts with a strong elementary foundation of education and those soft skills, and the curriculum,” she said. “Becker Elementary was a dual language program; that was really important to us. So, that communication and relationship foundation for a child is important.”

Celeste said Becker not only set up her girls for future success, but it also prepared her and Adrian for the next phase of parenting.

“Years later, as we’re forming groups about our kids going to college and what that looks like, we almost feel like the kindergarten parents again, just like, oh, this whole other wave of parenting, and ‘are we making the right choices?’ and all that,” Celeste said. “It’s still, this extended family, so to speak.”

As for her daughters, Celeste said Becker helped teach them a sense of well-being and security through their processes of learning to make friends and maintain friendships.

“Even though Austin is this huge city in the United States with so many exciting things happening, when you have these small schools within such a large urban community, it feels like a small town,” Celeste said. “So you’re able to still have a human scale experience where you have deep, rich relationships with those teachers that we still keep in touch with, the principals that we still keep in touch with.”

“It’s a good foundation for our human connection, and the proof is that longevity, that it’s still there after all these years,” she added.

The importance of Becker’s dual language program, what will happen to it

Becker Elementary has a dual language program in which enrolled students study in both English and Spanish.

Celeste said that the dual enrollment program was one of the main reasons she and Adrian chose Becker for their daughters.

“It’s extremely important. Communication is key, and being able to speak with others in different languages, even if it’s just a few words, is so utterly helpful,” Celeste said. “Forget just being a small kid and making friends, we live in a global economy now.”

Celeste noted how close Austin is to the border of Mexico, too. “We forget in Austin how close we are to a whole other huge country, a Spanish-speaking country,” she said. “So I think it’s extremely important to teach our kids to be able to communicate with all kinds of different people.”

Celeste said that a lot of people work hard to provide generational wealth to their children. To her, “wealth is human connection and being able to communicate,” she said.

Under AISD’s draft consolidation and rezoning plan, students at Becker would move to either Zilker Elementary or Sánchez Elementary.

AISD said its goal is to move non-zoned dual language programs “closer to where emergent bilingual students now live.” The programs aim to serve 50% emergent bilingual students and 50% non-emergent bilingual students.

Non-zoned dual language programs will be relocated as follows:

According to the draft plan, Becker will close, and its neighborhood students will be reassigned to Zilker. The school-wide Spanish dual language program will relocate to, and merge with, Sánchez.

That means Sánchez will no longer be a neighborhood campus and will support a non-zoned school-wide Spanish dual language program. In the draft plan, AISD wrote that Sánchez ES was chosen to house the program because it “already has strong dual language enrollment and serves many emergent bilingual students nearby.”

Here’s how the changes break down, per AISD:

• Students who currently participate (or want to participate) in dual language can stay at Sánchez ES. 
• Sánchez ES neighborhood students will be reassigned to Allison ES, Zavala ES, or Travis Heights ES through boundary changes.
• Dual language students from Sánchez ES and Becker ES will be prioritized next year; other students can apply to participate in the program.

Families with students who live in Becker’s current boundary can go to Zilker or apply for a priority spot in Sánchez’s school-wide dual language program. Transfer students can go to their zoned school or apply for a priority spot at Sánchez.

AISD noted in the draft plan that it is “very confident that all students who apply will get a spot.” If Sánchez does fill up, every student is guaranteed a place at another school-wide dual language program (Odom ES, Pickle ES, Wooten ES) or in Joslin ES’s Spanish and Mandarin immersion program, according to the draft plan.

School closures, consolidations impact not only students, but parents as well

Though they’re not as involved with AISD elementary schools, Celeste said she and Adrian’s “hearts are always there,” and they love the community and still have friends and family involved.

Celeste also acknowledged the financial challenges AISD faces in its future plans. Still, she said the upcoming changes seem daunting for impacted families.

“By nature, I am a very positive person, and so I do believe that kids are resilient and that, faced with some uncomfortable changes, they will rise to the occasion,” she said. “However, I believe that there are more and more challenges that one child is facing, than certainly when I was a child,” Celeste said, referring to things like school shootings, bullying, isolation, and the negative impacts of social media.

“And I wonder if all of these things combined can negatively impact children [more] than what they’re used to their little bodies handling,” she added.

Celeste also said that stressors parents face, like affordability issues and economic challenges, can trickle down to the children, noting that parents will have to change their routines based on where their child will go to school.

“I hope that we can pause and slow down and think about the values that we want to teach our children and for our children to experience in this capital of Texas,” Celeste said.

The AISD Board of Trustees will take a final vote on the closure and consolidation plan during a Thursday, Nov. 20, meeting. If approved, the changes would take effect in the 2026-27 school year.

Credit: Source link