AUSTIN (KXAN) — On Friday, the Austin Independent School District released its preliminary draft plan to close 11 elementary schools, including a Montessori school, and two middle schools.
The schools listed for closure in the draft plan include: Bedichek and Martin middle schools, as well as Barrington, Becker, Bryker Woods, Dawson, Maplewood, Oak Springs, Palm, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley, Widen and Winn Montessori elementary schools.
District Superintendent Matias Segura said the list is a draft, and the board will look over the plan on Oct. 9. From there, the district will hold several meetings with the community. The final vote on the plan is set for Nov. 20.
Segura spoke one-on-one with KXAN’s Kelly Wiley on Tuesday to paint a clearer picture of what the changes could look like under the current plan.
Community response: 700 ‘comment cards’ received by Monday
Segura said since the announcement was made on Friday, there have been different reactions and various feedback from the AISD community.
“I think because now that it’s been released, people are able to respond to something, as opposed to not knowing what the plan may include,” Segura said. “So lots of folks have been reaching out, you know, with actually very specific feedback around, ‘why this or not this?’ Or, ‘would you consider this and not that?’”
“It is a draft plan,” Segura said, “so we know that it will change.”
He said community members have acknowledged that changes were needed, given the age of the school district and pressures the district is facing, from state mandates to the district’s finances. There have been anxieties and concerns brought up by the community, too, he said.
“There’s certainly feedback from certain communities regarding significant changes, and we’re going to work through those with our community to ensure that we get to a successful adoption moving forward,” Segura said.
The draft plan was announced on Friday evening. As of Tuesday morning, Segura said district leadership had received about 700 “comment cards” that were included in the draft plan for families to use to send feedback to AISD.
“When you have, you know, 70,000 students, it’s not as many as you might expect, but very thoughtful,” Segura said. “The feedback has been very, very thoughtful, and it certainly will inform our next steps as we move through the process.”
Boundary changes
Thirteen schools are closing, and school zone boundaries are being redrawn, impacting every school in the district. But AISD has assured parents and guardians that their students can stay at their school if they want to once the boundaries are redrawn.
Segura said that’ll be addressed during the enrollment process.
“We know where our students are, we have codes, we understand which ones transfer out, which ones are part of any change in the process,” he said. “And so because we know of where they are and what the change will be, we’ll be able to take care of that on the back end, we are going to ask our parents to hold us accountable, right? There are lots of students, and certainly with the different moves that are occurring, something could get missed, but a lot of that will be done on the backside.”
Segura said essentially, students can be “grandfathered” into their schools if they want.
“Essentially, if you’re a second grader and you go through a shift in your school, we want you to stay at that school if you choose to do so, through third, fourth and fifth grade.”
When parents go through the enrollment process, there’s a menu that will give parents whose kids were rezoned to a different school the option to choose the same school they were at before. Segura said because of how complex the changes are and all the different moves happening, some families’ school choices could get missed along the way, and if that happens, families are encouraged to reach out to the school board.
“We want to limit disruption wherever we can, you know, keeping communities together is very, very important for us, but we also recognize that there they are large, complex systems and things gonna get missed,” Segura said. “But please, please, please tell us. That’s not our intent, we’re not doing it for any other purpose than trying to get it right, but it is a large system, and so if something is not right, doesn’t feel right, you know, we will have that communication and that those resources out there to let us know, and we’ll make the changes for sure.”
Turnaround plans
Seven of the schools slated to close have received three consecutive F ratings, meaning they would have needed to implement turnaround plans (TAPs) under the Texas Education Agency (TEA) next school year.
AISD leaders told parents last month that the district will not include accountability ratings in the rubric they’re using to assign students to different campuses, and that improvement plans given to campuses from the state will instead follow the students to the schools they end up reassigned to. Segura explained how that will work.
“Because of how ’24-’25 accountability came out, we were kind of working through two different sets that had two different realistic opportunities to address the turnaround plan actions,” Segura said. “And so we wanted the plan itself, the overall plan, to be thoughtful of allocation of resources, to ensure that we had strong neighborhood schools, we wanted to, you know, communicate, kind of where we had inefficiencies, and have the plan stay on its own. But we knew that we needed to have a turnaround plan be accepted by the agency on November 21.”
Segura said once the district got far enough along in the process, the TAP conversations began to “sort of merge with our plan.”
“The way that it’s going to work is where there’s a consolidation, the majority of students, whatever school that they’re going to, that school will then receive the turnaround plan,” he explained. “There will sometimes be a split where 70% of students are going to one school, 30% are going to another school. The school that receives 70% of the students will receive the TAP.”
Segura emphasized that schools that receive TAPs will also receive additional support, which is included in the TAPs.
Four of the schools that are planned to close had B ratings, and one had an A rating. Wiley asked Segura what his message was to parents who feel that closing those schools could mess up a good thing.
“The system as a whole has to serve all students,” Segura said. “We do have thriving school communities, and we often talk about the fact that our schools are so much more than a rating… We just spent the last two years talking about how our students are more than a score, and so I really want to lean into that.”
“There are incredible schools everywhere in Austin ISD, but not all of our students are getting what they need to be academically successful,” he continued. “And to do that, it requires resources we committed early in the process to identify goals of getting to a certain percent of utilization, trying to figure out how to reduce our overall cost. We named the goal of $30 million and so you know, to do that holistically, it’s going to require moving things that have previously been been stable to achieve that goal, especially when you think about feeder pattern alignments as well.”
Segura said district leaders recognize the challenge of the impending transition, but that with it comes opportunity for even more thriving schools.
“I do want to acknowledge that it is a disruption. We own it. It’s something that I know is going to be challenging for our community, and there’s obviously time for refinement as we move through this process,” he said. “But given our size and given what we need to do as an organization to support every student, you were going to have impacts of schools that had historically performed and met, you know, accountability.”
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