Fort Worth ISD has been without a strategic plan for months. That could change soon.
After months of discussion and false-starts, the Fort Worth school board is expected to take up a strategic plan for the district in the coming weeks.
A proposed five-year plan will be the main focus of the board’s January workshop, said board President Roxanne Martinez. School boards use multi-year strategic plans to set priorities for the districts they govern, including academic goals and plans for reaching them.
Fort Worth ISD was without a codified long-term strategy for the entire fall semester after board members voted down a proposed five-year plan in August. The meeting marked the first time the proposed plan had been seen in public, and many parents and several board members said the public needed more time to weigh in before the proposal went up for a vote. The board rejected the proposal, voting 5-2 with members Kevin Lynch and Ann Darr absent.
Since then, the board has collected feedback from the public through online questionnaires and conversations with community members. Two main themes arose from that feedback, Martinez said: Parents and community members didn’t think the proposal provided a clear, concise plan of action, and they wanted to know how it aligned with the board’s goals for the district.
The proposal that will go back before the board in January will most likely be a cleaner, pared-down version of the plan the board rejected last summer, Martinez said. She hopes to come out of the January workshop with a clear strategic plan that reflects the board’s goals and includes specific, measurable targets.
Aside from taking up the strategic plan, the board will also discuss the search process for a new superintendent at January’s meeting, Martinez said. Three months after former Superintendent Angélica Ramsey left the district, the board hasn’t taken any steps toward finding a permanent replacement. But Martinez said it’s important to have a strategic plan in place before hiring a new schools chief, so the leader has a clear set of expectations when they arrive.
Fort Worth ISD reading scores lag behind previous goals
Included in the proposal from last summer was an expectation that reading and math scores in the district would improve steadily over the next five years, with 50% of students in the district scoring on grade level in those subjects on the state test by 2029.
A previous set of academic goals called for 47% of third-graders in the district to be reading on grade level by 2022. But the district hasn’t come close to that point in at least the past decade. The percentage of third-graders scoring on grade level in reading has hovered between 25% and 35% since 2014. Researchers and education leaders say third grade is an important milestone in reading, because students who are behind at that point are unlikely to catch up later on.
The district’s lack of progress in reading has been a subject of much concern among city leaders. Last August, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker spoke at a board meeting, calling for a broad community effort around improving reading scores in the city’s public schools. In comments to journalists after the meeting, Parker said the district had suffered from a lack of leadership for years. A month later, the board approved a resignation agreement with Ramsey.
Martinez, who was elected to the board in 2021, said board members will be getting more regular updates about the district’s progress in reading and math next year. Until recently, the board got quarterly reports on student progress measures. But when Deputy Superintendent Karen Molinar stepped in as interim superintendent in the fall, she began reporting those numbers at each meeting. Those more frequent updates put the board and the broader community in a better position to hold the district’s leaders accountable if students aren’t making progress, she said.
The district also recently rolled out a parent portal designed to give parents better access to information about how their kids are doing academically. It includes real-time grades, state test scores and attendance information.
Plan must include steps to improve literacy
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of the education advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she wants to see a plan that includes focused support around literacy for all students in the district. In particular, she wants to see efforts to improve reading scores among Black students, who were nine points behind the rest of the district in terms of students scoring on grade level in reading on last year’s state test. Black students are consistently the lowest-performing demographic group in Fort Worth ISD, and Dorsey-Hollins, who is Black and has kids enrolled in the district, said she doesn’t think district leaders have done enough to correct the problem.
Dorsey-Hollins noted that the board passed a resolution at its December meeting, committing itself to “an unwavering, long-term, sustained focus of time, essential resources, and work” in support of improving literacy. But she wants to see more specifics about what that support looks like, and what action district leaders will take if student progress doesn’t follow. She’d also like to see the district bring parents into the decision-making process in a more meaningful way, she said.
Dorsey-Hollins would also like to see the plan include more efforts to keep parents informed about how their kids are doing academically. The parent portal is a good first step, she said — the district rolled the portal out partly in response to advocacy efforts by Parent Shield — but there’s more that school leaders could do.
On a recent visit to the Leadership Academy at Como Elementary School, one of five Fort Worth ISD campuses operated by Texas Wesleyan University under a partnership with the district, Dorsey-Hollins saw school leaders hold a data night where teachers walked parents through their kids’ academic progress. Dorsey-Hollins wants the district to hold similar events once a semester at each campus. Parents would get reports not only on their kids’ grades, but also MAP assessments, state test scores and other metrics like attendance, she said.
That information would put parents in a better position to help keep their kids on track, Dorsey-Hollins said. If kids are behind, parents can talk with teachers about what they can do at home to help them catch up, including finding private tutoring, if necessary, she said.
“It just gives parents more information on how they can best support their kids,” Dorsey-Hollins said.
The board will hold its workshop at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 14 at the Fort Worth ISD District Service Center, 7060 Camp Bowie Blvd.
This story was originally published December 30, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
