Fort Worth ISD gathers community feedback with school closure decisions on the horizon
After the Fort Worth Independent School District school board this week reviewed potential scenarios for upcoming school closures, district officials and its facilities master plan consultant are ramping up ongoing efforts to share information with committees and community members while fielding questions and feedback.
The Citizens’ Oversight Committee met on Wednesday, Feb. 12, to hear an update from Tracy Richter, vice president of planning services at HPM, on the facilities master plan process, which included analysis of data points and factors that Fort Worth ISD must consider while deciding how to consolidate its campuses due to declining enrollment. Richter’s presentation was similar to the one he had given to the school board the night prior, where more than 20 school names were mentioned for potential closures.
The Wednesday night meeting included a smaller crowd of community members who threw out questions along the way. It was the first of six scheduled over the next month involving a committee, task force or the general public.
“We’ve got a task force and a steering committee. Both are committees that kind of look at this data. The task force is a large, by-pyramid committee, that we have 125 members of, that represent across the district. Steering Committee is a smaller group of community members that are also looking at this data,” Richter said. “Of course, we have our internal team that works on this too. And so a lot of eyes, different eyes working on it in the effort to try to be as transparent as we can. That’s our goal.”
The facilities master plan will inform district officials on how to make the heavy decisions about which buildings to keep, which buildings to cut and which buildings to repurpose. Formal recommendations are expected to come before the board in June, Richter said, which will mostly impact elementary schools. The master plan process started in September 2023.
Documents show that across all of Fort Worth ISD’s 79 elementary schools, there’s a potential reduction range of up to 28 schools. Some of the options presented also suggest closing up to three middle schools and converting Western Hills High School into a middle school.
Richter emphasized the variety of variables being analyzed for each campus throughout the planning process beyond a building’s capacity and enrollment.
“People walk away from these and think it’s just a spreadsheet exercise. And it’s far from a spreadsheet exercise. We talk about programs, we talk about demographics, we talk about delivery models, we talk about the framework of education a lot in this process,” Richter said. “It’s not just a matter of numbers of students, it’s not just a matter of just conditions of facilities. There’s so much that goes into this.”
Citizens’ Oversight Committee Member John Pergande, of District 1, asked Richter on Wednesday about the ideal enrollment number for elementary and middle schools in order for them to receive the resources they need. Pergande is one of 20 people on the committee, which was created to oversee the rollout of Fort Worth ISD’s 2021 bond program, in which voters approved $1.2 billion for renovations of middle schools and construction of four elementary campuses. It remains to be seen how the bond program will overlap with the facilities master plan.
Richter answered Pergande by noting the number varies by state, but in Texas, an ideal middle school enrollment is “a number you probably could never attain,” which is 900-1,200 students. But middle school administrators argue it’s smaller.
“Most middle school administrators will tell you that a 750 or 900 middle school is almost an ideal size for a lot of different reasons. For teaming, for how you’re resource building, how you get the teachers to work together programmatically,” Richter said. “At the elementary grade level we feel like, in Texas, that four to six teachers per grade level is an appropriately staffed building. Now, in translation, that means an elementary school from 550 to 700 is an appropriately staffed school building.”
In addition to hosting upcoming community meetings later this month and in March, the district will be sending out a survey soon to field comments from the community, said Deputy Superintendent of Operations Kellie Spencer. The district had fielded another survey in the fall where, out of about 1,100 Fort Worth ISD respondents, 46% said they agreed with reducing the number of buildings in the district while 25% were opposed and 29% said they were unsure.
“Tomorrow evening (Thursday, Feb. 13), the task force will meet for the third time… as they work through really finalizing the options so that they are in a form that we will present to the community. The community then will have the opportunity to provide similar feedback based on the options presented through a survey,” Spencer said.
The task force meetings are not open to the public.
The upcoming community meetings will be advertised through a variety of channels, Spencer added.
“Emails went out today, so communication went out to community members and parents this evening,” she said. “There’ll be posts on social media. We’ll ask our principals to help us communicate in their forms of communication. There is a Friday message that goes out districtwide that information will be communicated through that as well. So really, every media channel that we have available.”
The upcoming meetings open to community members, all scheduled from 6-7 p.m., are:
Feb. 24 at O.D. Wyatt High (Eastern Region — Dunbar, Eastern Hills, Polytechnic & Wyatt pyramids)
Feb. 26 at Diamond Hill-Jarvis High (North Central Region — Carter-Riverside, Diamond Hill-Jarvis, North Side & Paschal pyramids)
Feb. 27 at Benbrook Middle-High (Southwestern Region — Arlington Heights, Benbrook, South Hills, Southwest & Western Hills pyramids)
March 3: Virtual meeting (All district)
