FWISD board approves partnership with Texas Wesleyan to run struggling middle school
The Fort Worth Independent School District’s board voted Tuesday to hand day-to-day operations at a struggling middle school over to Texas Wesleyan University.
The board approved a plan to add Leonard Middle School to a list of campuses it runs in partnership with the university. As a part of the partnership, the school will get extra support, an extended school day and stipends to help attract the district’s top-performing teachers.
The middle school has struggled academically for years, receiving failure ratings every year that state education officials have awarded them. On last year’s state test, just 17% of the school’s students scored on grade level in reading, and 8% were on grade level in math.
Since 2019, Fort Worth ISD has partnered with Texas Wesleyan to run the five campuses in its Leadership Academy Network — Mitchell Boulevard, Como, John T. White, and Maude I. Logan elementary schools and Forest Oak Middle School. The district formed the network in 2017 to help boost academic achievement at those schools, which had struggled for years.
Two years later, it turned operations at those schools over to the university under a kind of partnership laid out in Senate Bill 1882, which lawmakers passed in 2017. The law gives school districts financial incentives to partner with outside organizations like nonprofits, universities or charter schools to run low-performing campuses. Besides adding Leonard Middle School to the network, the board also voted Tuesday to renew the district’s partnership with the university to run the other five campuses.
During the public comment section of Tuesday’s meeting, several teachers, administrators and students from Leadership Academy Network campuses asked the board to continue supporting the program. Skylar Jamison, a fifth-grader at the Leadership Academy at Mitchell Boulevard Elementary School, said teachers and administrators at the school helped shape her into a leader.
The school offers experiences that others don’t, Skylar said. On Fridays, the campus participates in Everybody Grows, which gives students a chance to try out activities like gardening, yoga and a science lab. Those are activities that students don’t get to see in their everyday lives, but might want to try out in the future, she said.
Danny Fracassi, principal at Mitchell Boulevard, said students at the school thrive in an environment that encourages leadership and creativity. The progress the school has made since the Leadership Academy Network program began in 2017 has been “nothing short of remarkable,” he said. The school received a failure rating the year before the program began. Last year, it was a B-rated campus.
But Fracassi said more can be done. He thanked board members for supporting the program up to now and asked them to maintain that support.
“Our students’ potential is limitless,” he said. “And with your support, we can continue to expand the opportunities that will allow them to become leaders we all want our children to become.”
