A Fort Worth charter school will soon close, citing funding, enrollment issues
Rocketship Public Schools Texas, a financially beleaguered charter school network, is closing its Fort Worth school at the end of the school year, officials announced Friday.
The network will surrender its charter to the Texas Education Agency and turn its Berry Street building, the current home of Rocketship Dennis Dunkins Elementary School, over to Responsive Education Solutions, the Lewisville-based charter school operator behind Ignite Community Schools. The building will reopen next year as an Ignite campus.
Rocketship Dennis Dunkins Elementary opened in 2022. At the time, the school’s superintendent, SaJade Miller, told the Star-Telegram he hoped it would offer an alternative to students who were underserved by the traditional public school system.
The following year, the network opened a second campus, Rocketship Explore Elementary School. But in December, the charter network’s board voted to shut Explore Elementary down and merge the two campuses. At the time, school leaders cited financial pressure and lower-than-expected enrollment.
Rocketship Texas has had challenges, both academic and financial, almost since its inception, state records show. The network received an F rating in TEA’s A-F accountability ratings for 2023, which were released Thursday after a two-year court battle. The network also received an F rating on the Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas for the 2023-24 school year, the district’s second year in operation. State evaluators noted, among other things, that the network’s revenue wasn’t great enough to cover operating expenses, and its assets weren’t sufficient to cover its debts.
Miller, the superintendent, told the Star-Telegram that the closure was a disappointment, not only for him, but for the families and community that looked to Rocketship as an educational alternative. He considers it a point of pride that Rocketship didn’t only accept students who were academically well credentialed and easy to deal with.
“We served children who have been kicked out of three or four schools, and we took the hard kids,” he said.
But Miller said the school’s financial projections were based on year-over-year increases in state revenue that were in line with historic trends. State lawmakers haven’t adjusted the per-student allotment districts get from the state since 2019, leaving many schools struggling to keep up with inflation. That lack of new revenue, combined with enrollment numbers that also didn’t keep pace with projections, made it financially untenable to keep the network operating, Miller said.
The decision to hand the Berry Street building over to another charter network came mostly out of a desire not to leave a vacant building in the neighborhood, Miller said. Doing so also means the community Rocketship serves won’t lose an educational option when the network closes. Miller said he could make no guarantees about whether families at Dennis Dunkins will see a noticeable change with the new leadership. But Ignite has shown a commitment to working in high-need communities like the one the school serves, he said.
Charter schools make up a small but growing share of Fort Worth’s overall public school landscape. Last year, about 13% of the city’s public school students were enrolled in charter schools. While it’s been relatively rare for charter schools in Fort Worth to surrender their charters, Rocketship Texas’ closure comes about a year after the closure of another local campus, for similar reasons. Chapel Hill Academy, a charter school operated by the Fort Worth children’s advocacy group Lena Pope, closed last year, citing financial pressure and declining enrollment.
Ayesha Rushdan, the mother of a kindergartner at Rocketship Dennis Dunkins, said she was initially drawn to the school because she liked the idea of her son starting at a new school with a new campus culture. Rocketship’s heavy emphasis on parental involvement also appealed to her. Rushdan lives just a five-minute drive from her son’s zoned elementary school in the Burleson Independent School District, but when she heard about Rocketship, she decided it would be worth the longer commute to school.
But Rushdan said her impressions of the school shifted quickly. The mid-year merger of the Dennis Dunkins and Explore campuses was a major disruption, she said. She also felt like there were breakdowns in communication and leadership.
In meetings with parents, Rocketship officials said they weren’t getting enough new revenue from the state to cover expenses, Rushdan said. State lawmakers haven’t adjusted the per-student allotment districts get from the state since 2019, leaving many schools struggling to keep up with inflation. But Rushdan noted that Rocketship Texas opened its first school two years into that funding environment. She thinks school leaders should have been better prepared to manage the network’s finances in a tight budget situation.
The news about Rocketship Texas’ closure leaves Rushdan looking for a new school for her kids — one who started at Rocketship and another who starts kindergarten in the fall. Even though Dennis Dunkins Elementary will continue under new ownership, the instability she saw there made her feel like she had to get out.
“It’s just too many hiccups,” she said. “... I don’t want to keep bringing my child into an uncertain environment.”
This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 10:39 AM.
