With possible state takeover looming, Fort Worth ISD parents get organized
A group of parents in the Fort Worth Independent School District are organizing to push back on a potential state takeover of the district.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath notified Fort Worth ISD officials last April that the district could be targeted for state takeover after one of its campuses received five consecutive failure ratings. An announcement on the district’s future could come as soon as this month.
But several parents told the Star-Telegram that they’re worried about the disruption that a state takeover would create, especially at a time when the district appears to be making progress academically.
Sixth-grade campus puts FWISD at state takeover risk
Morath notified Fort Worth ISD officials in late April that state law requires him to intervene after one campus, the Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, received a failure rating for a fifth consecutive school year. The school’s fifth unacceptable rating came in the state’s A-F accountability ratings for 2023, which the Texas Education Agency released last spring after a two-year court battle.
A 2015 state law requires the education commissioner to take one of two actions when a school receives five consecutive failure ratings: Close the campus down, or take over the entire district, removing its elected school board and replacing it with a state-appointed board of managers. TEA selects applicants from within the school district to serve on the board of managers.
Complicating matters further is the fact that Fort Worth ISD already closed Forest Oak Sixth Grade. District leaders closed the school at the end of the 2022-23 school year and moved its students to Forest Oak Middle School.
In his letter to Fort Worth ISD, Morath said the fact that the district had already closed the school “has no bearing on, and does not abrogate, the compulsory action the statute requires the commissioner to take.”
Fort Worth ISD officials appealed Forest Oak Sixth Grade’s fifth F rating. The appeals process is set to wrap up this month, and Morath has said he’ll make a decision on what action to take after that point.
FWISD PTA parents push back on TEA takeover
During an online meeting Thursday evening organized by the Fort Worth ISD Council of PTAs, several parents expressed concern that Fort Worth ISD could see the same level of turmoil as Houston ISD, which has seen growth in state test scores but also an exodus of teachers and principals following a similar state takeover two years ago. Although the council of PTAs hasn’t officially taken a position on the takeover, many of its members discussed plans to lobby local officials and state lawmakers who represent Fort Worth, calling on them to speak out against the potential move.
During the meeting, several PTA council members said they worried that a state takeover could do lasting damage to the district and push more families to look for other options, like charter schools or private schools, rather than sending their kids to a Fort Worth ISD campus. Some said they suspected the move is a part of a broader effort to privatize public education in Texas.
Bryan Upchurch, president of the PTA at Bruce Shulkey Elementary School, told the Star-Telegram that teachers and staff members at the school have told him they have a good relationship with Anne Darr, the board member who represents the Wedgwood neighborhood, where the school is located. He worries that relationship would be disrupted if the board’s current members were replaced with a board who was selected by TEA instead of elected by the community.
Upchurch said he also thinks a state takeover flies in the face of the Texas ethics of small government and local control. He acknowledged that districts need to be accountable to the state for how well they use taxpayer dollars and how students perform academically, but for the state to dictate who should lead a local school district and what its values should be doesn’t align with those ethics, he said.
Boards must reflect community’s needs, wishes for schools
Local control is important in all areas of government, said Ken Kuhl, director of governance for the Tarrant County Education Coalition, but nowhere more so than in schools. School board members generally aren’t experts on how to run a school system, he said. They’re there to set goals for their districts, direct money and hold school leaders accountable. But in doing that, they have to reflect the communities they serve, he said.
That’s important because what one school district needs can be vastly different from another, he said. Rural districts look different from suburban or urban districts, he said, but even within those categories, needs can be different. For example, a large percentage of Fort Worth ISD’s students are English language learners, so the district needs to have services in place to work with them. A state-appointed board, even if it’s made up of people selected from within the district, won’t necessarily reflect the community’s priorities in the same way as an elected one, he said.
Kuhl said he also worries that the potential takeover is coming at a time when the district seems to be making progress. The district has struggled for at least a decade to improve its reading scores. But on the most recent state test, the share of third-graders who scored on grade level in reading climbed by 8 points, from 33% last year to 41% this year. Although that still places Fort Worth ISD behind the rest of Texas, the district gained ground faster than the state as a whole. Texas saw just a three-point increase in third-grade reading, with 52% of students testing on grade level this year, compared to 49% last year.
Kuhl said he takes those gains in Fort Worth ISD as a sign that the strategies and emphasis on reading that Superintendent Karen Molinar has put into place since she stepped into the job last spring are working. He worries that a state takeover, if it’s done now, would disrupt that progress.
FWISD takeover would be ‘another blow to public education,’ mom worries
Taylor Duncan, the mother of three students at Daggett Elementary School, said the news of the possible state takeover felt like “another blow to public education.” Like several others, Duncan pointed to the most recent STAAR scores as a sign that the district is headed in a good direction, and worries a takeover would upend that progress.
One of Duncan’s primary concerns is that, if Morath installs a board of managers to govern the district, the community will have no way to hold board members accountable for the job they do. Under the current system, she said, parents have open lines of communication with the school board members who represent them. If voters don’t like the direction the district is headed, they can always vote for another candidate the next time their board member comes up for re-election. But because a board of managers wouldn’t be selected by the voters, they also wouldn’t be answerable to voters in the same way that elected board members are, Duncan said.
Duncan said she also worries that many families would choose to send their children to school elsewhere if Fort Worth ISD were under a state takeover. The move could erode parents’ confidence in traditional public schools, she said. She worries many would give up and transfer their kids out of the district, which could make matters even worse for the kids who remain.
“There’s still going to be kids left in those schools, and my worry is that there’s going to be even fewer people advocating for them,” she said.
Ed commissioner to announce takeover decision ‘later this year’
At a State Board of Education meeting on June 25, Morath said he hadn’t made a decision about what steps he planned to take in Fort Worth ISD. He said he expects to announce his plans later this year.
The fact that Fort Worth ISD has already closed Forest Oak Sixth Grade doesn’t affect the decision-making process at the state level, Morath said. But he also implied that it doesn’t leave the agency with no option other than a state takeover.
It might be more politically expedient to order Fort Worth ISD to close a campus that’s already been shut down, he said. But the district has other “pretty profound challenges,” he said, including several other campuses that have received poor scores for several consecutive years but aren’t being targeted for intervention because of a COVID-era pause on the issuance of failure ratings. But he also acknowledged that the district has a new superintendent
“I’ll be continuing to evaluate those factors, and then announce the decision sometime… later this year,” he said.
This story was originally published August 4, 2025 at 4:52 AM.
