Pre-K expands, Bible readings, summer camps: Top Fort Worth education stories this week

From summer literacy camps to a new Bible reading mandate for Texas classrooms, education headlines across Fort Worth and the state covered a wide range of issues this week. Programs targeting early learners, gun safety and curriculum changes all made news.

Here are key takeaways:

• Fort Worth is running literacy programs at more than 20 community centers this summer, with certified teachers delivering 45 minutes to an hour of daily reading instruction to fight the “summer slide.”
• A $330,000 donation from the Rainwater Charitable Foundation allowed the city to expand literacy support specialist hours from 20 to 25 per week at Camp Fort Worth sites.
• Castleberry ISD’s Camp Discovery: Pre-K Jumpstart program helps incoming pre-K students get familiar with school routines through a half-day program running late May to late June, easing first-week transition challenges.
• Educators in Castleberry say students who attend the summer program arrive ready in August, and research shows public preschool attendance correlates with higher third-grade reading and math performance.
• Fort Worth ISD plans to serve more than 200 additional pre-K-3 students in 2026-27 by filling about 225 seats from a waitlist of roughly 400 eligible 3-year-olds.
• The district also plans to pilot a program at three high school campuses where students can earn an industry certification in early childhood education by serving as assistant teachers.
• Texas recently became the first state to require biblical readings for all public school students. The State Board of Education approved a statewide social studies curriculum change and mandated reading list.
• Cook Children’s Health Care System treated 121 unintentional gun injuries in children from October 2023 to September 2025, with five of those injuries proving fatal. Experts urge parents to be mindful of proper gun storage and safety practices to keep their families safe, especially during the summer months when children are home more often.
• One in 5 children in Cook Children’s eight-county service area live in homes where guns are not always stored in locked areas, according to a 2024 report.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.

This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 5:02 PM.