Improved student outcomes in Fort Worth ISD depend on finding the right number of campuses, according to a district-hired consulting firm.
Fort Worth ISD needs to achieve a balance as it determines the right number of campuses for its declining enrollment and shrinking number of people living in the district, consultant Tracy Richter told the school board during a July meeting. Closing schools, he said, could translate into better academic performance for a district grappling with stagnant outcomes.
Fewer schools frees up money otherwise tabbed for building maintenance.
More schools? Higher costs and delaying some maintenance and improvements until a bond election. For example, Fort Worth ISD would need to spend $16 million to maintain just middle schools — the same amount as the district’s annual maintenance budget, Richter said.
“The fact of the matter is if you want diverse and robust program offerings, low operating costs and small school sizes, you can’t have all three,” Richter said. “Just do the math.”
Small schools with plenty of program offerings? “You’re going to pay for it,” the consultant said.
Low operating costs and diverse programs? “Your school sizes are going to have to be a little bigger,” Richter said.
Richter works for Hoar Program Management, or HPM, an Alabama-based firm receiving more than $2 million to assemble the district’s building plan.
A national school finance expert told the Fort Worth Report in 2023 that connecting academic priorities and school closures should be among the top considerations for trustees.
Starting from scratch
The district has to deal with shrinking enrollment at the middle school level, according to both trustees and their consultant.
In May, trustees pulled a proposal that would have merged seven middle schools into three new buildings. Trustee Wallace Bridges told his fellow school board members the community felt like the previous plan was a done deal that didn’t reflect residents’ input.
“I’m going to be honest with you: it did not come across very well,” Bridges said.
The district started its school building plan from scratch, Richter said.
“We’re going to talk about standards. We’re going to talk about goals. We’re going to talk about programmatic impacts. We’re going to talk about all those things and community impacts before we even get to make options,” Richter said.
Community members don’t trust Fort Worth ISD and the school board, trustee Quinton Phillips said. The middle school proposal and the 2021 bond passing by 57 votes are evidence of that, he added.
The district needs to deliver on its promise of upgraded middle schools and three new replacement elementary schools from the bond, Phillips said. New schools could triage enrollment declines, he said.
“Now we’re flying in the face of that again, coming up with our own schemes about what we want to do instead of doing what we said we were going to do in the first place,” Phillips said.
Board President Camille Rodriguez said further delaying consolidation could mean erasing the option of building new middle schools because of higher costs.
Deputy Superintendent Kellie Spencer confirmed Rodriguez’s concerns.
Neighbors and constituents have inundated Rodriguez, she said, with questions about why they are not receiving a new school. Rodriguez’s school board district included two middle schools eyed in the proposed merger. Other middle schools were split between trustee districts.
“We need brand new state-of-the-art schools. We don’t need to continue to put Band-Aids on schools that are 50, 60, 100 years old,” the school board president said. “There’s only so much you can do.”
Trustee Roxanne Martinez called school closures and consolidations a last resort. Her children attend Fort Worth ISD schools that don’t address larger systemic needs in the way all public schools should, she said.
“When we went out to the community, things that I heard were, what have we done as a district to bring back our families and our students?” Martinez said, referring to several spring community meetings about middle schools. “I also heard a lot of different ideas from community members, like have you considered maybe just realigning boundaries to equal out the enrollment at middle schools?”
The number of students attending Fort Worth ISD has dwindled since its enrollment peak of 87,233 during the 2016-17 school year. Richter expects enrollment to drop further before stabilizing.
Superintendent Angélica Ramsey has predicted enrollment dropping to 55,000 before plateauing.
By the 2033-34 school year, HPM expects 59,756 students in Fort Worth ISD. To put that in perspective, Arlington ISD’s enrollment was similar during the 2019-20 academic year.
If that number comes to fruition, Fort Worth ISD would have lost nearly one in three students between 2016 and 2033.
Or, put another way, a loss of 27,477 students.
Jacob Sanchez is a senior education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or @_jacob_sanchez. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
