Superintendent Mark Ramirez knew for months he wasn’t going to lead Lake Worth schools into the foreseeable future as the state takes control of the 3,200-student district.
Now it’s official after Lake Worth ISD trustees accepted Ramirez’s resignation and approved staff layoffs during a special board meeting March 9. Ramirez’s last day is Friday, and trustees are expected to name an interim superintendent at their March 23 meeting.
“This is the most difficult vote I have cast in my 12 years as a board member,” board President Tammy Thomas said before trustees approved Ramirez’s separation agreement. “You have established a solid foundation in Lake Worth ISD for academic improvement and growth.”
District officials did not immediately detail how many jobs will be eliminated during a campus restructuring that is coming as Lake Worth transitions to state control after years of poor academic performance.
The board approved the reduction in force tied to program changes at Marilyn Miller Language Academy, the struggling campus at the center of the state intervention.
Ramirez told the Fort Worth Report the move is part of a plan to restructure Miller through an Accelerating Campus Excellence, or ACE, model supported by a state grant.
Trustees unanimously approved identifying employment areas at Miller that will be subject to the cuts, including core content teachers across grade levels, special education, electives — such as physical education, art and music — as well as campus-based professional staff including assistant principals, a counselor and a nurse.
District leaders said the action does not automatically cut an employee. Affected teachers and staff will be evaluated against criteria administrators are developing and may be eligible to apply for open positions at Miller or elsewhere in the district.
Officials will meet individually with affected employees and determine whether they qualify to be rehired under the new campus structure. Those who do not secure another position could face nonrenewal of their contracts.
Conservator Andrew Kim said the ACE approach focuses on attracting highly effective educators to schools with persistent academic struggles.
“The main crux is to really recruit talented individuals, talented teachers — teachers who are expert in curriculum and expert in teaching — as well as the leadership that goes with that,” Kim said.
The strategy is based on the model started in Dallas ISD under its former leader Mike Miles, now the state-appointed superintendent of Houston schools. Typically, ACE schools include higher pay for teachers, additional instructional coaching and planning time and an intensive academic focus for the turnaround campuses.
In Fort Worth ISD, which is undergoing its own state intervention, district leaders are using ACE at six campuses, where teachers in core subjects can earn starting salaries of about $100,000 as the district tries to quickly raise student achievement at historically low-performing schools.
Lake Worth officials said their ACE plan at Miller is tied to a state grant that provides additional dollars for the district’s recruitment and restructuring efforts.
Administrators are determining what salary incentives could look like for teachers hired under the model, Ramirez said. The grant provides about $350,000 per year, he said, and part of that funding may be used to increase compensation for teachers who qualify to work at the redesigned campus.
Lake Worth ISD employs roughly 556 staff members, including 214 teachers and 65 aides, according to state staffing data. The district operates on a balanced general fund budget of about $40 million, with more than half of that spending tied to classroom instruction.
The financial strain of the takeover has been a concern for district leaders. During a January community meeting with Texas Education Agency officials, trustee Mary Wilson Coker asked whether the district would be responsible for paying the costs associated with the intervention — including the conservator overseeing Lake Worth schools, Ramirez’s expected separation agreement and the salary of the next superintendent.
“If the state’s going to take over, it would be nice if they could help offset some of the costs of them taking over,” Coker said.
Agency officials at the meeting confirmed the district would bear those expenses.
Ramirez’s exit had been expected since December when Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath ordered the state intervention. The school leader, hired in May, confirmed soon after that he would not be a candidate to remain as superintendent once the state installs new leadership — a decision by Morath that Ramirez said he was disappointed by.
Under the intervention, Morath will appoint a new superintendent and a board of managers to govern the district, replacing the authority of Lake Worth’s locally elected trustees.
Ramirez came to the district from Dallas ISD after longtime superintendent Rose Mary Neshyba retired from Lake Worth. During his brief tenure, he focused heavily on classroom instruction with administrators as well as instructional coaches logging hundreds of classroom visits across campuses where they monitored lessons. School leaders said they were seeing early signs of academic improvement.
Trustees traveled to Austin in December, urging Morath to strike a deal to remove them from power but keep Ramirez in place.
Ultimately, the commissioner said the district’s long history of low academic performance required a complete leadership reset, even as he acknowledged Ramirez had begun making changes.
“If they had taken steps to bring Dr. Ramirez in five years ago, I highly doubt we’d be having this conversation,” Morath said.
Early data presented to trustees suggested some improvement. Beginning-of-year and middle-of-year testing showed fewer students performing at the lowest academic levels and more reaching grade-level expectations compared with the previous year, district officials said. Ramirez also guided trustees through adopting state-developed Bluebonnet Learning lesson plans and pushed campuses to use common lesson structures across the district.
He drew strong support from teachers and parents who questioned the state’s decision to remove him while such changes were still taking hold.
“For the first time in many years, we have clear, actionable steps, aligned strategies and procedures that give our staff a structured path toward improvement,” Effie Morris S.T.E.A.M. Academy teacher Katrina Lemond said.
Still, Morath said the district required a full leadership reset to address longstanding academic challenges.
The state takeover was triggered by Marilyn Miller receiving five consecutive failing academic accountability ratings — a threshold in Texas law that requires the commissioner to either close the campus or replace district leadership.
Earlier this year, Morath appointed former superintendent Kim as conservator to oversee district operations and governance while Morath assembles new leadership for the district that stretches along the northwest border of Fort Worth.
Morath is expected to name managers and a new superintendent this spring.
Prior to his resignation, Ramirez said he plans to assist with the leadership transition while the district continues implementing its academic turnaround efforts.
“I worry about the decisions I can make,” Ramirez previously told the Fort Worth Report. “We’ll keep showing the growth and moving Lake Worth to where we know it can be.”
After Monday’s vote, Ramirez said he felt both emotional and proud.
“There’s a sense of accomplishment,” he said. “We’re on the road to increasing student achievement. We built positive relationships.”
He will leave Lake Worth to become chief of schools in El Paso ISD under that district’s new Superintendent Brian Lusk, he told the Report. Ramirez and Lusk worked together in Dallas ISD from 2016 to 2025.
Ramirez believes Lake Worth would have benefited from continuity in leadership during the turnaround. But his final message to the community was to keep the focus on students.
“It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially in the next couple of weeks,” Ramirez said. “The next couple of weeks are gonna be challenging, but we have a lot to look forward to.”
After his final report to trustees, the room rose for a standing ovation that lasted about 10 seconds — a show of support that mirrored the emotion on the dais, as Thomas and trustee Cindy Burt wiped tears from their red eyes.
Burt put words to what many in the room appeared to feel.
“You can see it in our faces. You’ve made us better,” Burt said, sniffling lightly. “Yes, it was just a short term … but as much as I wanna kick and scream and plead, ‘Don’t do this,’ it’s gonna have to be done. So we’ll pull up our bootstraps and cowboy up, and let’s rock and roll.”
Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.orgor @matthewsgroi1.
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