Classrooms in Fort Worth ISD’s lowest-performing schools now have web cameras pointed at students — mirroring takeover changes seen in Houston classrooms.
The cameras have alarmed a parent group and teacher association that say families and educators were not notified. District officials said the cameras allow students to watch live lessons when they’re out of the room over behavioral issues.
Dionna Deardorff, spokesperson for Families Organized & Responding to Takeover, a parent group known as FORT, said cameras were placed this week in third- through fifth-grade classrooms in Elevate Network schools, the district’s chronically failing campuses.
The group also raised safety concerns about the district using Zoom, a video conferencing platform FWISD dropped during the pandemic after unauthorized users breached password-protected virtual classrooms.
In a separate January 2024 incident, a pornographic broadcast interrupted a Zoom broadcast of a FWISD sex education committee meeting.
“Families are partners in their child’s education and deserve to have all the information on what is happening in their child’s classroom,” Deardorff said in a news release.
FWISD spokesperson Jessica Becerra said the cameras are neither for surveillance nor recording classroom instruction.
If a teacher is absent, students can watch a live lesson from another classroom covering the same material. Students removed for a disciplinary reason will keep following the lesson from another supervised location.
“Web cameras have been included as part of the instructional technology expectations of the Elevate Model since its inception,” Becerra said in a statement.
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, said members had questions about the district’s rationale and worried about privacy because the cameras point toward students.
Teachers received little communication over the cameras, Poole said.
“The direct communication from administration is not there,” he said. “A lot of what teachers are receiving is from their principals, which changes from school to school, and also just word of mouth.”
FWISD appeared to copy the approach from Houston, Poole said.
Houston ISD installed cameras in its lowest-performing classrooms as part of a turnaround model called the New Education System. Houston Superintendent Mike Miles cited reasons similar to FWISD’s.
During a recent town hall meeting, Superintendent Peter Licata said Elevate is a Fort Worth model based on the mixture of several districts, including large urban school systems. Fort Worth’s reforms are practices that are consistent across high-performing schools, he said.
“We are going with strong instructional practices that I’ve seen my entire life,” Licata said. “I was never part of any (New Education System) model that was ever presented, so I’m not aware of that. But I am aware of what good instructional practice looks like, and that’s what we’re pushing hard.”
At the town hall, Daniel Soliz, the deputy superintendent and chief of schools, described Elevate as an instructional model that helps principals run the day minute by minute, with a standardized bell schedule, extended classroom time, new curriculum and a required playbook campus leaders are trained on to close reading and math gaps.
“This is something that we created when we got here,” said Soliz, a former chief under Miles in Houston ISD.
Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or @_jacob_sanchez.
Disclosure: FWISD manager Pete Geren leads the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report. FWISD manager Laurie George is a member of the Report’s reader advisory council. 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 Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
