Frustration boiled over during Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Peter Licata’s listening session at Arlington Heights High School.
More than 180 people packed the cafeteria — nearly double the attendance of three previous meetings combined. Parents shouted at the superintendent, demanding he answer their questions and look at them when they spoke. Licata paced the room, at times looking down at his shoes.
One parent was ejected from the meeting over behavior that chief of staff Louis Kushner and the superintendent found unacceptable.
It was the loudest of Licata’s four listening sessions, billed as the takeover leadership’s chance to hear from families. Parents and students raised the same concerns again and again — a rigid curriculum, teacher turnover and poor communication. Licata said he’s listening. Many who showed up left unconvinced he had heard them.
Licata opened each session the same way: with data delineating the district’s decline. FWISD fell under a state intervention after years of failing academic ratings. The district has pockets of success, but Licata said 3 out of 5 students can’t proficiently read.
“I’m here because we did not do well,” Licata said. “This is not a lifetime job for me. We don’t get out of this without all of us talking about what we can do better.”
Parents didn’t come to defend the old FWISD. They agree it’s broken. It’s the way district leaders are guiding the turnaround that brought them out.
Christina Jones attended the South Hills High School meeting. She wants a partnership with Fort Worth ISD’s new state-appointed leadership, but she’s not sure the district wants the same.
Mario Alcalá, whose two children attend Lily B. Clayton Elementary, came to the Polytechnic High School session to hear Licata directly rather than make up his mind from secondhand accounts. Complaints from parents should produce something more tangible than an acknowledgement from district leaders, he said.
R.L. Paschal High School junior Alexander Nguyen attended all four listening sessions because he believes the district’s changes could help struggling students. His fear is about what happens to students who are already excelling.
“We’re on very, very different pages,” Jones said. “We feel very us vs. them with the district as parents.”
‘They’re edited incorrectly’
Alexander told Licata at the South Hills meeting that the district-provided lessons in his French class drift between French and Spanish. The assignments in English were so bad that he said he could barely parse them, and he worried about classmates.
Alexander suggested letting FWISD’s strongest teachers standardize the materials.
Licata acknowledged the lessons have mistakes, but that they are meant to be edited. Sometimes, he said, edits create errors.
“We’re owning some mistakes in the curriculum that we own, but teachers also can edit it, and they’re edited incorrectly,” Licata said.
At Arlington Heights, Licata said the district is hiring more teachers so that they can review the work before classes see it.
At the Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School session, district leaders held up Alexander’s complaint as an example of the meetings working. Licata contacted academic administrators while the South Hills meeting was underway, Kushner said, and curriculum staff reviewed and corrected the slides the next day.
But Alexander said the response exposed the larger contradiction bothering him: If district-provided materials are wrong, why require teachers to use them? And if teachers are expected to catch the mistakes themselves, why constrain how they teach?
“If the slides are wrong, then why are we still enforcing that teachers must use these slides?” Alexander said.
His complaint echoed across the meetings. Parents said they were less opposed to standardizing what students learn than to how narrowly teachers appeared expected to deliver it.
‘I want them to succeed’
Parents repeatedly connected the lesson rigidity to another concern: whether FWISD can keep experienced teachers if they no longer feel trusted to teach.
For parent Christina Jones, the teacher losses trace back to how the district treats the people in the classroom. She said she’s watched educators she respects be worn down by micromanagement and mistrust.
“To see them beat down, belittled, manipulated and micromanaged, it breaks my heart,” Jones said. “I want them to succeed so that kids in our community can succeed, and I see that really being taken away from them.”
At Diamond Hill-Jarvis, parents said teachers described being micromanaged over whiteboards, classroom procedures and even how pencils were arranged and sharpened. Some questioned whether tightly prescribed instruction left young students with enough time to sit on classroom carpets, move around or take breaks.
Licata defended tighter expectations while rejecting the idea that teachers were to blame for FWISD’s academic struggles.
“Are there rigid regulations about how we’re going to do things? Yes,” Licata said.
He repeatedly called teachers the most important educators in a student’s life. But parents pushed him on whether those two messages — trust teachers while prescribing how they work — can coexist.
‘Working together’
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, executive director of parental advocacy group Parent Shield, said FWISD’s communication is stuck in the same cycle: the district tells parents what happened after it has gone wrong.
Clear, proactive and transparent communication with parents will begin to repair broken trust, Dorsey-Hollins said.
“Make us feel like we are working together and not it’s you against us,” she said.
Daniel Trejo Jr. offered a smaller example of why trust has eroded.
Trejo’s son started pre-K this year at Diamond Hill Elementary. Trejo took time off for the first day and expected to walk his son into school. Instead, he said, parents arrived and learned at the door that they could not go inside.
Trejo later saw first-day photos from other FWISD campuses where parents had been allowed to walk their children in. His relatives at schools elsewhere in the district had been able to do the same.
“We did not have any communication about what to expect from the Elevate campus,” Trejo said, referring to Diamond Hill Elementary. “I can’t walk my child into the school. It’s heartbreaking.”
District leaders acknowledged the inconsistency. Kushner said the Elevate model calls for instruction to begin when students enter the building, which affects drop-off procedures. Licata also conceded the district had not adequately communicated the change.
“When you say we’re not communicating well, you’re right,” Licata said.
Kushner called the district’s in-house newscast, FWISD Forward, a step toward better communication. The daily video emulates television broadcast news, including interviews with district staff. The newscast is published on FWISD’s social media in English and Spanish.
“As a former principal, this is where I’m personally comfortable doing this and bringing solutions forward so that way we don’t feel the mistrust,” Kushner said.
Alcalá, the Lily B. Clayton parent, questioned whether that strategy reaches the families that district leaders most need to hear from. At the Polytechnic session, he looked around a room in a heavily Hispanic part of Fort Worth and saw few people he felt represented the surrounding community.
Posting something online is not the same as ensuring parents see it, he said. The district needs to meet families where they are, whether through texts, phone calls, campus events or other outreach.
“If the parents don’t know what you’re doing, you could be doing a ton of great things,” Alcalá said. “It doesn’t matter.”
District leaders said the sessions already changed their approach. They corrected the curriculum slides Alexander flagged. They removed questions from the meeting format after participants at the South Hills session said they felt combative rather than collaborative. And leaders said they would begin sharing takeaways from the sessions through the superintendent’s weekly newsletter.
Those changes are the kind of response Licata said he wants the meetings to produce. He told participants not every suggestion will become district policy, but promised his cabinet would review what it heard across all four sessions and determine what needs to change.
‘I didn’t even want to get up’
Western Hills High School teacher Lucynda Nicholson did not plan to speak. Nonetheless, she stood up in the back of Arlington Heights’ cafeteria and grabbed the microphone.
She told the room she has taught more than 30 years in FWISD. She watched superintendents come and go without asking teachers what they needed. The last time the district’s leader did that was in 2005, she said.
Nicholson loves FWISD, loves her school, loves her kids — and that’s why she said she is angry and can’t take the stress of the state intervention anymore.
She said she’s thinking about leaving the district, either in December or May.
“I didn’t even want to get up in the morning and go to school,” Nicholson said. “I feel like nobody’s listening to us.”
Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or @_jacob_sanchez.
Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or @matthewsgroi1.
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.
