This story was originally published by the Fort Worth Report. You may read the original version here. 

Eight hours into a Saturday workshop, Fort Worth ISD’s Texas-appointed board members arrived at the question they had heard from parents for weeks: Would they rein in scripted lessons?

The answer shapes the rules that the board of managers will use to hold Superintendent Peter Licata accountable. Managers are drafting superintendent guardrails and FWISD goals based on feedback from parents, students and other district residents. They will finalize the goals and limits at their Nov. 10 meeting.

The community comments led managers to draft a rule requiring the superintendent to seek teacher feedback on scripted lessons and other classroom changes.

Licata objected. He said the complaints came mostly from one of the district’s high school feeder patterns. He pointed to indicators from a test administered early in the year as a sign his instructional overhaul is working.

“Right now we’re getting pretty damn good results,” Licata said.

Manager Tennessee Walker said the complaints came from across the 60,000-student district. Directly from teachers. They all pointed to an ongoing failure: the loss of teacher trust.

“We’re not looking at just test scores in six weeks. We’re looking at sustainable results,” Walker said. “If teachers don’t feel trusted, if we don’t have teachers that will stick around, become master teachers and be here for decades to come, then it’s short-term results for long-term failure.”

Scripted lessons stayed at the top of the list when managers counted every feeder pattern equally, according to district documents.

Manager Jay Stegall said he sees the results Licata touted. However, a disconnect exists between what managers hear inside the District Service Center and what they hear from the community, he said.

Manager Laurie George cut through the disagreement: The board wants to respect teachers, she said.

Board President Pete Geren said teacher trust and respect was the No. 1 issue residents raised. Teachers told managers that the superintendent rolled out scripted lessons and other instructional changes without talking to them, Geren said.

“This says going forward, he won’t do that without engaging the teachers,” Geren said.

Ultimately, the board of managers stripped the scripted lessons from a proposed superintendent limit. However, the limit directs the superintendent to seek teacher feedback on significant lesson and instructional changes.

The scripted lessons discussion was one of several before managers drafted five goals and six superintendent limits.

‘No mission, no money’

Licata asked the board of managers for a constraint: Do not operate FWISD in a fiscally unsound manner.

“I don’t think this handcuffs me,” he said.

The superintendent outlined the district’s hurdles. Enrollment is declining. Too many campuses. A nearly $50 million shortfall.

“With the massive budget changes we’ll be making about closing schools, selling land and all that, I just think it’s important that that’s in there,” Licata said.

Secretary Rosa Maria Berdeja noted that fiscal responsibility was not an issue raised during the board’s listening sessions nor in survey responses. She said she was wary of replacing a community-rooted guardrail with one raised by the superintendent, but supported adding it as a sixth.

Finances underlie everything in FWISD, Walker said.

“No mission, no money,” Vice President Courtney Lewis said. “We can’t accomplish anything if we are not fiscally sound.”

Representation gap

Norma Garcia-Lopez, whose nieces and nephews attend FWISD, immigrated to the United States as a child. Her Spanish-speaking parents struggled to navigate the school system. 

“I know what it means when somebody has to be the voice for their family,” Garcia-Lopez told managers. “And that is why I cannot sit quietly when I see communities potentially being left out of a process that’s supposed to shape accountability for our superintendent.”

Garcia-Lopez and other community members criticized the board’s survey response collection for not being representative of student demographics.

Nearly half of 2,637 respondents who reported their race and ethnicity said they were white. FWISD’s student enrollment is 12.6% white. Latinos are 65% of students.

The board’s survey breakdown showed how the gap shaped the results. White respondents named scripted lessons as the top thing FWISD should stop doing. That’s more than twice the rate of Latinos who most often pointed to cuts to lunch, recess and the arts. 

However, scripted lessons were in the top three concerns for white, Latino and Black respondents.

Stegall suggested the board of managers seek additional feedback from residents to address the survey disparity. 

The sheer amount of responses should give managers confidence that the goals and guardrails are in the ballpark of what the community wants, Geren said. The survey drew 972 Latino and 241 Black respondents. 

“Before the next meeting, I’ll take responsibility of coming up with a plan and engaging a professional person to help us figure out how we reach all these groups that we haven’t reached very well,” Geren said.

Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected] 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.

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