Category: Schools

School District Saturday – 2025 02 22

This week, we’re going to catch up on Keller ISD and all its troubles, plus Fort Worth gets a new superintendent.

School District Saturday – 2025 02 15

There is regularly a lot of news about the school districts here in North Texas, which is because just as Texas is the national laboratory for bad government, North Texas is one of the state laboratories for terrible school district decisions. So I’m going to try to round up what’s going on with our local districts and what’s going on statewide (and nationally, if needed) that will affect our local schools.

The impending breakup of Keller ISD

Keller ISD covers the eastern part of Fort Worth and the suburb of Keller. The district is highly regarded but, like every other district in Texas, facing demographic and financial challenges exacerbated by the choices of our state government. I missed the beginning of this story because I don’t hang around on Facebook enough, and certainly not in the parts where stakeholders in Keller ISD spend time, but the story is that certain members of Keller’s seven-member board decided they wanted to split the poorer western side of the district from the eastern, suburban side of the district, with the dividing line being Old Denton Road. This was all happening in November and December, when we were all busy with other things.

Somehow, this has become an actual plan that appears to be happening. Keller’s web site refers to this project as “reshaping” and has a proposed map for the split. Some of the trustees were blindsided by the reveal of the proposed split back in January. The superintendent, who had only joined the district in December 2023, offered her resignation and the board named an interim superintendent in their January 30 meeting.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of opposition. At the meeting on the 30th, 200 speakers signed up and the majority were against the split. The Star-Telegram has editorialized against the split. Republican State Rep. Nate Schatzline, the pastor of Mercy Culture, is open to the plan but is concerned it will drive down property values if the new school district isn’t as high-performing as Keller ISD; he would represent much of the new district. Democratic Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, whom regular readers will know as a foil of Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, is also against the split.

So what is going on here? One piece of it is almost certainly the public interest lawsuit against Keller’s at-large trustee election system. I’ve written about these before but the gist of it is that Brewer Storefront, the public advocacy arm of a big law firm, has been threatening to sue districts around the state for at-large trustee elections. In the case of Keller ISD, they have May elections and that’s also a factor. These two rules make it harder for voters of color to have their say, which is illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (to the extent that still applies under the current administration). Brewer is now pushing to stop the split as well.

But the other rumor I’ve heard and can’t confirm is that the trustees behind the original split discussions–whom I can only guess at by seeing who’s against it, because it’s not them–are your bog-standard reactionary school board haters and the split is happening for obvious reasons. I find this theory somewhat compelling because it fits with everything else happening in Texas, in North Texas school boards, and because the start of these discussions in November and December aligns with a time when it became clear the Justice Department wouldn’t do anything about resegregation of school districts. This quote from an opponent of the split makes that clear:

The saddest thing of all was when a student said to my son I hope they split the district so that I can go to school with all white kids

Some further reading on this story: