LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.

There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear. 

“Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”

This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.

Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.

That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.

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At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”

Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.

The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.

The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.

ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.

“An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.

Related: Five community colleges tweak their offerings to match the local job market

First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.

In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.

The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.

“Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”

Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.

In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.

“We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”

The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.

The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.

Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”

But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.

“I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”

Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses

Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.

Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.

“I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”

Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.

Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.

This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.

In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.

They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.

Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Austin Community College was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post A community college could transform a region — and help itself grow. Will voters buy it? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about school segregation was produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that provides free news, data and events on Texas public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. This story was reprinted with permission.

SAN ANTONIO — Shoulders hunched and a worried expression plastered on his face, Principal Brian Sparks walked briskly through the halls of Lamar Elementary toward the cafeteria.

It was lunchtime on the first day of school in August, and Sparks alternated between directing students precariously balancing their lunch trays and milk cartons to their seats and helping calm a shrieking, red-faced kindergartner who refused to eat until teachers retrieved her mother.

He spends half the week at Lamar and the other half at Bowden Academy, a pre-K through 8th grade school just a 10-minute drive south, where he was installed as principal this fall.

Both schools enroll mostly low-income Hispanic students. But Lamar, a recently renovated school in a gentrifying neighborhood, is thriving thanks to an infusion of money and increased enrollment from inside and outside the district. Bowden, drab and dimly lit, is still struggling as it awaits an $11.1 million renovation financed through a 2016 bond.

Sparks, one of San Antonio Independent School District’s “network principals,” has been given more than $1 million in grants to replicate Lamar’s successes at Bowden, part of a larger effort to overhaul low-performing schools and boost falling enrollment across this inner-city district with 92 schools and about 49,000 students.

Like many of its urban peers, San Antonio ISD has been losing thousands of students each year to private and charter schools, as well as neighboring school districts — part of a national trend as parents gain more options for where to enroll their children. That declining enrollment has meant the loss of millions of dollars in state money for the district.

But instead of shuttering schools with dropping enrollment — a move that often triggers community backlash — they’re redesigning them by offering popular education programs such as dual language or Montessori that are meant to serve as bait for families who otherwise might be paying for those offerings at private schools.

Related: San Antonio is hoping career-themed schools can alleviate a worker shortage

The plan serves as a way to integrate some schools in what has historically been a majority Hispanic district by bringing students with vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds together in the same classrooms, an approach that is known to improve academic performance and overall life outcomes. It also is intended to cut down the number of schools in poor neighborhoods that have been low-performing for years.

As more Texas public schools begin to resemble San Antonio ISD’s — with wealthier white students leaving and Hispanic students, who are more likely to be poor, in the majority — the district’s plan could become a blueprint for how to draw those families back while also improving schools for all students. While racial segregation is far from a distant memory in many parts of the state, San Antonio ISD and most other Bexar County school districts are majority Hispanic, making socioeconomic integration a more feasible goal.

Related: How the federal government abandoned the Brown v. Board of Education decision

“We feel that the things we’re seeing, you can actually apply to the entire state, whether it’s other urban districts or rural areas,” Superintendent Pedro Martinez said this spring while explaining his work to a state-run school funding panel.

But it’s unclear whether San Antonio ISD’s educational experiment is financially sustainable. The plan is dependent on a combination of private donations and state and federal grants, but those dollars could run out. Because the district’s leaders cannot guarantee they can invest in all of its schools, they have to choose winners and losers as they divide limited resources in a system where 91 percent of students are considered economically disadvantaged by the state.

Over the last five years, Sparks has made Lamar a winner with the help of an engaged corps of parents, some who gush about finding a school where their children can learn in Spanish and English, without having to shell out five-digit tuition payments. Families who had once opted out of sending their kids to the school have come back, and some seats are open to students other parts of the city. Behind an old schoolhouse facade, natural light streams through the windows of once-sparse classrooms that now burst with eager students.

At Bowden, the atmosphere is much different. The parents are more likely to be working class and live in the neighborhood. They worry that class sizes are too big, teachers can’t keep disciplinary issues under control, and that their kids don’t often get to work on creative projects. Empty multi-colored lockers line the hallways instead of student drawings, and misshapen ceiling tiles hang awkwardly overhead. Many parents in the neighborhood are opting out, sending their kids to other public schools outside the district or private schools if they can afford it.

Related: The Anonymous Town That Was the Model of Desegregation in the Civil-Rights Era

But it’s Bowden’s similarities to Lamar that helped persuade district leaders to choose it for a major overhaul, funded by $1.3 million in federal grants this year and a promise of at least a million more next year. The neighborhood surrounding Bowden is also beginning to gentrify — shiny, modern row homes sit next to creaky, often dilapidated, historic ones.

To district leaders, Bowden has the right ingredients to someday lure back families just as Lamar has.

As Sparks splits time between the two schools, he knows Bowden’s teachers and students will benefit from his experience at Lamar. But he’s also uncomfortable with the strategy of pumping money and experienced leaders into certain schools as other students languish in high-poverty neighborhoods for years without seeing much improvement.

“That doesn’t sit very well with me,” Sparks said. “But I don’t know the alternative. I think this is the right way to go. It just kind of is messy in the moment.”

Innovation at a cost

Looking out onto a standing-room-only crowd in the district’s boardroom near downtown, Martinez struggled to get through a financial presentation to the school board in May.

He sat quietly for almost an hour, listening to scores of outraged teachers who were upset about layoffs and anxious parents who worried about the district’s trajectory. The few parents who showed up to praise the innovative programs that drew them to San Antonio ISD were drowned out.

David Garza, a teacher and parent at De Zavala Elementary School, spoke out against the district’s “lack of transparency,” which he said had only intensified in the last three years. Protesting the district’s decision to hand over control of a low-performing school to a New York-based nonprofit, Garza told the board he was alarmed by the district’s overall strategy.

 “You had an opportunity to engage with all of SAISD with your plans for bringing charters into SAISD. You didn’t do so,” Garza said.

Related: Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schools

Martinez’s subsequent attempts to mount a defense of the district’s decisions were punctuated by jeers from the large crowd of teachers, parents and community members who had packed the room in protest, holding up homemade signs that read “#byePedro.”

Martinez and his team were navigating grim financial terrain. As the 2017-18 school year ended, the district had lost roughly 10,100 students to charter schools — privately managed public schools — more than doubling the previous school year’s loss. At least another 200 students living within its boundaries had transferred into nearby districts.

That was more than district leaders expected, and they anticipated even more losses, so they cut their budget for 2018-19 by $31 million, or 6 percent, and laid off 132 teachers.

At the same time, they vowed to continue pursuing partnerships with universities and nonprofits that would bring in more state dollars — but require the district to hand over the management of its schools to the new partners.

Those decisions had triggered vehement resistance from parents and teachers concerned that the district was surrendering oversight of its most needy students — and their teachers — to outsiders and that it was focused on attracting new, wealthier students at the expense of its low-income students. Families from neighboring districts enrolling children in San Antonio ISD schools are far more likely to live in areas of higher socioeconomic status.

“I’m speaking tonight as an SAISD parent — one who doesn’t shop for my child’s school,” said Sarah Sorenson, the parent of a third-grader at Bonham Academy.

Sorenson was practically yelling when she told the board that it was forcing teachers, and consequently students, to “bear the brunt” of ill-informed decisions.

“Families are sending a message — they are looking for options, and when those options exist, they are going to those options,” Martinez managed to get out at one point. “And so for us, it just confirms the direction we have to go and we have to continue to support our schools.”

Related: Measuring success at San Antonio’s public preschool program

When Martinez arrived in mid-2015, San Antonio ISD consistently received low ratings from the state, and so did many of its schools, putting its performance below other urban districts in Texas. Frustrated teachers took jobs in districts with fewer problems — and were nearly impossible to lure back.

San Antonio ISD had made some progress in the last few years, relaunching low-performing schools on the verge of closure and bringing in new students — and the state money that comes with them. District leaders were also banking on a significant tax hike passed in 2016 to help. But that still wasn’t enough.

Charting a new path

Hunched over his laptop, Mohammed Choudhury, the district’s chief innovation officer, sat near the front of the reserved staff section and looked spent as the crowd at the May board meeting criticized how the district was implementing the plan he helped mastermind.

In an interview months later, Choudhury chalked up the anger to a small group of union-affiliated teachers clinging to the status quo and resisting the district’s attempts at “disrupting mediocrity.”

“You’re not doing anything if you’re not loved and hated while you’re trying to create change,” he said.

Hired in the spring of 2017, Choudhury has big plans for the district. Following a stint at Dallas ISD where he led a similar charge, he’s responsible for helping overhaul low-performing schools by relaunching them with innovative instructional models that will tap into what he describes as a “sea of affluence” in San Antonio.

A product of diverse Los Angeles public schools, he’s confident students can be successful in schools where most of them are poor. As San Antonio ISD relaunches its low-performing schools with an eye on attracting wealthier families, Choudhury said he’s committed to ensuring they remain accessible for the low-income children who live around them.

Related: Segregated schools are still the norm. Howard Fuller is fine with that 

After more than a year working in one of the country’s most socioeconomically segregated cities, Choudhury has perfected his pitch: “While we do high poverty schools well — and we need to and we can figure them out … we’re going to stop re-creating them where we can.”

The nation’s seventh-largest city, San Antonio is home to a constellation of school districts born out of deep-rooted housing segregation that shut black and Hispanic residents out of high and middle-income neighborhoods through deed restrictions. Texas’ present-day school districts began forming in the late 1940s, spurred in part by the financial incentives the state Legislature offered if they consolidated with others, to save the state money.

As they negotiated, wealthier districts considered the financial liability they were willing to take on from neighboring districts — and many spurned lower-wealth districts like San Antonio, which ended up merging with several other relatively poor districts.

The result was a public school system with districts whose student populations “were intended to be homogenous when they were built,” said Christine Drennon, associate professor and director of the urban studies program at Trinity University in San Antonio.

After those mergers came the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, which triggered white flight from San Antonio ISD and school districts across the country. Wealthier white families largely settled in the northern end of Bexar County, while black and Hispanic students were concentrated in the inner city.

Over the years, many in San Antonio’s Hispanic middle class have moved to the northern part of the county — where the school districts remain wealthier — while most of the black middle class has abandoned San Antonio altogether. That left poor black and Hispanic children in inner-city schools — many of them within San Antonio ISD’s boundaries — without enough children to fill them, Drennon said.

Choudhury has built a two-pronged approach to overcoming those historic divides that seems both practical and idealistic.

The first part entails increasing diversity at about 30 of the district’s 92 schools, with a percentage of seats at those schools reserved for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and students who live outside of the district’s boundaries.

One of them is Steele Montessori Academy, launched in 2017 in a school that was closed years ago. It runs from pre-K to second grade and enrolls a quarter of its students from outside of the district and at least half from economically-disadvantaged families, prioritizing those in deep poverty and those who live within a two-mile radius of the school. Last year, it received more than 450 applications for 52 seats, leaving hundreds of families on the waitlist.

The second part of Choudhury’s strategy includes collaborating with local universities and nonprofits in poor neighborhoods — which in some cases brings in additional state money. At Lamar, that meant partnering with Trinity University, which sent instructors to help revamp some of its curriculum.

Meanwhile, Ogden Academy, a chronically low-performing pre-K through 7th grade school in one of the city’s poorest ZIP codes, now serves as a training ground for student teachers from the Relay Graduate School of Education, a teacher training program founded by charter school operators. The student teachers commit to work in the district for three years after graduation.

Choudhury’s six-person department works out of a few rooms in a shuttered middle school on the city’s east side. On one wall, he’s hung an enormous map breaking down the poverty students face throughout the district, block by block: green blocks represent areas where the median household income hovers around $50,000, where parents are more likely to be college educated and most homes are two-parent households; red blocks represent areas where the median household income is $19,533 and where most households are led by single parents who are less likely to have college degrees.

He and his colleagues in the innovation office have tried to get the word about their strategy and the programs the district offers out to every corner of that map. They’ve mailed flyers to hundreds of thousands of homes in the county and shaken hands with parents at festivals and health fairs. When the real-time data showed not enough Spanish-speaking children were applying to some specialized schools, they targeted those areas on the map for additional block-walking and recruitment.

But the district’s plan has been met with resistance from some parents whose kids aren’t seeing any of its benefits. At De Zavala Elementary School, where almost every child is Hispanic and economically disadvantaged, Garza, a pre-K teacher and one of the parents who spoke at the board meeting, says he and four other teachers had to share 20 iPads between 60 kids last year.

Garza has a fourth-grade son at De Zavala, in San Antonio’s west side, and he’s watched fellow teachers spend months applying for grants to get classrooms outfitted with smart boards that are staples in the schools that the district has already prioritized.

That’s what led Garza to address the school board at the May meeting. While Garza supports economic integration in San Antonio schools, he said he struggles with what he sees as the district’s tendency to play favorites, leaving campuses like his with fewer resources.

“If you’re allocating so many funds to these boutique schools and then you’ve got other schools that are not getting those funds, that doesn’t seem right to me,” Garza said from the second floor of the local teachers union’s offices months after the board meeting. “I really take issue with that because I mean, in the meantime, who’s suffering? It’s our kids.”

It’s possible schools like De Zavala will not receive that money. The district does not plan to put specialized programs or enrollment guidelines in every school, Choudhury acknowledged, but he’s hopeful that leaders’ investments in technology and fine arts will eventually lift all schools.

“Is it happening fast enough? Absolutely not. With competing resources and funding, it’s not,” Choudhury said. “Their frustrations are warranted.”

Questions of equity

Despite the district’s efforts, parents are still leaving, and not just the affluent ones.

District officials have kept an eye on Sarah King Elementary, located in one of San Antonio’s poorest areas, because it has lost more than 100 students over the last four years — it’s among the top 20 schools with a more than 15 percent drop in enrollment.

Diosis De La Sancha, a single mother with a fifth-grader at Sarah King, is strongly considering sending her child to a KIPP San Antonio charter school next year. KIPP’s schools accept students from throughout Bexar County and are among the largest competitors for students living within San Antonio ISD’s boundaries, siphoning off hundreds last year.

De La Sancha hates that her 10-year-old is stuck in overcrowded classrooms, where she says teachers cannot control students’ physical fights. Most of those kids will probably go to the same middle school together, just a mile away in the same west San Antonio neighborhood, but she doesn’t want her son to be one of them.

“The environment here isn’t so good. That’s what is motivating me to transfer him,” De La Sancha, a parent volunteer at the school, said in Spanish. “It’s not an easy decision, especially for him. He’s cried. I tell him, ‘Well, I want the best for you.’”

De La Sancha also has considered San Antonio ISD’s Harris Middle School, which has a fast-paced curriculum that would challenge her son. But she thinks the KIPP school will be easier to get to from her home, and it goes up through high school.

Other Sarah King parents are grappling with the same decisions. De La Sancha is close to persuading her fellow parent volunteer Maria Blanco, who doesn’t know how to drive, to consider the same school for her son.

When Choudhury heard about De La Sancha and Blanco’s situation, he was unable to offer an easy solution. “I would love to meet them and talk to them,” he said.

For all the money and energy Choudhury and his team have put into spreading the word about other options within the district like Harris Middle School, many parents and students appear to still rely on information spread word-of-mouth between neighbors, friends or family members. District leaders know some parents may never find out about those options.

While parents like De La Sancha are thinking about leaving the district, wealthier parents outside the district are flooding it with applications for its more popular schools — which district leaders have taken as a sign their plan is working.

“We could fill all the seats with out-of-district families, which politically would not be good for me, but we could actually do that for the first time,” Martinez told state education leaders this spring. “What families are saying to us is, this is the first time they’ve ever seen San Antonio as a district with great choices that they would want to go to.”

The district’s newfound popularity has also forced leaders to confront the limitations of a school integration model that relies, in part, on parents’ initiative and ability to seek better educational opportunities for their children.

In advance of the fall 2016 opening of San Antonio ISD’s Advanced Learning Academy, which eschews traditional, structured instruction in favor of creative, self-paced projects, district officials received 1,000 applications for just 550 seats in what started as a kindergarten through 10th-grade campus.

Some families living in the surrounding neighborhood, which is primarily low-income and home to many immigrants, had applied to ALA but got stuck on the waitlist, despite living blocks away, according to state Rep. Diego Bernal.

Bernal, who lives in that neighborhood, realized that his constituents were left out and pointed out the discrepancy to district leaders, asking, “Are we sure that the way we’re doing this is working the way that it’s supposed to?”

Choudhury acknowledged the misstep. Before his arrival, the district did not reserve seats for its poorest families in its magnet and specialized schools, meaning parents who knew how to navigate the system were more successful, he said.

“I will never be a fan of this version of choice. It’s not equitable. It’s not right,” Choudhury said. “And you’re exacerbating problems and inequities in cities where there are haves and have nots. So that needed a rewrite. That needed a redesign, and Superintendent Martinez was well aware of that.”

In ALA’s second school year, with more affluent families clamoring to enroll, district leaders reserved half the seats for economically-disadvantaged students, prioritizing those living in the poorest areas and living within two miles of the school.

Some parents, accustomed to using their connections to get their children accepted, were upset at finding their kids on the waitlist, Choudhury said.

“You hold your ground in those things because at the end of the day, that’s why this administration has come together to do this work and transform outcomes for kids in the city,” Choudhury said.

The flip side of a fast push

If the district’s fast-paced approach to overhauling some of its schools has been messy, it’s because it was launched with a sense of urgency, Martinez said.

Enrollment was falling. Inner-city schools had been shuttered or were on the verge of closure. The state had given the district a low rating. And only half of the students graduating from San Antonio ISD schools were attending college — below the state average. 

“I wish the pace had been in some cases, in some ways a little slower,” Martinez said. “I think for a lot of our staff the pace has been very fast. The other side of that is just because the need is so urgent, and I struggle with that. You talk to these students and you talk to these families and you see these neighborhoods and you just want things to move very fast. And it’s tough.”

The district is looking to slow things down, Martinez said, and get more community input about which schools should be next in line for improvements. This year, Martinez and his team have asked principals to work with their parents to submit proposals for redesigning their neighborhood schools. More than 12 have already expressed interest.

Regardless of the pace they want to set, money is still a huge hurdle. The district will likely face a deficit next year, as enrollment continues to decline, and it’s still competing with charter schools and other districts for students.

Martinez appears defensive when asked about the criticism that he’s more interested in attracting affluent students from outside the district than meeting the needs of poor students left behind at schools that haven’t made the cut for new programs and money.

“Right now, we have to create schools that people want to come to that are great options for everybody. Period,” he said.

Martinez points to the gains the district has seen during his three-year tenure. More students are enrolling in advanced classes intended to prepare them for college. They are slowly growing the share of students going on to attend competitive universities. Fewer campuses are considered low-performing by the state.

In two years, Martinez wants the share of students who are graduating high school in four years to grow from 83 percent to 90 percent. He wants to see 50 percent of students enrolling in four-year colleges — up from 25 percent. He also wants to pare down the number of schools that get low ratings from the state, which was 16 last year.

But it’s unclear how his goals will play out at schools like Ogden Academy, which has received failing state ratings for five years straight, putting it at risk of strict state penalties.

The school has a high rate of students who come and go in the middle of the academic year, and is located in a low-income neighborhood surrounded by rundown homes. Though Ogden can enroll students from anywhere in the county, Principal Ixchell Gonzalez said she decided to prioritize keeping kids from the neighborhood.

The district has partnered with the Relay Graduate School of Education, which has experience working in high-poverty schools, to help turn Ogden around.

“The school was out of control, teachers were upset, kids were running wild,” Martinez said, describing his first visit to Ogden in 2015. “Go there today, it’s a completely different school, same exact children.”

Gonzalez has worried that parents will leave Ogden, wooed by offerings at other schools, such as the new dual-language program within walking distance at Irving Academy that allows kids to learn in both English and Spanish.

But enrollment was steady last school year, she said, and parents in the neighborhood appreciate the new batch of committed teachers.

“So far our families have chosen to stay,” she said.

A dream comes true

A longtime bilingual teacher at Lamar Elementary, Isabel Nava was beaming on the first day of school this fall.

She had hoped to show up earlier that morning to make sure her classroom was ready for the 21 students she was welcoming — up from 12 the year before — as enrollment at Lamar continued to grow. But with time running short before the starting bell, she hurriedly jotted “Hola amigos” in bright blue marker on her erasable board and adjusted the alphabet letters in a large display board before speed-walking down to the school’s playground.

It was the start of her 18th year of teaching at Lamar, but the past two years have been special for Nava and her colleagues.

For years, they had watched enrollment fall as more parents in the neighborhood opted to place their children in other public schools or private schools. Things had only gotten worse when the community began to gentrify. In one summer, the school lost a fleet of students practically overnight when a developer demolished several nearby apartment buildings with little warning.

Knowing Lamar was on the verge of shutdown, Nava worried about the children who would be left without their neighborhood school. She thought of the younger siblings of the students she had taught and wondered if they would be shipped off somewhere else.

Then Sparks came on board, and Lamar partnered with Trinity University instructors who helped revitalize the curriculum, focusing on project-based learning. They extended the school year and set aside time each school day for teachers to help develop students’ social and emotional skills. And a collection of parents and staff came together to implement a successful dual-language program. Altogether, those efforts helped attract families from all over San Antonio and boosted enrollment.

She choked up remembering the first day of school after Lamar’s transformation, when school staff had unrolled a red carpet at the entrance to welcome students back.

“Everybody was outside with balloons. The children were entering the school through every doorway,” Nava said through tears. “That was my dream.”

On the first day of school this fall, enrollment at Lamar Elementary hit 390 — up from 220 six years ago.

At Bowden, English and science teacher Monica Martinez has seen class sizes grow, but it’s a sign of struggle more than progress.

This year, 27 students in her seventh-grade English class have to squeeze around several clusters of desks in her classroom. Student enrollment has decreased in the last year, forcing the school’s leaders to consolidate classrooms.

Now, she has trouble making sure all her students are engaged at all times — which Sparks notes in his regular observations of her class. She said she feels challenged and supported by the regular feedback, and feels optimistic about his goal of using Lamar’s successes to push Bowden teachers to do better for students.

“He definitely is giving us the resources to change up things in the classroom,” she said.

In late fall, Sparks hosted a meeting for parents just after students arrived for the day, to explain the new structure that had him splitting his time between two schools. About 20 eager parents separated across a few tables, divided into Spanish and English speakers, and discussed what they wanted from Bowden’s future.

“We need your feedback to figure out what you love about our school and how we could make it better,” Sparks said, with the help of a Spanish translator. He asked whether they would want to partner with a nonprofit or university, like Lamar did, and develop a specialized program to attract students from outside the community — though, he reassured them, neighborhood students would always have a place at Bowden.

Sitting with another seven Spanish-speaking parents, Claudia Rodriguez, who has a fifth-grader at Bowden, was quick to point out things that needed to improve — such as overcrowded classrooms and the need for more challenging student activities — but also said she trusts Sparks as a leader.

In past years, she noted the continued neglect at Bowden, visible when she walked through the halls. The building was often dirty, she recalled, and trash piled up outside the school.

“Yes, there is more work needed, but the school is getting a lot better. We’re happy with the principal because he’s very attentive,” she said in Spanish.

Sparks knows that improving Bowden won’t be a quick fix. In a recent interview, he recalled talking to a parent at Lamar years ago, as she considered enrolling her child in the school. She asked him if he would feel comfortable placing his child in every single classroom on the campus.

“And the answer was, if I had to put them in this school today, the answer would be no,” he told her then.

Five years later, on top of Lamar’s increased enrollment, teachers like Nava are staying longer and even looking for new ways to be leaders on campus. And teachers and staff at Bowden, like Martinez, are excited to learn new ways of connecting with students in the classroom, he said.

“We just need time,” Sparks said before pausing for a moment and nodding to himself. “It just takes time.”

Ryan Murphy contributed to this report.

The post In San Antonio, school integration may not lift all boats appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LONGVIEW — At the first Friday football game in the first school year since the school district in this East Texas town had been declared racially integrated — nearly 50 years after a federal court order — thousands of spectators dressed in forest-green Lobos gear filled the stadium.

Enduring the late-August heat, fans filed into creaky fold-down seats they’d reserved for years. Some who had attended segregated white or black schools in Longview decades ago now shared the same rows. When the marching band played the school’s fight song, most of the crowd formed an “L” with their fingers and rocked them back and forth in unison.

Ted Beard, a longtime Longview Independent School District board member, watched the football players race across the field and wondered how long the commitment to integration would last.

The district is at a pivotal moment now that a federal court has released it from decades-long supervision of its policies for educating students of color. It has made progress to topple the barriers still holding black and Hispanic students back from the same academic success as white students.

Whether it continues a commitment to student equity now depends solely on the collective will of a school board that could change with a single election cycle. And that worries Beard, whose father was part of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and faced threats and violence along the way. Beard is black and had two kids go through Longview schools.

Related: How the federal government abandoned the Brown v. Board of Education decision

“The board could change and then the direction could change, and those that are ultimately affected are going to be the students,” Beard said.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but Longview ISD — along with hundreds of other Texas school districts — resisted until federal judges intervened and imposed detailed desegregation plans across large swaths of the state.

In 1970, an East Texas-based federal court mandated Longview ISD tackle a long list of tasks designed to make sure its black students were learning and playing in the same classrooms and playgrounds as their white peers — including closing four all-black schools and busing black students to formerly all-white schools throughout the district.

Forty-seven years later, Longview was one of only three Texas districts that remained under a federal court order, along with San Angelo and Garland.

Related: The Anonymous Town That Was the Model of Desegregation in the Civil-Rights Era

A federal judge fully released the district from that order in June, and just weeks before the school year started, Beard and the rest of the board unanimously approved a voluntary plan to keep the district’s schools desegregated and ensure that students of color have equal opportunities to graduate and succeed beyond high school.

But Beard and others know the district has yet to overcome the deep disparities that have defined so much of its history. In Longview ISD, white students — who make up a fraction of the district’s enrollment — still outpace their black and Hispanic peers in many ways. They are roughly half of the students enrolled at Longview’s specialized elementary school, which has higher academic standards. And they are more likely to take classes and tests meant to prepare them for college.

And district leaders also have struggled with a new education challenge that federal judges couldn’t have foreseen in 1970 — adequately providing a burgeoning group of Hispanic students with crucial services they need to learn English.

Order from the court

Sixteen years after the Brown ruling, the federal government sued the state of Texas for refusing to integrate most of its schools. In 1970, a federal judge almost 40 miles from Longview placed nearly the entire state under court order and threatened sanctions against defiant school districts — resulting in one of the largest series of desegregation orders in the nation’s history.

The same court ordered Longview to integrate both its faculty and students. That meant busing more than 600 black students to white schools and the consolidation or closure of several all-black schools. If white students tried to transfer, the court order mandated that they could only be reassigned to schools in which they would be in the minority.

Related: The only A-rated, majority-black district in Mississippi

Longview ISD was unlikely to have integrated without a court order. Like people in much of the state, folks in Longview saw the federal push for integration as a threat to their autonomy.

The effort to improve facilities across the district was slow. Board members began pushing to renovate some of the old school buildings in the late 90s. Since the integration order, white families — who still made up the majority of Longview’s population — had left the school district in droves for private schools, and white voters actively resisted paying to renovate the district’s schools.

Related: Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schools

“If you’re an Anglo family and you’re taking your kid out of school, why would you vote yes to float a bond?” said Chris Mack, a white board member first elected in 1993 who was a middle school student in Longview ISD when it was forced to integrate.

By many accounts, the turning point came when James Wilcox was hired as superintendent in 2007.

With Wilcox at the helm, the community approved — in a measure that passed in 2008 by fewer than 20 votes — a $266.9 million bond to finance a massive overhaul of the district’s schools. Longview ISD built eight schools, renovated three others and upgraded technology across the district.

The district made more progress integrating black students after 2008 than it had in the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of school segregation data by Meredith Richards, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University.

Related: Is Providence the poster child for the worst increase in school segregation?

While overhauling schools, the district went back to the federal court to argue that it no longer needed an extensive busing system, which district leaders argued had become tedious. 

“We did what was best for our students while meeting the requirements of the desegregation order,” Wilcox said from his office earlier this year. “But it was a dinosaur, a pyramid, or whatever you want to say — something that in our mind has lost its function because it’s a totally different district.”

Related: Segregated schools are still the norm. Howard Fuller is fine with that

In 2014, the courts released the district from some of the restrictions of the original 1970 court order. In exchange, the district’s leaders promised to spend the next three years working to improve in areas where Longview still needed to make progress after more than four decades: monitoring racial disparities in student discipline, preventing students from transferring to schools where their race was the majority, hiring a more diverse staff and ensuring students of color had equal opportunity to take advanced classes.

A strategy with a Montessori in mind

Since 2017, most pre-K and kindergarten students in Longview have begun their education at East Texas Montessori Prep, a $31 million, 150,000-square-foot building in the middle of the district.

“We have the same exact expectations for every student,” Wilcox said.

Widely considered an exclusive educational program more common in private schools, Montessori prioritizes self-directed, hands-on student learning.

Troy Simmons, who became Longview ISD’s second black board member in 1985, saw East Texas Montessori Prep as a way to give students of color a competitive advantage early in their lives. Community members often responded to the district’s pitch to create the Montessori school by complaining about how much it would cost, he said.

“People don’t believe in educating all children. They believe in educating their kids, not your kid,” Simmons said.

Among the strongest objections to a district-wide Montessori school came from parents at Johnston-McQueen Elementary School, located in the whitest part of the school district, where parents successfully advocated to keep a traditional pre-K and kindergarten program for students zoned there.

To Simmons, the separate program is a figurative foot in the door, impeding the district’s plan for a cohesive education system.

If the decision had been left up to Beard, Longview ISD would not have given up court supervision at all.

His opposition is recorded in a few lines in the minutes from the November 2017 board meeting: “Knowing that at a drop of a dime the board could change and take…its sight off what is best for ALL students, he will not support this motion.”

Beard voted no, joined by Shan Bauer, who is also black.

Simmons, joined the majority in the 5-2 vote to ask the court to fully release the district — a decision he later regretted.

In June 2018, Judge Robert Schroeder lifted Longview ISD’s court order.

Another challenge emerges 

The district was also confronting a new challenge that the courts in 1970 had never anticipated: Providing an equal education to an exploding population of Hispanic students — many of them immigrants or first-generation citizens, and many of them Spanish speakers.

Without a court order hanging over them, the district’s leaders, by their own admission, have struggled to lift Hispanic students like they did, belatedly, for black students.

Hispanic enrollment in Longview schools has almost doubled in the last 13 years alone. The district has included them in many of its desegregation measures, particularly in its efforts to recruit students for advanced classes, said Jody Clements, an assistant superintendent at Longview ISD.

But in Longview, most Hispanic students need bilingual or English as a second language instruction — hundreds more students enrolled in those programs between 2009 and 2017, state data shows.

The number of teachers for those programs only increased by about five.

“We haven’t cracked that nut yet,” Mack said after an August school board meeting during which the issue was discussed in executive session.

The new reality

In August, Longview’s school board unanimously approved a seven-page voluntary desegregation plan that it plans to implement with the help of a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Starting this year, five predominately black and Hispanic schools will offer special programs, such as advanced engineering or college preparatory courses, to attract higher-income students and white students living in the district but attending private school or homeschool.

The plan is self-enforced, with no federal judge serving as referee.

Longview ISD leaders will no longer limit student transfers to certain schools based on race or set goals for the percentage of white, black or Hispanic students for each school. Instead, if they notice a school is becoming more segregated, they will correct the problem using “race-neutral” strategies, such as recruiting students from low-income neighborhoods — which some experts say is not as effective in achieving racial integration.

About 56.2 percent of white students graduated ready for college English and math in 2016, according to state data, compared with a dismal 23 percent of Hispanic students and 16 percent of black students. That disparity is similar among students who take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes in high school.

Will the momentum continue?

The community’s commitment to equity could soon be tested. Though Mack was just re-elected to another three-year term, he will likely step down after handing his daughter her diploma at graduation this spring, after nearly 20 years on the board.

Simmons, who now has the longest tenure on the board, regularly considers whether it’s time to retire. He’s tired, he says, but leaving is not a decision he can make without considering the impact on Longview’s progress.

“I have a lot of faith in our superintendent. I have a lot of faith in the core of our board, the way it operates, but I also know that one change, one blip, one glitch can turn the board into something completely different and basically destroy everything that we’ve built in these past years in doing this,” Simmons said solemnly at the start of the year. “And so that makes me hesitant about not seeking re-election, but at the same time I am tired of fighting this the way I have to.”

Four months later, Simmons ran for — and secured — another three-year term.

Ryan Murphy contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Southern Methodist University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The post Desegregation is unraveling in this Texas town appeared first on The Hechinger Report.