Fort Worth ISD voted 6-1 on Tuesday to extend its $237,000 contract with My Brother’s Keeper Alliance for district programming.
“It would be to our detriment not to have this program in our district. We have the strongest My Brother’s Keeper Alliance initiative in the state of Texas,” Trustee Quinton Phillips said at the district’s board meeting.
The sole trustee against the contract extension was Michael Ryan, who was concerned that there was not enough data showing the benefits of the group’s programming.
“I have a hard time supporting the program,” Ryan said.
The organization, inspired by former President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Challenge, which he started in 2014, aims to address the challenges and “opportunity gaps” that children of color allegedly face. The organization provides mentoring, education, job training, and other activities to its student members.
My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) focuses on helping children of color reach six “key milestones to success.”
They are as follows: 1) Entering school ready to learn; 2) Reading at grade level by third grade; 3) Graduating from high school; 4) Completing post-secondary education or training; 5) Obtaining employment that provides a living wage; 6) Remaining safe from violent crime.
“Our country’s persistent social inequities are widespread, rooted in structural and institutional racism, and prevent our boys and young men of color from reaching their full potential,” the MBK website claims.
The framework of the program is “equity-driven” and focuses on disrupting “historic barriers” and making a “generational impact.”
Last year, Fort Worth ISD trustees voted 7-2 to extend the program’s $255,000 contract. They mandated that program directors begin providing quarterly reports on how the participants are impacted academically, according to the Fort Worth Report. However, at the time, Trustee Wallace Bridges argued that the value of mentorship programs may not be accurately captured through quantifiable data.
MBK’s latest report to the Fort Worth ISD board states that 311 students were enrolled during the 2023-2024 school year — 194 in the MBK program and 117 in the My Sister’s Keeper (MSK) program for girls.
It also states that the percentage of MBK/MSK students enrolled in AP, OnRamps, or dual credit courses dropped from 25.5% during the 2022-2023 school year to 19.7% during the 2023-2024 school year.
For the upcoming term, the local MBK organization proposed offering programs that would entail weekly mentoring and check-in sessions at MBK/MSK chapters. The contract renewal will permit the group to establish 12 MBK and four MSK chapters in high schools around the district.
Some people criticized the program during public comment.
“My son went into this program when he was in the district, and they taught him to chant about Obama, which goes completely against our family values that we have a right to have,” Fort Worth resident Hollie Plemons told the board during Tuesday’s meeting.
Fort Worth ISD’s MBK program is known for making students do military-type lineups, during which they have been documented chanting “Barack Obama” or “No justice, no peace.”
Another speaker, Brandy Jordan, told the board, “I am here opposing the extension of the MBK/MSK program. And I’ll go ahead and throw all the programs in there because generally they’re superficial, and they’re not very effective.”
“When I was a kid, somebody would pray and read something from the Bible every morning, and we had problems. We’d talk in class and run in the hall, [but] there’s nothing like it is today, and there’s a reason for that,” she said.
Other speakers supported MBK’s work and urged the board to continue supporting it with taxpayer money.
“I’m here in support of the MBK program… I think that as far as academic achievement [goes], I think if that just means that if you’re better in school, if you’re bad or you [have] a behavior problem, and you’re less of a behavior problem now because you’re in this program, then I think that that is an achievement. So I support that program,” Charles Bills said.
Fort Worth ISD has struggled academically, with the latest Texas Education Agency accountability reports showing that just 32% of Fort Worth ISD students scored at grade level on the STAAR in the 2021-2022 school year. This is worse than neighboring Dallas ISD’s results, which clocked 41% of students scoring at grade level that same year.
The available STAAR scores from Spring 2024 show that Fort Worth students are still struggling. For instance, just 26% of 8th graders scored at grade level in math.
The Dallas Express reached out to Rickie Clark, the executive director of Fort Worth ISD’s MBK program, and Fort Worth ISD Board President Camille Rodriguez to ask whether the youth group pushes DEI and critical race theory on its participants, but did not receive a response by the publication date.