Challenges continue at Fort Worth ISD, where a request to exceed maximum class sizes was recently filed with the state.
Fort Worth ISD’s board of trustees voted unanimously to submit a classroom size waiver. The deadline to do so was extended by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for the 2023-2024 school year due to the delayed release of its accountability ratings from last term.
The district has 145 classrooms in 60 of its schools, surpassing the 22-student limit set by the TEA for pre-K through fourth-grade classes. Some have up to 30 children in the class. Last year, Fort Worth ISD had 127 classrooms in 44 schools exceed the state cap.
Like many districts across North Texas facing personnel issues, Fort Worth ISD has struggled to find certified teaching staff to fill its vacancies. Nonetheless, it managed to reduce the number of vacant positions from approximately 350 in the summer of 2022 to only 82 in November of this year. Moreover, according to The Texan, district administrators have been working to redistribute students across classrooms to satisfy the 22-to-1 ratio.
Despite such efforts, Fort Worth ISD has not managed to comply with state law. The district has said that the teachers assigned to classrooms in which the number of students exceeds 22 will receive additional pay. However, the situation has led to the dismay of many stakeholders.
For instance, in October, Taylor Duncan, president of the Daggett Elementary PTA, where three classrooms exceed the state cap, addressed the board of trustees.
“Looking at the schools, I am concerned about the equity of the schools that are hit hardest and which schools don’t even make the list at all,” said Duncan, pointing out that most of the overcrowded classrooms were in the southern and eastern zones of the attendance district, according to the Fort Worth Report.
As covered by The Dallas Express, such zones are also where some 48 campuses at less than 70% capacity tend to be located. These schools are likely targets of the district’s upcoming “rightsizing” initiative aimed at grappling with the steady decline of student enrollment figures these past few years.
Student enrollment figures have been seeing a downward trend in other North Texas districts as well, as reported by The Dallas Express.
While some districts like Fort Worth ISD and Dallas ISD have likely been losing students to charter and private schools due to longstanding lackluster student achievement scores, others that have historically been in high demand — such as Frisco ISD and Plano ISD — have only recently begun to show a slip because of demographic shifts and high housing costs.
