Dallas Independent School District’s (DISD) Board of Trustees hired a familiar face to assume the superintendent post this academic year: Stephanie Elizalde.

No stranger to Dallas, Elizalde previously served in several administrative roles at DISD, including chief school officer and director of mathematics in the district’s teaching and learning division.

She took over for former superintendent Michael Hinojosa, who recently retired after 13 years. Several alleged scandals occurred during his tenure, and Hinojosa watched DISD’s dropout rate climb and its on-time graduation rate fall while many experienced educators left the district, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.

While Elizalde has only been on the job for a few months, she has just begun facing DISD’s most pressing problems, like certified teacher retention and flagging student outcomes.

Concerns exist about what exactly she will do to address the issues, however, especially after she recently suggested that at DISD, “We don’t need reform.”

Such concerns are compounded when considering Elizalde’s performance at her previous job in Austin, Texas.

Prior to accepting her new role in DISD earlier this year, Elizalde served as superintendent of Austin Independent School District (AISD), where she oversaw “a tsunami of teacher resignations,” according to The Austin Chronicle.

Dalton Pool, an AISD high school teacher, told the news outlet that his district was better off without Elizalde, claiming “incompetence, mistrust, and poor decision-making” during her tenure contributed to the outflow of educators.

Pool’s sentiment was echoed on Twitter, where district educator Deborah Sahli replied to AISD’s announcement of Elizalde’s departure, stating, “No one I know thinks she did anything but destroy [morale] and increase the number of people leaving to record levels.”

Other tweets claimed that teachers and parents felt “relief” that she was leaving and that some were even “rejoicing.”

The Dallas Express reached out to Education Austin, the employees union for AISD, and asked how Elizalde’s “leadership” factored into teacher morale and retention in the district.

In an email, union president Ken Zarifis explained, “It is probably clear that we were as happy for Dr. Elizalde to find a new job as she was in finding it … We wish her the best in Dallas and hope workers and students fair (sic) better under her leadership there than they did in Austin.”

The Dallas Express reached out to the district’s media relations team to see if Elizalde would be interested in responding to the fanfare surrounding her departure from Austin. No statement or comment was forthcoming.