Several Fort Worth ISD campuses are in crisis, according to a teachers union.
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, revealed new data on teacher turnover rates at Fort Worth ISD that he called “absolutely unacceptable,” according to NBC 5 DFW.
“We don’t have enough teachers as it is. So, the district needs to start identifying some of these hotspots and making corrective actions so we can keep these excellent teachers in our schools,” Poole said.
The data showed that Harlean Beal Elementary had a turnover rate of 88% during the 2022-2023 school year. This is a significant hike from the year prior, which showed a turnover rate of 42%. However, the lower number should have also acted as a red flag, according to Poole.
“When there’s this churn of teachers at a school, parents take notice, and then they wonder if that chaos is affecting their students, and they’re taking their kids out of the school because of it,” Poole said.
Fort Worth ISD has seen a steady decline in student enrollment numbers since 2013 despite the city’s population growth. Demographic shifts, the opening of new charter schools, and the district’s dismal student achievement outcomes have all contributed to this drop.
As covered by The Dallas Express, Fort Worth ISD officials have reacted by ordering a capacity study that will devise a plan to reallocate its campuses, which currently hold 71,066 students despite being designed to accommodate up to 90,000 students. As many as 48 schools — a large number of them elementary schools — are currently below 70% capacity.
The district’s elementary schools also figure heavily in the ranking of campuses, seeing the highest teacher turnover rates last year, representing four of the top five and seven of the top 10.
Woodrow Bailey, the district’s chief talent officer, suggested that teacher turnover rates and falling student enrollment figures go hand in hand.
“Are there changes in the student population where they’re losing students? And so, therefore, that communication has gone out to that campus to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to be losing teachers next year?'” Bailey told NBC 5.
Poole claimed that teachers complained about poor leadership and struggles to teach students at Harlean Beal Elementary. Yet he suggested this was not enough to write off the campus altogether.
“Just because it’s a hard-to-staff school and hard circumstances at that school doesn’t mean that it’s a bad school and that we should put up with this kind of turnover,” he said.
In the 2021-2022 school year, only 28% of Harlean Beal students scored at grade level on the STAAR exam, according to the Texas Education Agency accountability report. This falls just short of the district average of 32%, which is lackluster compared to the state average of 48%.
At Dallas ISD, another district struggling with both declining student enrollment figures and poor student achievement scores, 41% of its students scored at grade level on the same STAAR exam.
