The Fort Worth Independent School District hired foreign labor at taxpayers’ expense while hundreds of teachers left the district, a review of records shows.
FWISD currently has seven employees with H-1B visas, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) H-1B Employer Data Hub.
Nine H-1B visa applications have been filed for FWISD teachers in 2024, the H-1B Salary Database for 2024 reveals. The reported roles FWISD sought to fill with foreign labor include everything from high school art and science teachers to elementary bilingual education teachers.
Foreign workers will be paid approximately the minimum salary for FWISD teachers, as shown in the H-1B Salary Database. This amounts to around a $63,000 expense per teacher for the taxpayers.
This revelation comes as”organic retirements”—those attributable to pregnancy and old age—plummet and resignations due to discontent rise, according to the Fort Worth Report.
“Those [teachers] choosing to leave, they’re just frustrated with the district,” Steven Poole of the United Educators Association told the outlet of the 654 resignations in FWISD in 2023-2024. Reasons for the resignations cited included a lack of autonomy and little support.
Six of the H-1B applications came after Fort Worth ISD laid off 133 employees, some of whom were “Freshman Success Coaches,” student and teacher mentor/mediator roles that some surveys say reduced freshman academic failure rates by 10%.
This comes as area school districts such as Plano and Richardson close schools and the state suffers a 12.2% attrition rate among teachers statewide between 2023 and 2024.
Using foreign labor appears to be a novel employment policy for Fort Worth ISD. There were 13 H-1B visa holders employed by the district in 2023 and three in 2022, USCIS data reveals. There are no responsive records for the previous 10 years.
“The H-1B program allows employers in the United States to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent,” the USCIS website stated.
The Department of Labor indicates that the H-1B program is intended for employers that cannot find native-born American workers with a specialized skill set.
“The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States,” the government agency noted.
A national debate over H-1B visas sprung into the national consciousness on Christmas Day 2024, The Dallas Express reported.
This has revived discussions about the merits of the roughly three-decades-old immigration program.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” President-elect Donald Trump’s adviser Vivek Ramaswamy posted on X during an online firestorm over H-1B visas in the next administration. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added.
Critics of the program claim to have been de-badged and demonetized after criticizing Elon Musk, an H-1B advocate, over his support of the program on his social media platform X.
Trump previously opposed the program, The Dallas Express reported. “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” then-candidate Trump said during his first successful presidential bid in 2016.
Trump, however, seems to have modified his position.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he recently told the New York Post.
The Dallas Express asked the FWISD Board of Trustees why their district has sought teachers from abroad when there appears to be a surplus of teachers in the Texas job market. DX contacted trustees Dr. Camille Rodriguez (District 1), Tobi Jackson (District 2), Quinton “Q” Phillips (District 3), Wallace Bridges (District 4), Kevin Lynch (District 5), Anne Darr (District 6), Dr. Michael Ryan (District 7), Anael Luebanos (District 8), and Roxanne Martinez (District 9).
None of the trustees responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.