State to close La Marque ISD

They don’t know what they’re going to do with it, and that’s a problem.

Galveston County’s La Marque ISD will officially be no more as of July 1, 2016, state education officials confirmed.

On Thursday, Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams notified La Marque ISD officials of the decision to revoke their accreditation.

“The district will be merged with another school district in the area,” said DeEtta Culbertson, a spokeswoman for the education agency.

[…]

The typical practice when a district loses its accreditation is for it to be wholly absorbed into another district rather than being broken up among multiple districts.

Culbertson said the details about the merger were still being worked out.

See here, here, and here for the background. I get the reasoning behind this – La Marque has been at the bottom of state academic rankings for several years, and in August it failed the state fiscal accountability rating. That’s plenty of justification to shutter a district. The problem, as I detailed in that last link, is that there’s no obvious place for La Marque ISD to go. None of its neighbors seem like good candidates to absorb it. This is likely why nine months after the first announcement that La Marque was on the chopping block the TEA still has no confirmed plan for what to do with it. Everyone knew that North Forest would be absorbed by HISD. Nobody knows what will happen to La Marque. That seems to me to be at least as big a problem as the one the TEA is trying to solve by dissolving La Marque ISD.

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