Texas declined Thursday to take over the Wichita Falls school district, which had been at risk of receiving the state’s most severe form of intervention over years of academic underperformance.
Kirby Middle School triggered the potential of a takeover. Under the state’s school accountability system, five consecutive years of unacceptable ratings at a single school allows the Texas Education Agency to replace a district’s locally elected school board with a state-selected board of managers or order the closure of the struggling campus.
The district near the Texas-Oklahoma border had already informally closed Kirby Middle School in 2024 and moved its students to Hirschi Middle School to provide them with better facilities. Facing continued pressure from the state to improve academic performance, the district adopted state math materials and outsourced operations at Hirschi to Third Future Schools, a charter school network that focuses on turning around struggling schools.
After TEA Commissioner Mike Morath visited the district last month, he and Wichita Falls ISD agreed to formally close the obsolete Kirby campus and permit Hirschi to continue its partnership with Third Future Schools. The TEA will appoint a conservator to monitor the district’s progress and advise the superintendent and school board.
“TEA will continue to tightly monitor the district’s progress through the appointment of a conservator and the other conditions that the district agreed to,” said Jake Kobersky, a spokesperson for the agency. “The district must continue to improve academic outcomes for students to prevent a campus closure or Board of Managers appointment in the future.”
The district went from 11 academically unacceptable campuses in the 2022-23 school year to five in 2024-25. Donny Lee, the superintendent of Wichita Falls, said he expects there to be no failing campuses when accountability ratings are released later this year.
With Third Future Schools in charge, students experience stricter learning environments with longer school days. They are lined up and walked to their next class, and if there’s a disruption, students are removed from the classroom, Lee said.
See here for a brief mention of WFISD’s fate as of December. Good for WFISD avoiding the takeover, even if they had to get into bed with Mike Miles’ charter school outfit to do so. Boy, having actual elected officials represent you and your views on your schools board – *fans self* – I miss that.
I do have questions about this arrangement. How long are they obligated to be yoked to Third Future? Like, if in a couple of years that school is still doing fine, do they have the option of saying “okay, we got this from here, thanks and here’s a nice parting gift”? At least under the takeover law, you know there’s an endpoint. Will they have any way to seek redress if Third Future turns out to be unable to deliver on their promise? What control, if any, do they have over how Third Future handles business at that school? Can they at some point say “let the kids get to class on their own”, or “loosen up on the discipline”, or whatever? What if Third Future is asking for above-and-beyond expenditures, or wants to go their own way on curriculum? How much of this is a true partnership, and how much of it is a takeover that’s just limited to that one school? I’m just curious.
On a side note, Fort Worth ISD’s generally well-regarded Superintendent Karen Molinar was given her walking papers by Mike Morath in advance of the formal takeover. She had a lot of political support, and for a minute or two it looked like there might be a chance she’d stay on; the Supers of the other taken-over districts have all been replaced by now. Whether that was ever a serious consideration or a fig leaf I couldn’t say. I will say again, good luck to you, Fort Worth ISD. I’m still waiting to see if the TEA has more than one model in mind for how to handle these takeovers or if it’s going to be Mike Miles clones all the way down.