I wish them all the best. It’s going to be a long ride.
Zach Leonard, a parent to three Fort Worth Independent School District students, wants his children to be able to walk to a high-quality public school in their own neighborhood.
“That’s kind of an old school value, but I believe it to be an extremely important facet of our society,” he told Courier Texas.
But that value is under threat after the Texas Education Agency took control of Fort Worth ISD last October.
Under state law, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath was required to take action after one of Fort Worth’s campuses—Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade Center—received a failing accountability rating for five consecutive school years. In March, Morath replaced the previous superintendent, Karen Molinar, who served as Fort Worth ISD’s interim superintendent since October 2024 and worked for the district for over 30 years, with Peter Licata.
Morath also appointed nine new members of its appointed board of education, replacing the locally elected school board.
The new leadership has already drastically changed campuses across Fort Worth ISD.
“We want to restore local elected control, and I say elect—that’s important—because the control we have is local technically, but they’re not elected,” Leonard said. “These nine people are business leaders primarily—lawyers, architects, and folks like that—business leaders in the community. And now they are doing the role of the trustees.”
Leonard founded the group FORT, or Families Organized and Responding to Takeover in 2025. The coalition of parents, educators, and concerned community members is working to improve student outcomes, build community, and restore local control amid the state takeover.
Leonard said teaching has become “rigid” under the takeover, and curriculum is scripted and derived from artificial intelligence. He also said there aren’t a lot of real books left on campuses.
“The rollout of new curriculum was really poor. They didn’t leverage curriculum writers, in fact, they let many of them go, and now use AI to create scripts for curriculum, and they had many mistakes. That disengaged a lot of teachers.”
The district has also faced cuts to several programs, departments, and staff positions, including directors of emergent bilingual programs, dual language coordinators, special education analysts, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and psychologists.
Licata claims the district is starting fresh and will rehire for all the positions, but Leonard said it won’t be that easy.
“They got rid of all the part-time speech language pathologists,” he said. “Speech therapists and other special education teachers in things like dyslexia intervention are already stretched thin, they’re going from campus to campus. There’s rarely someone dedicated to a campus, and might have a sick day or they may have maternity leave, and so who fills in now that the part time employees are all gone?”
“They couldn’t even fill all the roles they had last year,” he added. “They’re not going to be able to quickly fill all these vacancies they’ve created.
Boy, do we feel your pain. I don’t have anything to add, so read the rest. And if you know someone in the Fort Worth area who’d like to get involved, have them check FORT out.