La Marque ISD to fight closure

Good luck.

The La Marque school board Monday voted to wage a legal battle to keep the state from dissolving the school district, the Texas Education Agency said.

La Marque officials could not be reached for comment, but a spokeswoman for the Education Agency said that the board voted to hire an attorney to contest the decision by Commissioner of Education Michael Williams to disband the school district.

“La Marque ISD has chosen a costly course of action,” the agency said in a statement. “The hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to this effort is funding that will not go into any LMISD classroom or toward educating one student.”

See here and here for the background. North Forest also fought against being shut down, but in the end they lost. I honestly don’t know if any ISD that has been targeted for closure by the TEA has managed to stave it off and retain its independence. My guess is that by the start of the 2017 school year, if not the 2016 school year, the students who today are in La Marque ISD will be in another district. And now we know which one: Texas City ISD:

“We respect the Commissioner’s decision and we are prepared to move forward with the annexation process in a way that benefits both communities and all students,” Texas City Superintendent Cynthia Lusignolo said in a statement posted on the school district web site.

Texas City ISD spokeswoman Melissa Tortorici said that it was too early to know what kind of impact the absorption of La Marque schools would have on her neighboring district.

Tortorici said it was unlikely that students would be moved to new schools. “We want to assure both communities that it’s important for kids to go to school where they live,” she said.

Texas City ISD was the 565th ranked district out of 950 total last year. By comparison, La Marque was ranked #840. HISD was #683, in case you were wondering, but it’s a big district with a lot of good schools as well as some underperforming ones. La Marque has 2,528 students, compared to 6,133 for TCISD. That’s quite a bit different than HISD absorbing North Forest. I wish TCISD and the students of the soon-to-be-former La Marque ISD all the best with this transition.

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