Fort Worth Independent School District teachers and parents are eager to look forward and push the district in a positive direction after a month of extensive scrutiny on the state of the local schools ended with the superintendent’s resignation.
Angélica Ramsey is leaving her post as Fort Worth ISD’s leader shortly after Mayor Mattie Parker and other community leaders publicly called out the district last month on its stagnant academic performance and demanded a turnaround through local collaborative efforts. On Tuesday, the school board accepted Ramsey’s resignation and must now appoint both an interim and permanent leader. As district teachers and parents have watched the chain of events unfold, they’re hopeful the next superintendent can hit the ground running on a fresh start and utilize their knowledge of Fort Worth to uplift the area’s largest school district.
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, said Ramsey’s resignation was a step in the right direction for the district, as a change was needed.
“Fort Worth ISD has been playing catch-up for a long time, and there is a sense of urgency in this district. The mayor shined a spotlight on it, and I’m glad she did. The way things were going, the writing was on the wall,” Poole said. “We needed a fresh start. The page is turned, so we can start a new chapter. And I know there’s a lot of us in the community ready to get to work.”
It’s important that the school board promote someone from within for the interim position who understands Fort Worth’s landscape, he added. He wants the next superintendent to mend the district’s community relations, noting they have “been very strained for awhile now.”
“We need nonprofits. We need the religious groups. We need the city and the county involved in our school district because the school district can’t do it themselves. I’ve been around long enough, and I saw there wasn’t a lot of involvement in our school district the last couple of years, and we suffered the consequences because of it,” Poole said.
Ramsey laid out in her resignation statement the accomplishments of the school district that occurred under her leadership such as opening on-campus food markets to address food insecurity, launching advisory councils to gather input from stakeholders, and an anticipated improvement on the district’s state rating from a D to a C. The district calculated its own rating after a judge barred the Texas Education Agency from releasing the state scores amid a pending lawsuit. Fort Worth ISD, unlike other districts, did not verify their in-house calculations with TEA before releasing them. A week later, the district submitted them to the state for review , and TEA flagged some of the district’s calculations that differed from theirs but the overall C score remained the same.
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, executive director of Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she took issue with the content of Ramsey’s statement, including highlighting letter grade improvements that TEA had found inconsistencies with. Dorsey-Hollins was also surprised by Ramsey’s mention of the strategic plan, which had gone unapproved by the school board in late July after some board members said they wanted more public input on the plan before adopting it. Her biggest concern was Ramsey’s comment on serving emergent bilingual students and the large gains seen from focusing on the student group.
“To see them growing at that rate when you could have been putting that same intentionality behind your African-American students is kind of a slap in the face to Black parents,” Dorsey-Hollins said.
Dorsey-Hollins and other members of Parent Shield held a press conference on Sept. 17 before the school board discussed Ramsey’s performance in a closed session — a week before her resignation — to issue demands such as literacy reform, data transparency and academic improvement specifically for Black students who’ve seen declining test scores. Dorsey-Hollins says their requests remain unchanged, and the education advocacy group is still holding the school board accountable to them.
“I don’t think that that’s taking the pressure – that any of this (with) her resigning — is taking any pressure off the board. We still expect to hold them accountable, because we know that our kids, they still don’t have the luxury of waiting,” she said. “In the meantime, we just want to make sure that every student’s performance still moves forward and not backwards. We definitely cannot afford for this to distract away from kids’ academic progress.”
Jill Jorgensen, president of the Fort Worth ISD Special Education PTA, said she felt Ramsey made an effort to work with the PTA and had placed district staff in the Specialized Learning department that was responsive to the group’s inquiries.
In terms of getting students the accommodations they need, it’s a broader issue that goes beyond Fort Worth, she added. A fully staffed special education department is the exception, not the norm.
“Bottom line: staffing is crucial to special ed. With any new superintendent, we’d like to see an increase in stipends for special education and inclusion teachers. We’d like to see an increase in pay for (teacher assistant) positions, who have some of the hardest jobs in education, and perhaps an overhaul of the hiring system… We’ve heard from those on the district side and from applicants that it’s quite lengthy and burdensome, and we’re losing good talent.”
For Bradley O’Bannon, a special education teacher at M.H. Moore Elementary, it’s time to focus on rebuilding the district with a leader who understands what it’s like to be a teacher and has a “business sense.” O’Bannon described the district as a hub and valuable resource that serves thousands and thousands of students with “some of the best teachers in the state.” Both teachers and students need to be retained, he added.
“My biggest focus is not what’s happened in the past, what’s happening today, but what is it going to look like in the future? We need to focus and we need to move on, and we need to build a bigger, better, broader Fort Worth ISD,” O’Bannon said.
As of now, it’s unclear how much Ramsey will be receiving in her contract buyout and in what capacity she will be serving the district after she formally steps down on Oct. 1 but remains employed by the district until August 2025. The Star-Telegram has filed a records request for her exit agreement. Her annual salary is $335,000.
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