The State Education Agency Has Selected Austin’s Babysitters

TEA monitors are there to ensure AISD does what the state wants (Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

The Texas Education Agency has named the two monitors who will work with Austin ISD to fix the district's special education department. Last week, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath sent a letter to AISD saying that Sherry Marsh and Lesa Shocklee will oversee the district's progress and report back to TEA.

Marsh and Shocklee are part of a deal that AISD Interim Superintendent Matias Segura and the board of trustees cut with TEA on Sept. 26. The agreement allows AISD's employees to continue working on the backlogged special education services, with oversight from the monitors, rather than letting TEA appoint a conservator who could fire the district's employees and hire others from outside the district.

In addition to acting as go-betweens, Marsh and Shocklee are supposed to help AISD accomplish the goals laid out in the September agreement. They will help draft an assessment of how the district governs itself, conduct on-site investigations of special education services, assist with an external audit of the services, and support the district in implementing the corrective action plan it agreed to.

We could find little public information about Marsh and Shocklee, but both have long careers in public education. Marsh was employed for over two decades at the Region 20 Education Service Center southwest of San Antonio, a subdivision of TEA that helps districts comply with agency rules. She is currently a consultant on how to facilitate that compliance with Marsh Consultancy Services.

Shocklee has worked as an administrator in several North Texas school districts. She was, for the last seven years, the director of special programs at Mansfield ISD. In July, she was appointed executive director of special services for the conservative Grapevine-Colleyville school district between Dallas and Fort Worth.

Grapevine-Colleyville is one of the major battlefields of the culture war that is currently engulfing school districts across the state. Last year, its board of trustees passed a set of policies limiting teachers' ability to talk about race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom and forcing trans students to use the bathrooms of the sex they were assigned at birth. The new rules also prohibit the teaching of critical race theory (something that isn't taught at high schools anyway) and make it easier to ban books.

A new podcast on the political struggles at Grapevine-Colleyville was released on Oct. 4. Called Grapevine, it is the work of Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton, the same NBC reporters responsible for Southlake, which told the story of a very similar culture war at a school district up the road from Grapevine-Colleyville. Southlake won a Peabody Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer. It did not reflect positively on the community of Southlake.

Shocklee is expected to continue working at Grapevine-Colleyville as she fulfills her duties as a monitor at AISD. Both she and Marsh will receive $125 per hour for their work, billable to us, the taxpayers, along with reimbursement for their transportation expenses. Neither is expected to be in attendance at Thursday's meeting of the board of trustees.