Austin ISD Celebrates Hiring of New Superintendent

Newly hired Superintendent Matias Segura (image via Youtube)

The Austin Independent School District stepped into a new era on Thursday night as the board of trustees formally hired Matias Segura to be the district’s superintendent.

Segura has led the district in an interim capacity since last January. He started his education career with AISD in 2018 as the chief of construction, facilities, and maintenance. He was expected to serve only six months after being appointed interim super in January 2023, but his grasp of the district’s complex needs, his clear communication style, and his affable nature endeared him to the trustees. In November, the board decided it wouldn’t conduct a national search for a new superintendent; it named Segura the lone finalist a month later.

Many of the nine trustees praised Segura before the unanimous vote. Board President Arati Singh said he had served with honor. Vice President Kevin Foster called him “one of the strongest and best hires I’ve been honored to be part of in my professional career.”

Before the vote, the trustees reviewed discouraging data from recent test scores showing that – barring a miracle – the district won’t meet its goals for improving the reading and math skills of its third graders this year.

Those goals include increasing the percentage of third grade students who read on grade level, as measured by the statewide STAAR reading assessment, to 50% by the end of this semester. As of December, the data shows that 44% of these students read on grade level, just 1% better than the number at the beginning of the year.

The numbers in math are worse. The district’s goal is to increase the percentage of third grade students who perform on grade level in math to 50% as well by the end of the semester. The most recent data shows that only 35% of AISD third graders are performing on grade level in math. That is up from 33% at the beginning of the year.

Dillon Finan, director of campus and district accountability, described three takeaways from the data. First, the district needs to implement intensive interventions and accelerated instruction for its young students in reading and math. Second, those efforts should prioritize students experiencing poverty since they have lower performance across all racial groups. Third, African American students need to be prioritized, because they are not performing on par with their peers regardless of economic status.

Assistant Superintendent Mary Ann Maxwell said AISD has already begun to provide intensive supervision to teachers at 25 of the district’s 78 elementary schools, most of which have experienced high teacher turnover since the pandemic. She said the campuses will receive updated instructional materials and that educators plan to engage more deeply with the families of kids who need help. “Really, our goal here is to overserve our traditionally underserved population,” she said.

After the presentation, Segura and the trustees spent an hour digesting the data. Several said it contains hints that more rapid student improvement is on the horizon as progress-monitoring tools sharpen and efforts to stabilize learning environments take hold. Segura predicted that soon we’ll have a better idea of what is and isn’t working.

“Before the end of the semester, I suspect that we will have very clear initiatives that align with the scorecard,” Segura said. “And you’ll be able to see us communicate that these are the things that we know work.”

“And when will we know it? When we see it in the data,” Deputy Superintendent Patricia Rodriguez followed up. “That’s going to be the proof. It won’t be a feeling. We’re going to actually see it in the data.”