AISD Superintendent Considers Moving Hundreds of Students From Dobie to Lamar Middle School

Parents and teachers gather, expressing outrage over a plan to bring 300 to 500 new students to the overcrowded Lamar Middle School (photo by Brant Bingamon)

The plan is breathtaking in scope. With a temporary or permanent closure of Dobie Middle School looming, Austin ISD is proposing to fold between 300 and 500 students from Dobie into the already crowded, 1,100-student campus of Lamar Middle School, in the West Austin neighborhood of Brentwood. The district envisions the new students – the vast majority of them economically disadvantaged Hispanic and African American kids – beginning school at Lamar in the fall and continuing there for at least two years. Lamar parents and staff learned about the plan only a week ago.

The notification came in an April 17 email in which Superintendent Matias Segura explained that the district is considering “difficult options” to prevent a state takeover of the entire district, like the one currently melting down Houston ISD. “We want you to be aware that one of the possibilities under serious consideration is for Dobie students to attend Lamar Middle School starting in the 2025-26 school year,” Segura’s email stated. It asked the community to attend an information session on April 21 and said the decision on how to proceed would be made three days later. That deadline has now been pushed to April 28.

Lamar parents and staff – 500 of them – packed into the cafeteria on Monday night, worried, suspicious, and confused. Segura told them that state law allows the state, through the Texas Education Agency, to take over school districts when even one school in a district scores five consecutive F’s in its accountability ratings, and that it expects Dobie to score its fourth consecutive F this year. Segura laid out three options to keep TEA out of local schools: allowing a charter school to take over management of Dobie; closing the school permanently; or closing it for two years, busing its students to another middle school, and reopening Dobie in a reimagined form.

In theory, a fourth, high-risk option exists as well: keeping Dobie open and trying to get its accountability score up to at least a C in the next school year. But Segura did not entertain that idea, focusing instead on closing and then reopening Dobie. He said district administrators had examined which schools made sense to receive the Dobie kids, going down a list that included Murchison Middle School, 2.5 miles from Lamar. Segura dismissed Murchison, saying it would take too long to get the necessary permits from the city to add teaching space to the campus. The Lamar parents began interrupting.

“If you look at Murchison, it’s less crowded,” one yelled. “Why is it harder to get permits for Murchison than Lamar?” another asked. “I want to see the drawings, I want to see the layout,” another called out.

From that point on, Segura’s presentation was punctuated by outbursts and applause. Parents and teachers complained that Lamar is already at 117% capacity, that adding hundreds more students will turn the overcrowding into a crisis. “I have kids who sit on the floor for almost every period,” teacher Grant Kinscherff said. “Our halls are full of kids. It is insane.”

Again and again, parents and staff asked why the several hundred new students from Dobie couldn’t be distributed between Murchison and Lamar or other schools. Parents voiced safety concerns about the viability of the school’s evacuation plan and worried that the school’s accountability ratings will crash if nearly one-third of the student body is composed of kids who failed state tests at Dobie. They complained that the district is rushing the decision on the options for Dobie’s fate. Several said the district should allow a charter school to take over Dobie, even though such a takeover would almost certainly result in Dobie’s teachers and staff being fired.

Parents and teachers from Dobie spoke as well. The room grew quiet as Arminda Martinez, Dobie’s PTA president and a staff worker at the school, responded to the idea of putting Dobie under the management of a charter school. “Our community doesn’t want a charter school because we’re going to lose everybody – all the teachers, all the staff will have to go,” Martinez said.

Martinez also reminded the audience of the incredible challenge Segura is facing. “He’s trying to save us, save every school in the district. If the TEA gets in charge of the district, every single person in the district that works there will be gone. He will be out. All the members will be out. All the teachers, all the staff members in the schools will be out, and they will put their own people in their spaces. None of us wants that. So please, I just ask you, whoever the students are that come to this school, welcome them.”