Pecan Springs Elementary is made up of two uniform rows of beige, metal portable buildings sitting on a pad of cement, nestled in a circle of chain-link fence. Pecan Springs students and families have been waiting on their new school building for two years now, still under construction, since their old one on Rogge Lane was torn down. The temporary campus sits in the literal backyard of Winn Montessori Elementary.
The two elementaries are both Spanish-English dual-language schools within the Austin ISD public school district, serving “emergent bilingual” students: About 40% of both schools’ populations speak their first language at home with their families while actively learning English at school. In a two-way dual-language classroom, the English-speaking and English-learning students learn both the curriculum and one another’s languages in tandem. Studies have shown that students in such programs tend to outperform their peers as they develop in an immersive, bilingual setting.
What Pecan Springs and Winn Montessori also have in common: Both received “F” scores as a campus three years in a row, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, from the Texas Education Agency due to their underperformance on the highly criticized STAAR exam and other academic benchmark metrics.
In Texas public schools, children are meant to learn English in elementary. The state doesn’t provide standardized testing, like the STAAR exam, in languages other than English after fifth grade. For that reason, schools with more students whose first language isn’t English tend to underperform on the STAAR exam and end up receiving low TEA scores.
On Sept. 3, the TEA notified AISD that, along with eight other elementary schools and two middle schools that also received three consecutive “unacceptable” accountability ratings, Pecan Springs and Winn must either be completely restarted with almost totally new faculty and staff (hired either by the school district or by a third-party charter manager) or closed down. The students would be reassigned to other campuses that may or may not be dual-language schools.
TEA Commissioner of Education Mike Morath declared that 33 of AISD’s 116 schools, which are actively in session right now, require state-mandated interventions due to those scores – even though the Texas Legislature recently got rid of the STAAR exam system those scores are based on. The state agency demanded that the board of trustees produce and submit Turnaround and Targeted Improvement Plans (TAPs and TIPs) to overhaul faculty and curriculum at schools with one to three unacceptable scores by Nov. 14.
If the AISD Board of Trustees fails to produce plans for these schools that satisfy the agency, the TEA will intervene and appoint a state conservator to oversee the school district in place of the elected board.
The 12 AISD schools facing imminent restarts with new faculty and leadership, or potential school closure, are Barrington ES, Dawson ES, Linder ES, Oak Springs ES, Pecan Springs ES, Sánchez ES, Wooldridge ES, Widén ES, Winn Montessori, Bedichek MS, Martin MS, and Paredes ES.
Every single one of those campuses is an AISD dual-language campus, with the sole exception of Oak Springs. Moreover, 28 out of the 33 schools that the TEA has identified as “unacceptable” based on last year’s STAAR results are DL campuses.
With the November TAP deadline rapidly approaching for the board, the district is quickly putting together Turnaround Plan meetings for the families at those 12 “three-F” schools that will be closed or overhauled for certain at the end of the school year. At Pecan Springs on Tuesday evening, parents sat in the tiny swivel seats in the school’s cafeteria, located in one of the several indistinguishable portable buildings. Several families wore headphones, the Spanish translator repeating everything said by the English-speaking district representatives.
“We don’t want to be doing this. … We have to work with the options TEA is giving us.” – Amie Ortiz, AISD’s director of teacher incentive allotment
At that meeting, one immediately apparent problem was the district representatives did not have a Turnaround Plan draft ready for the parents to look at; the board will not look at preliminary drafts until their Oct. 9 meeting. They were hoping, the reps said, to get feedback from families before trying a draft. They presented six Turnaround Plan options the families could choose from, half of which were grayed out because Pecan Springs is a three-F school; one- and two-F schools have more options. “We don’t want to be doing this. If we didn’t have to do a restart, we wouldn’t,” Amie Ortiz, AISD’s director of teacher incentive allotment (talent hiring), said. “We have to work with the options TEA is giving us.”
Pecan Springs families wanted more answers than the representatives were entirely prepared to give them: Which charter manager would be responsible for hiring our new principal and teachers? Can we retain some of our current faculty? What does a “restarted curriculum” actually look like in concrete terms? Will the district even finish constructing the school building that our children have been waiting for, if you’re planning to close Pecan Springs for good?
During the Q&A section of the meeting, one father of a Pecan Springs student took the microphone. “As parents, we want our kids off the streets. We want them out of work. We want them to be well-educated,” he said in Spanish. “They are learning at Pecan Springs. There’s a great team here that is sacrificing so much and is entirely focused on the academic success of our children. This is the school for us.”
“This is about the district needing to support this school and support its leaders,” he finished. The families in the room, some of whom had been scribbling notes on paper while soothing babies in strollers, burst into applause.
Even AISD’s dual-language programs with high TEA school scores won’t be spared from consolidations. The district has told families that they will move the four existing “wall-to-wall” DL programs, where English-learning and English-speaking students are entirely integrated, to different campuses: Becker, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley, and Reilly elementaries.
Wall-to-wall DL campuses should serve a 50-50 split of Spanish and English-speaking students, and the district reports that due to population shifts across Austin, the four campuses are not seeing that intended ratio. “We plan to move programs closer to where most emergent bilingual students live. Students already in the programs will still have access, just at a different school,” reads the district’s plan. The district has not announced which campuses those programs could be moved to.
At the Sept. 18 AISD board meeting, the first one since the TEA letter arrived, every single one of the 60 available public comment slots were taken. Alejandra Maldonado, whose daughter attends Becker Elementary, one of those four fully immersive DL schools, was one of the first to take the stand.
“For immigrant families like mine, who speak Spanish like mine, Becker is more than a school; it’s a refuge,” Maldonado began, in Spanish. “Becker has become … a system of support that many immigrants lose when we leave our country.”
“The bilingualism, the culture of our children, it’s not only accepted but celebrated as a valued treasure,” Maldonado continued. “To close Becker wouldn’t just close a building, it would break the heart of a community.”
It’s important to note that there was already a years-long timeline for an AISD districtwide consolidation to save money and fill too-empty schools, basically redesigning the district with the ultimate goal of using the school seats and teachers in Austin most efficiently. Under a $19.7 million budget deficit, AISD cannot financially maintain the number of schools it does right now. At the same Sept. 18 meeting, AISD Superintendent Matias Segura made clear that the board fears a TEA takeover if they cannot straighten out the district’s financial trouble (on top of these new TAP requirements), a reason the TEA has cited for taking over other Texas school districts in the past.
Now, the TEA-mandated Turnaround Plans and potential forced school shutdowns have upended and propelled this school consolidation process into the very near future. Previously, only Webb, Dobie, and Burnet middle schools, all DL campuses, were facing potential closure or restart next school year; now 12 more schools are in the same situation. Decisions need to be made in just over a month. The board is voting on final recommended TAPs on Nov. 6. That leaves little to no time for trustees to communicate and work with their AISD families and PTAs.
And with the TEA identifying almost entirely dual-language schools as “unacceptable,” the reality is that elementary-aged children who are learning English as their second language, already facing a disadvantage within any English-biased public school system, are going to be the ones bearing the brunt of this process: school closures, consolidations, and the relocation of their DL programs. Parents repeated this sentiment again and again during public comment to the board: Those students will be uprooted from their current campuses, teachers, and friends.
Most emergent bilingual students speak Spanish, but there are also a few DL programs for students who speak Mandarin and Vietnamese. Most DL programs are located in East Austin, usually at schools with a more economically disadvantaged demographic.
“TEA required TIP/TAP plans punish campuses whose students face disproportionate need,” wrote AISD Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu to the Chronicle.
Winn Montessori and Pecan Springs share both a physical campus and a severe TAP situation right now, but they have their differences. Winn has an engaged PTA that is advocating for their kids during public comment, and Pecan Springs doesn’t; Winn has a school building, and Pecan Springs doesn’t; 95% of Pecan Springs students are economically disadvantaged, and 63% are at Winn. Ryan Malone, president of the Winn Montessori PTA, fears that closure decisions will be skewed based on which parents have disposable time to go to AISD board meetings. “AISD has to do better for all kids, not just the ones whose parents’ are the loudest,” Malone said.
Malone speaks English, and so does her daughter, who is in first grade at Winn. But in a two-way DL program, her daughter can already speak and read some Spanish. “She rolls her r’s regardless of the word,” Malone laughed. “She was reading a street sign the other day, L-A-M-A-Rrrr.”
“She has thrived. I hear her speaking it with her peers, with her Spanish-speaking classmates. And it’s like wow, this works,” Malone continued. “I wanted her to speak Spanish, what a gift I could give my child. But we want to make sure that the children for whom this program exists are getting served.”
This article appears in September 26 • 2025.