Chapter 6 — Draft school consolidation and boundary-change briefing (October 10, 2025)

**Date in the room:** Friday, October 10, 2025 (file title: Draft School Consolidation & Boundary Change Process). **Type:** Staff briefing. Dr. Rachel French, Planning Director and project manager. Not a board meeting. No trustees speak. No public comment. No vote. **Runtime:** last caption stamp `[00:27:27]` (~27 minutes). **Source:** `meetings/clean/20251010-Draft-School-Consolidation-&-Boundary-Change-Process.txt`

Caption errors: austinisd.org/conolidate (consolidate); Barrington (Bington); Bryker Woods (Berwoods / Breerwood / Breer Woods); Casis (Cassiss); Winn Montessori (when monasuri / monastery); Govalle (go valley); Blackshear (Blackshere); Widen (Wedane); Joslin (Jocelyn); Bedichek (Betach / Betachch); Webb (Web); Burnet (Bernett); Dobie (Adobe); Mendez (Menddees); Navarro (Navaro); McCallum (Macllum / Mallums); Akins (Akens); Pecan Springs (Panon Springs). Names below use the campus the captions are trying to say, with the caption form in parentheses where it first appears.

French tells viewers to watch the October 9 board recording for baseline academic programming. This tape is closures and boundaries only.

Who is in the room

**Staff:** Dr. Rachel French, director of planning, project manager for consolidations. She is the only speaker.

**Board:** none on the record.

**Public:** none. This is a briefing “to prepare us for our community meetings” so conversation next week can assume the draft is already posted (`[00:00:23]`–`[00:00:32]`).

Vision and drivers (`[00:00:00]`–`[00:03:09]`)

“Hello everyone. I am Dr. Rachel French. I’m director of planning for the district and the project manager for the consolidations effort.” Draft released October 3. Go to austinisd.org/consolidate.

Vision: “every family to have access to an excellent neighborhood school.” Look at where schools are and where people live. “Choice will still be there. We are not removing the ability to transfer to other schools.” Every school should be “vibrant, well resourced.”

Why this effort: “a budget shortfall as well as declining enrollment.” Then school closures, merging schools, program changes, boundary changes.

Not starting from scratch: 2022 long-range plan and bond, plus the equity assessment, all with community engagement.

Two parts of decision-making: (1) data / rubric — “what’s misaligned in our buildings… too full, too empty, in poor condition, just data points”; (2) contextual analysis — the actual proposal, looking at a school and all the schools around it. “This is real impact and real change to students and families… we are doing what is best for the district as a whole” (`[00:02:54]`–`[00:03:07]`).

Utilization (`[00:03:09]`–`[00:04:34]`)

Target at the start: **85% utilization** (kids who can fit versus kids who do). District now **76%**. Draft gets to **82%** “even with closing 13 schools.” “We want to close as few as possible and we’re comfortable not hitting our target in this case.” Elementary hits the target. High schools were already close. Middle schools limited “due to taps and restarts.”

Boundaries change who is zoned. Transfer policy and practice still have to catch actual enrollment; “that will be a bit of a longer term effort that we can’t fix with just boundaries.” Maps are based on **where students live and are zoned, not where they currently choose to go**.

Elementary closures and non-zone programs (`[00:04:34]`–`[00:18:03]`)

Slide: campuses proposed to close, plus some shifting from neighborhood school to **non-zoned program** (no boundary; any AISD student may apply). Closing school on the left of each column; blue schools are receiving; percentages are share of students sent. “We tried to keep communities together as much as possible but are just not able to in all circumstances.”

Wall-to-wall dual language: ideal 50% emergent bilingual / 50% not. “We are not able to reach this ratio in our current quote unquote wall-to-wall schools… a product of where these buildings are located and where our emergent bilingual students predominantly live.” New locations follow where EB students live and existing dual-language enrollment. About **590 added seats** for schoolwide dual language. Chart: current EB participation at the four existing wall-to-wall campuses versus potential if both communities attend the new site. Guiding principles sometimes conflict (enrollment balance vs. feeder vs. minimizing impact vs. long-term stability).

Feeder maps: stacked ES/MS/HS boundaries now have “lots of little splits”; the draft has fewer, larger groups traveling together.

Wall-to-wall mergers named: “Riley will be merging with Wooten Ridgetop with Pickle Becker and Sanchez and Sunset Valley and ODM” (`[00:09:16]`–`[00:09:22]`). Choice remains if another campus is closer.

**North / northwest:** space for more students than live there; only one closure because two convert to non-zone. Close Barrington (Bington) and Wooten; Pickle becomes schoolwide Spanish dual language.

**North central:** close Bryker Woods (Berwoods) and Ridgetop. “These are both small physical campuses. The buildings are really small… They rely on portables” and the long-term strategy is to minimize portables; surrounding buildings have space. Ridgetop: schoolwide Spanish DL at Pickle; neighborhood students to Riley (Riley’s wall-to-wall DL moves to Wooten). Bryker Woods reassigned to Matthews. Initial choice “to keep as much of Cassiss together and as much of Breer Woods together as possible… but that might not be the best solution.” Already hearing from Casis, Bryker Woods, and Matthews; options exist before November.

**Northeast / east:** three modernized schools close together west of 183. Close Winn Montessori; Montessori program relocates to Govalle. East Austin “has space for almost double the amount of students that live here.” Close Maplewood and Oak Springs; merge with Campbell and Blackshear. “There is room at Campbell for all of Maplewood and there is room at Blackshere for all of Oak Springs… keep whole communities together.”

East-Austin math: Allison, Govalle, Ortega, Norman-Sims, Sanchez, Zavala “have space for 3,000 students, but only 1,700 live there.” Allison, Norman-Sims, Ortega all under-zoned. Norman-Sims expands north into Pecan Springs; Allison expands from Sanchez south of the river; Ortega stays; Norman-Sims also pulls from Govalle. Remaining orange area “only has enough students to fill one school.” Instead of closing two more, program changes: Sanchez as schoolwide Spanish DL (proximity to Becker; strongest DL share of the three); Govalle as Montessori (most of those students live closest to Zavala). “Quite frankly, this was a decision made so we just didn’t have to close more campuses… our commitment was to really spread the impact of this hard thing around the whole city” (`[00:14:47]`–`[00:14:55]`).

**Southeast:** close Widen (Wedane) and Palm. Whole Palm community into Perez; almost all of Widen into Rodriguez. Perez originally looped over Langford and Houston; those lines “did not make geographic sense,” so they would have been cleaned up anyway.

**South central:** almost twice the seats as resident students. Close Becker; Spanish DL at Sanchez. Close Dawson; all of Dawson into Galindo. Galindo’s zone had extended south of 71 / Ben White; those students get a closer school. Becker neighborhood reassigned to Zilker.

**South Austin:** Sunset Valley wall-to-wall DL to O. Henry (ODM) as schoolwide Spanish DL. Sunset Valley closes. Joslin (Jocelyn) becomes non-zoned Spanish and Mandarin immersion. Boone, Clayton, Mills, Kiker (Ker), Cowan, Casey (Casuric) had smaller boundaries than their buildings; Kiker closer to aligned; fixing one boundary moves all of them. “If there is refinements to some of these boundaries, that is absolutely what we are wanting to talk about.”

After elementary: heat map. Red = very empty, dark blue = too full. On the right, “there is no more red. There is no more dark blue.” All elementaries in the “healthy utilization range.”

Middle schools (`[00:18:03]`–`[00:20:50]`)

Close Bedichek (Betach) and Martin. “We are considering keeping the buildings and would like… to collaborate with those communities to reimagine their future and programming.”

North limited by restarts at Webb, Dobie, Burnet (Web, Adobe or Bernett). Not counting single-gender middle: “space for over 11,000 middle school students… but only about 7,000 live here.” Need a boundary for Marshall. Close Martin; feeders use the river as a natural boundary. Most Martin students to Keeling or Marshall; south of the river to Lively. Marshall: eight elementaries could opt in, cannot all fit; about half of current Marshall choosers live in the new boundary; currently enrolled may stay.

South of the river: close Bedichek. Covington, Lively, and Mendez all too empty from a boundary perspective; Mendez too full in spots; Bailey empty. Keeling left empty **on purpose** for its magnet; Lively also has magnet room. “All but one of our middle schools are in that healthy utilization range.”

High schools (`[00:20:50]`–`[00:23:08]`)

No building closures. International High School, currently sharing Northeast Early College, closes as a campus and “will just operate as a program at Navaro Early College High School.” No proposed changes to magnet / application programs in that line.

LBJ vs. McCallum: if every zoned student attended, LBJ “would still be less than half full” and McCallum “would be 120% full” (`[00:21:45]`–`[00:21:54]`). Substantial high-school shuffles aligned to middle-school feeders. LBJ and Austin High look disconnected on the map because of the shape of the district.

South: Akins too full; Travis and Crockett too empty; reassign to healthy utilization.

Address lookup: austinisd.org/consolidate.

Staffing, transfers, buses, timeline (`[00:23:08]`–`[00:27:27]`)

Transition timelines in the draft deliverable: staffing, student support, campus culture. Refined proposal in November.

Principals of impacted campuses: **December**. Staffing allocations: **January**. “We often hire six to 700 students a year” — caption for teachers — “instead of hiring from outside, we will be starting to hire from within… staff from our consolidated schools” (`[00:23:48]`–`[00:24:03]`).

If the school is not closing and the program is not moving, enrolled students stay, in-district or out-of-district transfer alike.

Siblings: “siblings will not be automatically grandfathered unless they’re currently enrolled as well… they will still be a part of our prioritization… not guaranteed but they are still prioritized as they have been” (`[00:24:40]`–`[00:24:56]`).

Three family choices: new zone school; stay / move with the program; apply for a new program or general transfer. Must re-register; no automatic reenrollment; grandfathered transfers auto-approved.

Transportation: “our same two or more mile from your zone school will remain.” Some special-rule routes change — see the deliverable. **No bus for the new non-zone programs.** “Grandfathered students will not be eligible for bus service” (`[00:26:01]`–`[00:26:04]`).

Bridge teams after approval. Community engagement: October 14, 16, 25; in-person November 8 to show revisions. Comment cards: **1,700 already**, “reading everyone.” Cards open through **October 28**. Board votes **November 20**.

“Thank you all for your engagement and for being with us through this really hard thing that we’re doing together.” Last stamp `[00:27:27]`.

What was not discussed

Result

No motion. No board. No public comment. The draft of October 3 is explained. Vote date on the slide: **November 20**. Comment deadline: **October 28**.

Board and campus life

French is a planner with a clicker. She names “real impact and real change” and “spread the impact… around the whole city.” She does not claim a campus of her own. There is no trustee in the frame to say they taught at Pierce or have a child at Casis. The campus life in this tape is a map: portables at Bryker Woods and Ridgetop, twice the seats in East Austin, LBJ empty if everyone zoned actually came.

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