Dekaney High School is one failing accountability grade away from a state takeover of Spring ISD, and district leaders told trustees Tuesday that they are pursuing aggressive turnaround efforts at the north Harris County campus.
The pressure comes after Dekaney posted four consecutive years of failing academic accountability ratings. Under state law, that streak puts the district and its 33,500 students at risk of losing local control if the campus fails again.
Takeovers were once rare in Texas, but they have become more frequent under a 2015 state law that allows the Texas Education Commissioner to oust an elected board and replace them with a board of managers as well as a state-appointed superintendent if one campus has five years of failing grades. Most recently, the Texas Education Agency announced it was taking over districts in Beaumont, Connally and Lake Worth. That follows its intervention in Fort Worth ISD and its historic takeover of the Houston Independent School District, the largest in the state.
At Dekaney, administrators have rolled out tighter instructional supports such as standardized lesson plans and slide decks, increased feedback for staff, and exit tickets that require students to answer STAAR-aligned questions at the end of class.
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Dekaney Principal Connie Smith said that the campus had increased the number of weekly assessments for students, revamped how they track academic performance data, and started holding professional learning groups for teachers every school day.
“The data is showing that we’re pushing in the right direction,” Smith said. “We’re not perfect, and I don’t think anyone standing in any space would be, but our heart is in the place.”
On top of unit tests and exit tickets, Dekaney students take an additional English language arts assessment every week and a math assessment biweekly. Smith said this gives administrators more frequent data points on how students are doing in core subjects.
The school is also tracking each student’s learning using past academic performance and benchmarks such as weekly assessments.
“We utilize that triangulation of data to determine the needs not only of our students, but also our teachers,” Smith said. “We also meet with our instructional specialists as well so we can understand what our goals are as a campus, what’s going on there, identify the concerns and the gaps and create a plan of action.”
Smith said that school officials have also started to track student performance on exit tickets by individual performance rather than the whole average of the class. Smith said it keeps teachers from getting a “false sense of where students are” and shows them which students need targeted help and where to adjust curriculum.
This Chron story from October, linked in the first paragraph above, described the situation going into the 2025-26 academic year.
Dekaney has already received four consecutive years of failing academic accountability scores and, according to a Sept. 3 letter from the Texas Education Agency, “has not earned an acceptable academic accountability rating since the 2015–16 school year.”
District and campus administrators have just this school year left to improve that score, and they’re banking on its state-mandated turnaround plan.
[…]
Spring ISD leaders acknowledge that academics have flatlined at not just Dekaney High School, but all over Spring ISD over the last three years.
The percentage of students in Spring who met the grade-level standard on the reading STAAR has stayed around 38% since 2022. For math, it’s remained at 30% or lower for three years. That doesn’t include students in the “approaching” grade level standard, which is considered passing in the state’s eyes.
“We need to have exponential growth for us to exceedingly close the gap between us and the region and the state,” Superintendent Kregg Cuellar said at a work session last month.
In 2024, 49% of Dekaney students were at approaching or above grade level for reading and 54% for math.
At a Sept. 9 board meeting, district and school officials linked the school’s low rating to weak math and reading scores, poor readiness for college, career, and military and persistent gaps among students retaking tests — factors that all line up with the state’s key accountability metrics.
However, in that same meeting, Tracey Walker, assistant superintendent of high schools, said she believed preliminary data indicated that the campus could receive a C rating for last school year’s college and career preparedness.
Just over half of the school’s student population is Hispanic, and about 40% are Black. More than 79% of students are considered economically disadvantaged while about 32% are emergent bilingual students and English learners.
Toni Templeton, a senior research scientist at the University of Houston Education Research Center, said that Dekaney’s low graduation rates also stood out.
“(The accountability rating system) gives you the better of your fourth year, fifth year or sixth year graduation rates,” Templeton said. “So you have six years to graduate students, and it’s really interesting to me that the graduation rates are so low.
In 2024, Dekaney had a 76.9% graduation rate for students who finished in four years, compared with the statewide average of 90.7%. Spring ISD’s overall rate was 83.6%.
Michelle Williams, a teachers union leader recently terminated by HISD and a Spring resident for over two decades, has been trying to raise the alarm about Spring ISD’s autonomy, speaking out at board meetings and drawing parallels between Dekaney and Wheatley high schools. She said Dekaney’s first F rating should have raised a red flag.
“(The state) took over the largest school district in the state of Texas. That should have been urgency enough,” Williams said. “And the turnaround plan should have been done in year one or year two of getting an F.”
I’m rooting for them, I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone. Spring ISD has more data to work with as well as the HISD experience to guide and motivate them, so perhaps they will pull themselves out in time. They’re certainly borrowing from the Mike Miles playbook in their mitigation efforts, and if they’d like to borrow the man himself to oversee it all I’m sure we could make a deal. All that said, HISD could and arguably should have avoided this fate as well, and they didn’t. Good luck, but don’t rest easy. Until that law is changed, the threat will loom.