Inside Austin ISD's mission to bring its best teachers to its lowest performing schools

AUSTIN (KXAN) – Two weeks before the new school year, Tatiana Brown Gomez, 24, was laughing with her students at Dobie Middle School’s open house. The English teacher showed up to encourage them for what is expected to be a challenging and consequential year.

But Brown-Gomez will largely have to watch the year play out from afar. She is among several current and former Austin Independent School District core subject teachers who were removed from their roles at the district’s three lowest-performing schools and replaced with new educators.

“I am not qualified. That’s literally what I was told. I am not qualified to come back and teach at Dobie,” Brown-Gomez said.

The district hopes a new cohort of teachers will be able to do, this year, what the campus hasn’t been able to accomplish in the last several years: raise the campuses state accountability rating from an F to at least a D or a C. But KXAN found over the summer, on a fast timeline, the district struggled to replace the educators who did not meet its new standards with the “highly qualified” teachers it was seeking.

Vacancies

By July 31 – a little more than two weeks before the first day of school – district officials said there were 51 vacancies between the three campuses. The listings on the district’s vacancy dashboard listed needs for math, social science and Spanish teachers.

The district sent an email on Aug. 6 asking “eligible teachers” at other Austin ISD campuses to transfer to one of the underperforming campuses.

District data shows three days before the start of school; there were still 13 vacancies across the three schools. A spokesperson for the district told KXAN some of the roles could be intentionally vacant because of current enrollment.

Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura said the district chose to wait until late June to submit its turnaround plan to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to engage more with the community about the changes. He said in an exchange that the district got a late start in hiring.

The departures of last year’s staff left a lot of roles to fill. The district wrote in its June 26 presentation to the school board that 84% of Dobie’s core teaching staff would not be returning for the 2025-26 school year – 39% won’t be back at Burnet Middle School and 53% at Webb Middle School.

“I only know two teachers that were able to return,” Brown-Gomez said about the previous core subject teachers at Dobie.

The district also removed the administration. The principal at Webb is now the associate principal at Northeast Early College High School. Dobie’s former principal is now working as the Director of School Improvement. Burnet’s former principal no longer works for the district.

‘A sense of anxiety

The turnaround plan that Austin’s school board approved and submitted to the TEA in late June said it would only invite “highly qualified educators to apply” at Dobie, Webb, and Burnet – and those rules extended to the current core teachers.

Specifically, the district would only consider those who were certified, with at least three years of experience, and who demonstrated student growth in the top 20% districtwide. Teachers would also have to hold a recognized, exemplary, or master teacher designation.

A turnaround plan that kept the same staff and administration at the campuses was not a plan that the TEA would accept, according to Segura. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told KXAN it was important for the district to get the “most-proven, effective teachers.”

Email records show months earlier, before the board approved the plan, the district was holding meetings and sending emails to let educators know they would likely need to search for another job within the district.

“I recognize the sense of anxiety that can come with waiting for a decision on what is next. I want to be very clear: no decisions regarding staff placement will be made until there is a recommendation from the Board and the Board votes,” AISD Interim Assistant Superintendent of Staffing and Employee Services Steven Stapleton wrote in an email on April 22.

Educators KXAN spoke to say the details on who the district would allow to stay and why were not as clearly laid out in those meetings as they were in the turnaround plan the board voted on in June.

Snapshots from inside meetings with staff show district officials told them they needed to be certified with three years of experience. The PowerPoint said the district would also use “student growth data” to determine “highly effective teachers.”

Emails to Dobie staff in April outline how staff who didn’t qualify to return would be given two placement options at other schools and one opportunity to decline an offer. The email told staff to be proactive and put applications out now.

According to a district spokesperson, if staff members chose to decline the first placement offer, then they would get a second and final offer. The district said, in some cases, staff chose not to accept the second offer, at which point they chose to resign.

District officials said no staff were asked to resign, but data provided by Austin ISD shows 23 staff members chose to resign across all three campuses.

Former Webb teacher Cecilia Leonard knew she wouldn’t be able to stay at her campus next year. She was months away from earning her certification through an alternative certification program, Teachers of Tomorrow, when she learned about the turnaround plan.

“The first thought I had was feeling guilty for making the kids think I was going to be at the school long-term,” Leonard said.

Leonard and Brown-Gomez said colleagues with more than three years’ experience were unclear on which data points would be used to determine who could reapply to stay at the school.

The head of nonprofit Austin Voices, which provides additional support to students and families on all three campuses, said he learned from staff about miscommunications on the district’s end on whether teachers were qualified to stay.

“I think we lost some really good teachers,” Austin Voices Executive Director Allen Weeks said. “There were teachers because of some data point two years ago, the group of students they had, maybe didn’t look as good as another teacher, but then they were told maybe a few days after – we looked at it again, and you are qualified.”

“There were times along the way, and I want to apologize for sure, where we made determinations based on the information that we had, and then it became clear once we had feedback from TEA, or our technical provider that it really needed to be this other thing,” Segura told KXAN in an interview.

Delayed A-F ratings, delayed timelines

In early January 2025, Austin ISD officials were unclear about what federal interventions would also be required for Dobie. Email records show that when the TEA notified the district that the campus needed to develop a turnaround plan because it failed to meet federal accountability requirements, the district’s executive director of accountability and assessment wrote back, “We think that Dobie Middle School has been misidentified as a campus required to develop a turnaround plan.”

At that point, the state had only publicly issued one F-rating to Dobie Middle School from 2019. The legislature passed a law preventing TEA from releasing “unacceptable” ratings through the pandemic, and the agency could not release the 2023 and 2024 ratings because of ongoing lawsuits.

But if accountability scores were released as scheduled, TEA would have already publicly issued Dobie, Burnet and Webb their third F-rating by the time of the email. While TEA was prevented from issuing A-F ratings, the agency said it released raw accountability data to school districts in order for them to gauge performance.

The Austin ISD school board moved Segura into an interim superintendent role in 2022, and officials appointed him as superintendent in 2024, just as the district was dealing with state sanctions over its special education program. In the middle of his second year at the helm of the district, Segura said he is doing everything he can to protect the district from state takeover.

“I want to be clear this was not the easiest plan. We believe in our community. We believe in our schools,” Segura said. “At the end of the day, if we don’t hit this mark, the risk introduced to the schools and the school communities is something that we don’t want to have to work through.”

Math Department Chair and teacher Paige Masley is one of two core-subject teachers returning to Dobie. Masley said she is excited and hopeful for the new year despite the changes and pressure.

“It’s great to have so many new faces because they are bringing outside experiences from really great areas that we can recruit from that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise,” Masley said.

Brown-Gomez is now teaching English 7 miles away at Gus Garcia Young Men’s Leadership Academy. She said her frustration with her departure from Dobie has more to do with the gains she and other staff were starting to make.

District data shows Dobie earned an F-rating in 2025, but the numerical score did improve 13 points last school year from a 46 to a 59. One point away from a D in the state’s accountability system.

“There are so many things that people outside of Dobie do not understand about what our students are going through. Our students are going through abject poverty, through literal homelessness,” Brown-Gomez said.

“They’ve had a lot of turnover at Dobie and not having teachers stay for them and finally we were building to that. We were building that routine. We were building that trust with those students,” she said.

Investigative Photojournalist Richie Bowes contributed to this report.