Mid-afternoon Friday, Oct. 31, Austin ISD released an update to the districtwide consolidation plan, a top-down redraw of the school district map. The consolidations aim to avoid a takeover by the Texas Education Agency by balancing the district’s financial crisis and addressing the 24 state-mandated Turnaround Plans due to the state agency Nov. 21.
The list of 13 schools slated for closure in the first draft hasn’t changed. Thousands of students are still being rezoned to a different neighborhood school next year. The revisions include adjusted school boundary lines, the plan’s transfer policy, and expanded school bus access for displaced neighborhood students at the new non-zoned schools, plus other school-specific shifts.
These changes, made less than three weeks away from the AISD trustees’ final vote on the plan Nov. 20, followed feedback from 13 in-person meetings and 7,257 feedback cards received online from Austin families. The district published the process of how those ideas were implemented or not, with reasoning provided.
Pending board approval, changes to the plan’s transfer policy include:
Rising sixth and ninth graders can now stay at the middle or high school they were planning on attending next year, if now rezoned to a different school
Transfer students currently attending a school slated to close or change into a schoolwide dual-language or Montessori program can move along with their classmates to their reassigned school
Pre-K students can also choose to stay at their current school
Staff and sibling transfers will be automatically approved, except for magnet programs
Many AISD families had also criticized the district for not providing bus access to the four schoolwide Spanish-English dual language schools (Pickle, Wooten, Sánchez, Odom elementaries). The equity goal of moving those programs closer to where emergent bilingual students live in the city didn’t mean much if those students weren’t provided a way to get to school.
In this revision, local students that would be zoned for those schools can now ride the bus there, along with students living in Joslin ES’s (to become a Spanish and Mandarin immersion school) and the new Montessori school’s current attendance zones. The original proposal to move the district’s sole Montessori program to Govalle ES, with Winn closing, was met with wide pushback from the Govalle community. This revision proposes an opt-in program at Zavala or Ortega ES instead.
The district is also considering moving a 6-12 school into the current Martin MS building, and a pre-K through eighth or 6-12 school into the current Bedichek MS building, both still slated to close.
At a board work session called last Wednesday, trustees debated if it’s possible to give these consolidation decisions more time, as AISD families have petitioned for. Parents argued during public comment that the district should be solely focusing on the state-mandated Turnaround Plans to prevent a district takeover, rather than attempt to tackle consolidations at the same time before the state’s Nov. 21 deadline. The district added to the revision that they will consider a delayed timeline for changes not related to the state-required TAPs.
The revised map with boundary changes will be presented to trustees Nov. 6. The final recommended plan is still scheduled to release Nov. 14, with the board voting Nov. 20. At least five “yes” votes are needed to approve it – but while some trustees are willing to back something close to the current plan, others still have major concerns. “I don’t know if there are five votes in the room,” AISD Board President Lynn Boswell said on Oct. 29.
“It’s a manufactured crisis, and I’m sorry we’re in this place,” Boswell continued. “We need to get to something that all of us can get behind.”
This article appears in November 7 • 2025.
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