With district enrollment roughly 2,500 students below projection for the 2026-27 school year, Fort Worth ISD leaders announced Tuesday they will begin staff leveling and reassigning positions to adjust to the enrollment drop at several campuses.
In a statement Tuesday, Superintendent Peter Licata said the district is beginning the process of adjusting district and campus staffing to match actual student enrollment. That will include reassigning teachers to different campuses that need additional support.
Enrollment and staffing imbalances across Fort Worth ISD have resulted in some classrooms having over 35 students, while others have fewer than 10, according to the district. Staff leveling will allow the district to “more equitably distribute employees and resources and direct better support toward classrooms,” Licata said.
“We’re excited that we will finally have a process in place, we’re excited resources are going to the schools that are bursting at the seams,” Licata said. “Most importantly we are being responsible to the public … making sure that we are fiscally sound on this.”
In a video released by the district Tuesday, Daniel Soliz, deputy superintendent and chief of schools, said that all impacted staff will be notified or reassigned by Labor Day, which is Sept. 7.
Employees affected by reassignments will find out from the district before public announcements are made. Employees may be reassigned from campuses with lower enrollment to campuses with greater staffing needs, with the goal of creating more appropriate class sizes.
“We are a very mobile district,” Licata said. “We have students that are leaving the urban core and are leaving for more suburban areas. And when you have that, you have overcrowded classrooms in the suburban areas versus the urban core.”
As part of these changes, some cuts to administrative positions also are expected, district officials said in a news release. Fort Worth ISD will “continue streamlining regional and central-office operations, with reductions focused at the highest levels,” the release stated.
The staff leveling comes after Fort Worth ISD’s state-appointed Board of Managers previously voted to approve two separate rounds of staff cuts earlier this year. In April, the district announced it was eliminating dozens of roles, including postsecondary specialists; emergent bilingual teachers; dual language coordinators; college, career and military readiness directors; speech therapists; psychologists and more.
Licata said after that round of cuts that it was due to the district operating as if it had 80,000 students. The district has lost more than 20,000 students in the last decade.
“If we don’t do this, and we don’t reduce where we’ve lost a bunch of kids, what happens is we are increasing the budget and not tending to our resources, which are very limited,” Licata said. “It’s really not saving money, it’s about spending more money that we don’t have.”
Fort Worth Independent School District Superintendent Peter Licata, left, talks to staff members while waiting to start his first day of school as the new superintendent on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, in Fort Worth. Amanda McCoy FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Soliz said Tuesday that district leadership has already begun working with principals at campuses across the district to make sure individual needs are met at each campus through the leveling process.
“This is not a one size fits all formula,” Soliz said, mentioning Elevate campuses as an example. “We do know there are schools that have higher needs where we are not going to strip resources or staff because of a number. We know what resources need to be allocated to get those accelerated student outcomes we are seeking.”
In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Chelsea Baldwin, deputy executive director of the United Educators Association, an organization that represents public school teachers in North Texas, said this sort of staff leveling happens at the beginning of most school years.
“This is the time when they start looking at classrooms to see who’s over, who’s under, and they start rearranging or moving teachers around,” Baldwin said. “The difference for Fort Worth is they’ve always had a policy that governed who was chosen to be surplus. But this year that policy was suspended. So we don’t know what criteria they’re using to choose the teachers that are moving around.”
Younger teachers or staff members new to the district typically get chosen for reassignment, Baldwin said. Texas does not keep track of student to teacher ratios after fourth grade, so most of the reassignments are expected to impact teachers of kindergarten to fourth grade.
This story was originally published August 25, 2026 at 1:49 PM.
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Samuel O’Neal is the K-12 Education Reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, covering public schools and policy that impacts them. He previously worked as a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and is a graduate of Temple University.