Oak Cliff Faith Family Academy has built girls and boys basketball programs that rank among the best in the nation.
A little more than a year ago, the charter school left the University Interscholastic League after it banned the girls basketball team from the postseason and suspended its coaches from UIL activities for two years for recruiting violations.
The basketball teams played a national schedule, and the girls, with a plethora of highly ranked recruits who transferred from UIL schools, competed in the prestigious Chipotle Nationals tournament.
But this season could be Faith Family’s last.
The school is facing crippling academic problems and could close at the end of the school year under the state’s “three strikes” law, which says the Texas Education Agency will automatically shut down a charter school district that receives three straight F ratings, either for academic or financial reasons.
High School Sports
Faith Family superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley and athletic director Marcus Canonico did not respond to messages seeking comment.
“While this rating is disappointing on its face, we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating (72),” Purcell Mozley wrote in August in a post on the school’s website.
The school appealed its 2025 rating and will find out the results of the TEA’s review next month, during basketball season. It could be a surprising fall for a program that won four UIL state titles on the boys side and sent its girls team to Nationals.
The Faith Family boys are ranked No. 23 in the ESPN preseason national rankings this season, and the girls still have four-star Washington signee Amayah Garcia, rated the 46th-best player in the nation in the Class of 2026.
But the girls team lost five top players who transferred to Kingdom Collegiate Academy that has campuses in Dallas and DeSoto, including four-star senior Amari Byles, the nation’s 37th-ranked recruit. And four-star guard Cameron Lomax decided against transferring to Faith Family, instead remaining at Frisco Heritage, which he led to the Class 5A Division I state semifinals.
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There aren’t a lot of options on what data can be reexamined for the TEA appeal.
“There is an appeal process, but the appeal is relegated to a very specific subset of things, usually like students either erroneously included or excluded from a calculation,” said Toni Templeton, senior research scientist at the University of Houston. “Something that cannot be appealed is if a school district makes a data entry error and [for instance] classifies a student as the wrong race or ethnicity.”
High pay for teachers, coaches
That Faith Family finds itself in the position of having to appeal is surprising, given its track record of paying its high school teachers well and its basketball coaches even better.
Teachers in grades 9 through 12 at Faith Family make an average of $83,382 — more than nearly every school district in Texas — and boys basketball coach Brandon Thomas was the highest-paid employee at Faith Family last school year with a salary of $168,399. Girls basketball coach Andrea Robinson was tied for the second-highest salary at $130,000, according to information obtained by The Dallas Morning News through open records requests.
Mozley was paid a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run a district that has about 3,000 students, the Texas Tribune reported in September.
Robinson made more than three deans and three principals the school listed on its payroll and more than nearly two-thirds of the Dallas-area Class 6A head football coaches, according to information The News received through open records requests.
Thomas’ salary was more than UIL football coaches Todd Dodge, Randy Allen, Reginald Samples, Claude Mathis, Jason Todd and Ray Gates, who have combined to win 18 state titles. The boys basketball coach made nearly as much as Southlake Carroll’s Riley Dodge, the highest-paid football coach in the area who is also the athletic director for Carroll ISD.
But the school does invest in academics, paying its teachers much more than the state average of $64,813, according to the TEA.
It stands to reason that Faith Family should be able to attract quality teachers.
“From the literature, we do know that salary plays a part in where teachers decide to go,” Templeton said. “If you’re someone offering the lowest salaries, you are going to have a harder time recruiting teachers who have demonstrated track records of success or higher certification levels.”
For comparison, the top public school districts in the Dallas area for teacher average base pay in grades 9-12 are Farmersville ISD ($74,719), Anna ISD ($74,637), Arlington ISD ($72,811) and Mansfield ISD ($72,000), according to the TEA. None of those districts received an A accountability rating, with Mansfield ISD and Farmersville ISD scoring a B and Arlington ISD and Anna ISD receiving a C.
Faith Family doesn’t have a football team, so basketball comes first, which was evident last year when at least 18 girls basketball players transferred to the school. Those transfers included high-profile recruits who left Southlake Carroll, Mansfield Lake Ridge and Allen — schools that all received an A grade on their 2025 state accountability ratings — as well as two national recruits that left DeSoto, which got a B rating.
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Charter school landscape
Faith Family, which also has a campus in Waxahachie, is one of eight charter school districts that could shut down at the end of the school year, according to the Tribune.
TEA data also shows charter schools make up the majority of districts with repeat ratings of “unacceptable,” though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas, according to the Tribune.
What is important to remember, Templeton said, is that charter schools vary greatly from traditional public schools.
“The landscape of charter schools in Texas is really large, and they continue to grow. The student population is incredibly diverse,” she said. “You have charter schools who target students that might have a few more challenges in a schooling environment than others, but you also have charter schools that are set up for lots of different purposes.”
Still, school districts have to strike a balance between athletic and academic success. Ensuring that athletic departments are well funded and that coaches receive competitive salaries are important, but schools also have to devote the necessary resources to their teachers and students.
“I think schools exist for academic purposes,” Templeton said. “I am in support of rules that would allow schools who are failing to not serve students any longer. I am certainly in support of those closure rules in the charter sector, and I think that the agency and the legislature have progressed in the direction of fairness and upholding a strong accountability standard for charter schools over the years.”
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