Austin ISD released the final version of its proposed school consolidation plan on Friday, which keeps the list of 10 campuses slated to close by the start of the 2026-2027 academic year.
The updated plan also includes moving some campus-centric programs, such as dual-language, language immersion, and Montessori programs.
The final consolidation and realignment plan is the result of nine months of development and community engagement. It includes new attendance boundary changes across the district, updated feeder patterns and adjustments for different schools.
The district has said it needs to consolidate campuses to address declining enrollment and help balance its budget, amid a $19.7 million budget deficit. Board members are slated to consider the consolidation plan during a meeting next week.
Seven of the 10 schools closing are affected by turnaround plans the district must submit to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to address underperforming schools.
“We cannot continue with the amount of strain in the system,” Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura said. “The pressure of this work is a lot, and it needs to end.”
As Austin ISD has worked through its plan to close and consolidate campuses, parents have been uneasy about what the plans will mean for their kids.
Segura said this version of the consolidation plan will impact 3,796 students and chop 6,319 empty seats in the district.
The 10 schools that are slated to close are Becker, Barrington, Dawson, Oak Springs, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley and Widén elementaries, Winn Montessori and Bedichek and Martin Middle Schools. International High School will also close.
Under the new plan, the dual-language programming at Becker, Ridgetop, Sunset Valley and Reilly Elementaries would move to Pickle, Wooten, Odom and Sánchez Elementaries.
Odom will become a non-zoned school. Pickle, Wooten and Sánchez will educate students in two-way dual-language programming, so students there will learn both English and Spanish.
The goal, Segura said, is for those three schools to have wall-to-wall programming eventually.
“What we heard and what we certainly recognized as part of this was that it would be displacing students for whom those schools were built and intended, and we really wanted to make sure that we kept the neighborhood school and the students at that school as best we could,” Segura said.
Segura said they switched into a restart instead of a reassignment. What that allows the district to do, Segura said, is prioritize students zoned to that school, and then other seats will be made available to the incoming program.
For Sánchez, for example, it’ll be zoned students first, then better students, then students from the other language wall-to-wall campuses like Ridgetop, Reilly, or Sunset Valley, and finally any other student who wants to come. For Pickle, it would be neighborhood students first, and then Ridgetop, Riley, Becker and Odom.
“We can ensure that our students who are in the neighborhood are prioritized in this process, which allows us to really maintain the emergent bilingual population that we want to achieve, and also, with the size of the schools, have plenty of space to welcome those programs that are transitioning into those new schools,” Segura said.
Winn’s Montessori programming would move to Reilly Elementary as a strand within the school. It was previously slated to go to Go Valle Elementary.
“Reilly effectively is a newly developed kind of restarted school because the program as a whole that currently exists is moving to Wooten,” Segura said. “That gave us a unique opportunity to add programming, create an identity for Reilly.”
Students at Widén Elementary, which is closing, will attend Rodriguez Elementary entirely, rather than being split between Houston and Rodriguez Elementaries as in previous versions of the plan.
“Rodriguez, with the accountability history and the stability that is there, gives us a really good opportunity to break the accountability chain.” Segura said. “But more importantly, give our students what they need to be academically successful, reducing disruption, and not moving students to a school that, even though we thought it would be successful historically, had not been.”
Segura said the school closures are needed to make sure AISD students can succeed.
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