Licata opened each session the same way: with data delineating the district\u2019s decline<\/a>. FWISD fell under a state intervention after years of failing academic ratings. The district has pockets of success, but Licata said 3 out of 5 students can\u2019t proficiently read.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m here because we did not do well,\u201d Licata said. \u201cThis is not a lifetime job for me. We don\u2019t get out of this without all of us talking about what we can do better.\u201d<\/p>\n Parents didn\u2019t come to defend the old FWISD. They agree it\u2019s broken. It\u2019s the way district leaders are guiding the turnaround that brought them out.<\/p>\n Christina Jones attended the South Hills High School meeting. She wants a partnership with Fort Worth ISD\u2019s new state-appointed leadership, but she\u2019s not sure the district wants the same.<\/p>\n Mario Alcal\u00e1, whose two children attend Lily B. Clayton Elementary, came to the Polytechnic High School session to hear Licata directly rather than make up his mind from secondhand accounts. Complaints from parents should produce something more tangible than an acknowledgement from district leaders, he said.<\/p>\n R.L. Paschal High School junior Alexander Nguyen attended all four listening sessions because he believes the district\u2019s changes could help struggling students. His fear is about what happens to students who are already excelling.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re on very, very different pages,\u201d Jones said. \u201cWe feel very us vs. them with the district as parents.\u201d<\/p>\n Alexander told Licata at the South Hills meeting that the district-provided lessons in his French class drift between French and Spanish. The assignments in English were so bad that he said he could barely parse them, and he worried about classmates.<\/p>\n Alexander suggested letting FWISD\u2019s strongest teachers standardize the materials.<\/p>\n Licata acknowledged the lessons have mistakes, but that they are meant to be edited. Sometimes, he said, edits create errors.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re owning some mistakes in the curriculum that we own, but teachers also can edit it, and they\u2019re edited incorrectly,\u201d Licata said.<\/p>\n At Arlington Heights, Licata said the district is hiring more teachers so that they can review the work before classes see it.<\/p>\n At the Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School session, district leaders held up Alexander\u2019s complaint as an example of the meetings working. Licata contacted academic administrators while the South Hills meeting was underway, Kushner said, and curriculum staff reviewed and corrected the slides the next day.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Alexander said the response exposed the larger contradiction bothering him: If district-provided materials are wrong, why require teachers to use them? And if teachers are expected to catch the mistakes themselves, why constrain how they teach?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf the slides are wrong, then why are we still enforcing that teachers must use these slides?\u201d Alexander said.<\/p>\n His complaint echoed across the meetings. Parents said they were less opposed to standardizing what students learn than to how narrowly teachers appeared expected to deliver it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018I want them to succeed\u2019<\/p>\n Parents repeatedly connected the lesson rigidity to another concern: whether FWISD can keep experienced teachers if they no longer feel trusted to teach.\u00a0<\/p>\n For parent Christina Jones, the teacher losses trace back to how the district treats the people in the classroom. She said she\u2019s watched educators she respects be worn down by micromanagement and mistrust.<\/p>\n \u201cTo see them beat down, belittled, manipulated and micromanaged, it breaks my heart,\u201d Jones said. \u201cI want them to succeed so that kids in our community can succeed, and I see that really being taken away from them.\u201d<\/p>\n At Diamond Hill-Jarvis, parents said teachers described being micromanaged over whiteboards, classroom procedures and even how pencils were arranged and sharpened. Some questioned whether tightly prescribed instruction left young students with enough time to sit on classroom carpets, move around or take breaks.<\/p>\n Licata defended tighter expectations while rejecting the idea that teachers were to blame for FWISD\u2019s academic struggles.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAre there rigid regulations about how we\u2019re going to do things? Yes,\u201d Licata said.<\/p>\n He repeatedly called teachers the most important educators in a student\u2019s life. But parents pushed him on whether those two messages \u2014 trust teachers while prescribing how they work \u2014 can coexist.<\/p>\n \u2018Working together\u2019<\/p>\n Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, executive director of parental advocacy group Parent Shield, said FWISD\u2019s communication is stuck in the same cycle: the district tells parents what happened after it has gone wrong.<\/p>\n Clear, proactive and transparent communication with parents will begin to repair broken trust, Dorsey-Hollins said.<\/p>\n \u201cMake us feel like we are working together and not it\u2019s you against us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Daniel Trejo Jr. offered a smaller example of why trust has eroded.<\/p>\n Trejo\u2019s son started pre-K this year at Diamond Hill Elementary. Trejo took time off for the first day and expected to walk his son into school. Instead, he said, parents arrived and learned at the door that they could not go inside.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trejo later saw first-day photos from other FWISD campuses where parents had been allowed to walk their children in. His relatives at schools elsewhere in the district had been able to do the same.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did not have any communication about what to expect from the Elevate campus,\u201d Trejo said, referring to Diamond Hill Elementary. \u201cI can\u2019t walk my child into the school. It\u2019s heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n District leaders acknowledged the inconsistency. Kushner said the Elevate model calls for instruction to begin when students enter the building, which affects drop-off procedures. Licata also conceded the district had not adequately communicated the change.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you say we\u2019re not communicating well, you\u2019re right,\u201d Licata said.<\/p>\n Kushner called the district\u2019s in-house newscast, FWISD Forward, a step toward better communication. The daily video emulates television broadcast news, including interviews with district staff. The newscast is published on FWISD\u2019s social media in English and Spanish.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a former principal, this is where I\u2019m personally comfortable doing this and bringing solutions forward so that way we don\u2019t feel the mistrust,\u201d Kushner said.<\/p>\n Alcal\u00e1, the Lily B. Clayton parent, questioned whether that strategy reaches the families that district leaders most need to hear from. At the Polytechnic session, he looked around a room in a heavily Hispanic part of Fort Worth and saw few people he felt represented the surrounding community.<\/p>\n Posting something online is not the same as ensuring parents see it, he said. The district needs to meet families where they are, whether through texts, phone calls, campus events or other outreach.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf the parents don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing, you could be doing a ton of great things,\u201d Alcal\u00e1 said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n District leaders said the sessions already changed their approach. They corrected the curriculum slides Alexander flagged. They removed questions from the meeting format after participants at the South Hills session said they felt combative rather than collaborative. And leaders said they would begin sharing takeaways from the sessions through the superintendent\u2019s weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n Those changes are the kind of response Licata said he wants the meetings to produce. He told participants not every suggestion will become district policy, but promised his cabinet would review what it heard across all four sessions and determine what needs to change.<\/p>\n \u2018I didn\u2019t even want to get up\u2019<\/p>\n Western Hills High School teacher Lucynda Nicholson did not plan to speak. Nonetheless, she stood up in the back of Arlington Heights\u2019 cafeteria and grabbed the microphone.<\/p>\n She told the room she has taught more than 30 years in FWISD. She watched superintendents come and go without asking teachers what they needed. The last time the district\u2019s leader did that was in 2005, she said.<\/p>\n Nicholson loves FWISD, loves her school, loves her kids \u2014 and that\u2019s why she said she is angry and can\u2019t take the stress of the state intervention anymore.<\/p>\n She said she\u2019s thinking about leaving the district, either in December or May.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t even want to get up in the morning and go to school,\u201d Nicholson said. \u201cI feel like nobody\u2019s listening to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthr<\/a>e<\/a>port.org<\/a> or @_jacob_sanchez<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org<\/a> or @matthewsgroi1<\/a>.<\/p>\n Disclosure: FWISD manager Pete Geren leads the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report. FWISD manager Laurie George is a member of the Report\u2019s reader advisory council. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/fortworthreport.org\/2026\/09\/03\/us-vs-them-parents-confront-fwisd-superintendent-leaders-over-growing-trust-gap\/”>article<\/a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/fortworthreport.org”>Fort Worth Report<\/a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<img src=”https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/fortworthreport.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/cropped-favicon.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”><\/p>\n <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https:\/\/fortworthreport.org\/?republication-pixel=true&post=764415&ga4=2820184429″ style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https:\/\/fortworthreport.org\/2026\/09\/03\/us-vs-them-parents-confront-fwisd-superintendent-leaders-over-growing-trust-gap\/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } <\/script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/fortworthreport.org\/p.js”><\/script>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/20260902_SuperintendentListening1-1024x768.jpg\")
More than 180 parents and community members attended Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Peter Licata\u2019s listening session Sept. 1, 2026, at Arlington Heights High School. (Jacob Sanchez | Fort Worth Report)
\n\u2018They\u2019re edited incorrectly\u2019<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/20260824_SuperintendentListening3-1024x768.jpg\")
Fort Worth ISD parent Christina Jones speaks with Superintendent Peter Licata during a listening session Aug. 26, 2026, at South Hills High School. (Jacob Sanchez | Fort Worth Report)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/20260810_Sanchez-FWISDFirstDay-7-1024x683.jpg\")
Juliette Figueroa, 8, waves bye to her mom and sister on her first day of school at Fort Worth ISD\u2019s W.M. Green Elementary on Aug. 10. (Christine Vo | Fort Worth Report)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/0520-FarringtonFieldPublicInput-MC-16-1024x683.jpg\")
Superintendent Peter Licata speaks at a meeting about the future of Farrington Field at the Fort Worth ISD District Service Center on May 20, 2026. (Maria Crane | Fort Worth Report\/CatchLight Local\/Report for America)<\/p>\n