Austin’s school board debates expanding academy
Trustees concerned about duplication, location of ‘star program’ in South Austin.
A proposal to expand or replicate Austin’s nationally recognized Liberal Arts and Science Academy remains on the table, even if that means moving the school to another campus, after the majority of Austin district trustees said this week that they want to keep exploring the possibility.
Trustees Ann Teich and Paul Saldaña voiced reluctance to expanding LASA’s footprint into South Austin, but the others said they want the administration to continue to examine the idea.
But trustees put off a December decision on creating a magnet in South Austin and called for more robust community discussion.
The presentation by the administration at Monday night’s school board meeting offered a general magnet program as one of several academic options, but the board refocused the conversation on whether the district could replicate LASA with a location in South Austin, or even move the program to another location. Edmund Oropez, the district’s chief officer for teaching and learning, said community members are divided. He instead recommended creating a different type of magnet program in South Austin.
“It would be very difficult to duplicate LASA the way LASA currently is. You would literally have to staff it identically, create the identical programming, at a very enormous cost,” he said. “And we don’t have the capacity to create a 1,000-student LASA program in the south as we currently are situated right now. To say we could replicate it on a small scale, I don’t know if that’s possible.”
About half of all students attending LASA — which is housed within the LBJ High School campus in northeast Austin — live in South Austin.
Critics fear the school’s academic program could be diluted by starting a second LASA campus, and question whether a new program would stumble into similar pitfalls associated with the current school, including the low numbers of low-income, black and Hispanic students enrolled.
“There is a need to do something somewhere to release enough pressure from that great program at LASA to be able to diversify it,” said Trustee Ted Gordon. “We can’t continue to have a star program like this that is not accessible to all the communities of this district and particularly not accessible to the community that surrounds it physically.”
Trustee Kendall Pace said she wants to honor the wishes of families in Southwest Austin who asked for a LASA South, but the district has “dismissed their desires for years.” The biggest issue, she said, is where to locate it.
“We cannot be so territorial,” said Pace, who represents the district at large. “We have to look at all our families. We have to look at the district as a whole first.”
Saldaña said he doesn’t want school communities to feel like the administration is pushing programs on them. In previous conversations, Crockett High School, one of the schools in the area Saldaña represents, has been suggested as a possible location for a LASA South because the campus is underenrolled.
“I certainly have the impression that we’re trying to give preferential treatment to one community over another,” he said. “So I throw back to those trustees saying not to be territorial.”