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It is will a deeply saddened and heavy heart to post:
OFFICIALLY
ON JUNE 4, 2008

Johnston High School has been ordered:
"CLOSED BY THE TEXAS EDUCATION AGENCY"

(Click Here to view the Official Closure Letter from the T.E.A.)

State orders closure of Johnston

East Austin high school
will reopen with new mission in the fall.

By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, June 05, 2008

When the last bell of the school year rang just after 1 p.m. Wednesday at Johnston High School, unbeknownst to students and staff, it tolled the end of the 47-year-old school itself.

The state, which has rated Johnston "academically unacceptable" for the past four years based on passing rates on state achievement tests and dropout rates, ordered the campus closed Wednesday for failing to meet standards for the fifth year. It is the first school to be closed under the state's accountability law.

The Austin school district plans to reopen the campus with a new name and new faculty members to serve a different mission. At least 50 percent of the students previously served at Johnston must be reassigned to other campuses and at least 75 percent of the teachers must also be reassigned, according to state law.

The outcome is what district officials and some local politicians, including Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, had been hoping for — one that allows the district to maintain control of the school and prevents the building from sitting empty. The state could have closed the campus without allowing it to reopen or put it under alternative management.

The district still has to come up with a plan for the 2008-09 school year that is acceptable to the state. Officials propose reopening with a heavy emphasis on individual instruction and career training. By the 2009-10 school year, Superintendent Pat Forgione said the campus could open with a technology program or with an early college start program with help from Austin Community College.

Although he has criticized proposals to close schools in the past, Forgione said he was "very pleased" with Wednesday's news.

"We're at the very edge ... some might say the bleeding edge, of this law," Forgione said at a news conference that Watson also attended. Watson said that although he has several issues with the particulars of what could be a very "punitive" law, he was happy that the state and the Austin district came to an agreement that other schools in similar situations could use. Texas Education Agency officials said Houston's Sam Houston High School has been unacceptable for five years and also faces possible closure. Two other schools have been unacceptable for four years and also face closure.

Reached by phone, state Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said, "I think this reconstitution is very creative, and I think it will be very helpful for the students as well as for the school."

But state Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, said Wednesday in a statement that, "It is incumbent upon the Legislature to revisit the issue of automatic closure of schools ... and to develop procedures to encourage and ensure all of our children, especially those who are disadvantaged, reach their full potential."

District officials said they didn't immediately know exactly how many Johnston students will be affected by the closure or to which schools students will be reassigned.

Of about 600 students enrolled at Johnston in the spring, 20 percent are graduating. About 50 percent of incoming freshmen from the Johnston attendance zone decided to go to other schools. Last year, trustees discussed possibly sending students to Reagan, LBJ, McCallum, Travis and Austin high schools if Johnston were closed.

District officials plan to meet with members of the Johnston community today at 5:30 p.m. at the campus, 1012 Arthur Stiles Road, to discuss the next steps. The school board will hear about plans for the campus at a meeting Monday.

School board President Mark Williams said trustees are committed to making a plan to "repurpose" Johnston a success. "It's embarrassing to reach this point since we haven't changed, but change we must."

To stave off the state-ordered closure, Johnston students were required to improve in 16 categories on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Students came close, according to preliminary results released by district officials. They hit their marks in nearly every category. It also appeared that Johnston's "completion rate," a dropout rate, also fell short.

Education Commissioner Robert Scott said despite gains, the campus would again earn an "academically unacceptable" rating, the lowest, when state accountability ratings are issued Aug. 1.

"The closure of Johnston High School will be a challenge for the community that it serves, but my greatest concern is for each student's education. State law requires that the students assigned to Johnston be provided a more effective learning environment," Scott told Austin officials. Scott said Pearce Middle School in Northeast Austin, which has failed to meet standards for the fourth year, will remain open.

Place 2 Austin Trustee Sam Guzman, whose district includes Johnston, said "I want to be the first to invite Commissioner Scott to visit the newly repurposed Johnston High School in the fall. ... Trustees and the Johnston community are committed to achieving greater things for our students."

Albert Sydney Johnston High School, named for a Confederate general buried in the Texas State Cemetery, opened its doors in 1960.

Johnston has struggled for years with high turnover among teachers and administrators — 11 principals in 12 years before Celina Estrada-Thomas came in 2005 — and dwindling enrollment. With about 650 students enrolled in the fall, Johnston was less than half full.

Estrada-Thomas, who is leaving the district to lead Bastrop High School, has walked neighborhood streets and knocked on doors to fight apathy at the school: Officials have reported that more than 600 of Johnston's 760 students had more than 10 unexcused absences in the 2006-07 school year — nearly 80 percent of students missed two weeks of class or more.

In Johnston's final hour, district officials praised students during a pizza party celebrating improvements made on the TAKS. Unaware of Scott's decision, students had decorated the campus with strands of bright silly string, colored foam and balloons.

Estrada-Thomas, before a bank of television news cameras at the school Wednesday evening, said, "The kids are probably finding out (about the closure) as they're listening to me now. I think it's really going to catch them off guard."

Johnston senior Jade Bradley, who is graduating Friday, said she was stunned to hear of her alma mater's fate.

"I'm so shocked by that. That's crazy. Wow," she said Wednesday evening. Bradley, who plans to attend Texas Tech University and major in math and computer science, said she's sad that she will be among the school's last graduates.

At a repurposed Johnston, she said, "everything is going to be different. It's not going to be the same."

Johnston parent Anna Jimenez graduated from the school in 1992. Her son Art will graduate Friday.

"It's hard to accept," Jimenez said, "but ... you kind of expected that some change is going to happen."

Additional material by staff writers Molly Bloom and Regina Dennis. lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES

Pondering the mighty Rams' fall

Johnston was a place of change for students, times

By Pamela LeBlanc
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, June 09, 2008

My old high school is closing.

Not because its walls are crumbling or its student base has shrunk. It's closing because standardized test scores are low and dropout rates are high. The Johnston High School Rams are done.

It makes me sad. I only attended Johnston two years — I was bused there when officials tried to desegregate the school district in the 1980s — but still stay in touch with a few friends from those days.

I called one the other night. I've known Kate (Mohler) Slaten since we were in sixth grade together. We both remember the fuss when the families in our neighborhood found out their children would be bused across the city to Johnston. Parents crowded into school board meetings, and their kids yelled "Hell no, we won't go" like it was some kind of Vietnam War protest.

But back then, the district focused a lot of attention on Johnston. I wound up with an English teacher who helped influence me to become a newspaper reporter. I had good calculus, physics and chemistry teachers, too. I think I turned out OK.

In the past few years, though, I've followed Johnston in the news — through countless principal turnovers, plummeting test scores and a football season with too few academically qualifying players to field a team.

I drove by the campus and stared at the buildings where we'd gone through that agonizing process called puberty. I wondered why things had gone so wrong since I graduated. Last summer, at an impromptu and tiny high school reunion one of my classmates organized, others wondered the same thing.

Because, we all agreed, nobody seemed able to stop the downhill academic slide at Johnston.

I still get funny looks from some of my co-workers when they find out I graduated from Johnston. Everyone thinks of it as that school on the east side with so many problems.

Kate, now a librarian in the Austin school district, remembers shelving books there when she was a student. "It will make me sad to think that no one else will go there, and we won't be able to go back," she says.

I might reflect fondly on the football games (we lost all of them during my two years) or the locker Kate and I shared (No. 886 upstairs, combination 14-32-38), but she keeps one of her most cherished memories of Johnston close at hand — her husband.

About a third of my graduating class came from Anderson High School, a third from Crockett High School and a third had already been at Johnston. Kate and I came from Anderson; Curt Slaten was bused from the Crockett High School attendance zone. He dated a friend of ours, and we always secretly thought he was cute. Kate snapped him up when they reconnected years after high school.

Recently, she put Curt on the phone. He remembers the first day of class at Johnston. He'd heard rumors there would be race riots. That never happened, though on the first day of school some original Johnston students locked one of his Crockett friends inside the boys restroom for 15 minutes.

Looking back, he says going to Johnston was the best thing that could have happened to him and his friends. It broke up social cliques at Crockett and threw students out of their comfort zones. And he met Kate, too, of course.

In all, about 200 of us graduated in 1982.

"It's sad that they couldn't keep it going. Ninety-nine percent of my memories of that school are good," Curt says.

So are mine. Mostly. There were those awful baby blue and red school colors, and the plywood mascot of a ram in the gym that looked like a 1970s era Joe Cool, with bell bottoms and an upthrust fist.

"All that hoopla about it, but then it was fine," Kate says. "We had such a good time."

We did.

pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994

RELIVE THE MEMORIES
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OF WHAT USED TO BE OUR BELOVED



ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON
HIGH SCHOOL