It’s early September at a Stults Road Elementary (SRE) open house. Parents and their children pile into the cafeteria for a presentation over the school’s curriculum.
It’s standing room only, and the parents listen attentively — or at least as attentive as their little ones allow.
“I’ve been doing this for 21 years, and I can guarantee you if we as a campus work with parents, at the end of the day, students win,” Principal Ron Anthony says to the audience.
When Anthony took over as principal, COVID had taken a serious hit on the parental presence at the school. Those days are long-gone, he says.
“As we transition into the year and even next year, I want to have it to where we may have to host the event outside on the playground,” Anthony says. “Because we’re always driving to grow.”
But, this hasn’t always been the case in recent years. A half-hearted parent teacher association was kept afloat for multiple years by a teacher or two without parental involvement. When Lisa Granado took over this May, she became the first elected president of a fully-functioning Stults Road Elementary PTA in close to six years.
“There are parents who want to be active, who want to support the school, they just didn’t know what to do or how to do it, and we really didn’t either,” she says. “But it was kind of like everybody just lent a hand and did what they could to try to resurrect this PTA.”
She and RISD Trustee Rachel McGowan, an alumna and current SRE parent, set out to rebuild the community support infrastructure around the school. They found a passionate group of moms and have embarked on a mission to support the school and rebuild the PTA, and in turn, people’s image of the school.
“They’re just going off of the wrap that it gets,” says Jenifer Mallow, an SRE mom. “Even residents in the neighborhood, they have older kids, so they’re used to the way it was represented a while back, instead of what we are seeing.”
In the SRE attendance zone, which covers a socioeconomically diverse area including the Forest Lane corridor, transfers to private schools and other RISD campuses are common. According to the district’s 2023-24 demographics report, despite a resident student population of 573, SRE reported an enrollment of 542.
“I had to explain to my second grader,” SRE mom Jillian Solorzano says. “He wanted to know why all of his friends aren’t going to school anymore.”
Relatively low STAAR scores and TEA A-F ratings have disheartened potential student families in the past. Higher-scoring elementary schools like Merriman Park and White Rock are often transfer destinations for families.
“District-wise, we’re gonna need to really support the school and the efforts of the principal and what he needs, and the teachers and find out what they need,” McGowan says, speaking as a parent.
However, the STAAR has and likely will continue to be a controversial metric of a school’s performance, and the release of the A-F ratings — largely based on the STAAR — has been blocked for the last two years by a Travis County Judge over concerns of unfair STAAR standards.
On top of the STAAR’s controversial role in A-F ratings — especially following the implementation of the STAAR 2.0 for the 2022-23 school year — the school also has a large bilingual population which can require additional support for English-language tests like the STAAR. This adds another layer of nuance to SRE’s rating, where over half of the student population is listed as emergent bilingual, according to 2023-24 TEA PEIMS reports.
“We know that how we test native Spanish-speaking kids in [standard, English language] standardized tests, there’s a difference [in performance],” McGowan says. “And so how are we supporting that, and are we putting the funds behind that …. We’ve really got to pay attention to how we’re allocating funds and how we’re supporting those kids and making sure they’re successful in the test. It’s going to make a big difference.”
Despite entrenched attitudes, Granado, McGowan and the group are determined to change the perception of Stults Road.
“It’s kind of a divide in the community, where some are like, ‘Well, I’m on board. I’m willing to help be a part of that and make a change,’” McGowan says. “And then we have another part that’s like, ‘Not doing it, not chancing it.’”
The group is enthusiastically making a stand for their neighborhood school. They’ve gone door-to-door, created social media pages and hosted events to recruit neighborhood families.
“I think a lot of families kind of look at that and they’re like, ‘This is going to be a lot, I don’t know if I can take this on,’” says SRE mom Beth Perry. “So what we’re doing now, it is a lot of work, and we’re all working really hard, but I think the change that we’re making will lay the foundation for other families to come in and help it grow. They won’t be doing the nitty gritty stuff.”
One of Stults’ biggest draws, the group feels, comes from the school’s dual language program. The program places an equal number of English speaking students with native Spanish speaking students in a mostly-Spanish, immersive classroom environment designed to create bi-literate and bilingual students. It comes with a five year commitment for each student, and is open to all RISD residents.
“We feel like there’s just kind of a misconception about the school, but then there’s also a misconception about the program,” Perry says. “Either no one knows about the program at all or the information they have is not accurate, anyone that is zoned for a Lake Highlands school can apply.”
Recruiting families for next year isn’t their only concern. They’re also committed to supporting the school by whatever means possible.
“We had a meeting before school started with Mr. Anthony, and went over the calendar and just tried to bring some things back that we hadn’t had at Stults for a while because there wasn’t a PTA,” Granado says. “Dances, the Back to School Bash, donuts with grown ups, trying to get trips going, fundraising for those things that some of the other elementary schools are able to do that we might not have been able to do in the past few years.”
Since they began, parental involvement on campus has increased, the once-practically defunct PTA now has over 70 members, and even Principal Anthony has remarked on the efforts.
“It’s definitely exciting.” Anthony says. “Anytime we have a PTA meeting, the goal is to have standing room only, and we’re getting close to where that’s becoming a healthy problem, to where we got parents in the building and they are actively involved. They’re asking questions.”
While the group knows that affecting change will be gradual, they feel their, and the district’s, support will translate into long-term success.
“It’s important that we [the district] are supporting the principal and his efforts and the needs of the teachers that whatever it is that they need, they’re going to help raise the test scores for the kids in the school,” McGowan says. “That’s going to help parents look at that and change their minds.”
For Granado, who has lived in the community off-and-on since 1988 and went to SRE, the goal is to make the school a neighborhood hub again.
“What I want to bring back to Stults is that you live in a neighborhood and you go to school in the same neighborhood, so when my son wants to go and play with his classmate, he can just go across the street, or a street over, or he can walk down the block and he can go play with his friend,” Granado says.