The Austin ISD board of trustees meets Oct. 12, 2015 for a board work session.[/caption]

During its Nov. 9 meeting, the Austin ISD board of trustees discussed options for advanced academic programs in South Austin, including potentially bringing Liberal Arts and Science Academy or a LASA-like magnet school to South Austin.

Edmund Oropez, chief officer of teaching and learning, presented five draft proposals that aim to expand more advanced academic programs for South Austin high schools. The proposals were curriculum transfers to the Crockett High School Entrepreneurship Program, two additional academies at Austin High School, starting an International Baccalaureate or AP Capstone at a south high school, or establishing a high school magnet program.

Oropez said the conversation about expanding advanced high school programs in South Austin began because almost 400 of the students who attend LASA, a magnet high school in northeast Austin, came from Bowie, Akins, Crockett, Travis and Austin high schools. Additionally, LASA has reached capacity at its campus, which is also where Lyndon B. Johnson Early College High School is located, and community awareness of existing advanced programming in South Austin is low, Oropez said.

“Are we solving for a capacity increase for LASA?” trustee Yasmin Wagner said. “Because what I am truly hearing on the ground in Southwest Austin is that families there are very much enamored with, would very much like to be part of an experience like LASA. … We don’t have anything else in our district that matches the success that we’ve seen in LASA.”

Wagner added that, even with the best marketing efforts, the draft proposals would be a “hard sell.”

Oropez said the original problem that was to be solved was the capacity at LASA, but there are many perspectives, including whether LASA should relocate.

“It’s very difficult to replicate LASA with the way LASA currently is,” Oropez said. “You would literally have to staff create identical programming at a very enormous cost to be able to do so, and we don’t have the capacity to create a 1,000-student LASA program in the south as we are currently situated right now.”

Trustee Julie Cowan said she is intrigued with moving LASA to a central location.

"I think it would relieve a little bit of the tension that we've been hearing about from trustee [Edmund] Gordon over in [Northeast Austin]," Cowan said. "We certainly perhaps could do another magnet with another focus. What the school district has created in LASA is what receives the accolades and what people know works."

Trustee Gordon said he would like to see the board consider another LASA of sorts in some other place, central, east or south, but he feels the board is not ready to take on the issue.

"The politics of this particular issue are too intense, dealing with some of these other issues that we have in terms of boundaries and all that," Gordon said.

Trustee Kendall Pace said she wants to honor the wishes of families in Southwest Austin as well as in District 1, or Northwest Austin.

"I think we have dismissed [Southwest Austin families'] desires for years," Pace said. "We've danced around it, and it's not fair, and I don't think that's right."

The board was to originally vote on the draft proposals Dec. 14, but the board will not be ready to make a decision then, board President Gina Hinojosa said. There will be more community engagement to ensure all voices are heard, she said.