Amid FBISD board of trustees approving a partnership with Super Neighborhood No. 41 to promote literacy in the Willowridge feeder zone, Blue Ridge-Briargate Elementary—one of the zone’s five schools—found itself on the federal improvement status list for low academic performance in the 2024-25 school year, district officials said at the Feb. 10 meeting.
Willowridge-area schools have long been a source of the community’s pride, and the struggle to combat low academic performance has galvanized leaders for over a decade, said Regina Gardner, president of the super neighborhood’s Education Committee and 1984 graduate of Willowridge High School.
“The feeder pattern itself has a rich history, but the feeder pattern fell into decline,” she said. “So we're just here trying to engage with [the district] so that we can take it back to the levels that it's been before.”
The situation
Since 2013, all Willowridge-area schools—with the exception of Ridgegate Elementary School—have been flagged as Comprehensive Support and Improvement, or CSI, for at least one year by the Texas Education Agency after ranking among the bottom 5% of Title I schools in the nation.
For the past decade, Willowridge-area campuses have performed between 19 to 43 percentage points lower on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness’ reading exam than the district’s average, according to Texas Academic Performance Reports.
Monica Riley, Missouri City council member, graduated from Willowridge High School in 1995 when Edgar Glover Jr. was principal. She said although the school has witnessed a decline through federal intervention, the spirit of its first years lives on through the work of alumni.
“Mr. Glover created a motto for us that we still live by today, 40-plus years later, which is we operate with class and character, and that is the mindset that we live by today,” she said.
While CSI-designated schools are federally required to complete an improvement plan, community members have created their own “improvement plans” to remedy academic performance, Riley said.
Many Fort Bend leaders, some Willowridge alumni, joined under the umbrella of Super Neighborhood No. 41 to volunteer at the Blue Ridge-Briargate literacy tutoring program, which was piloted at the start of the 2024-25 year and will expand to all of Willowridge High School's feeder zone in August.
Remember this?
Riley said the following initiatives were launched through the years by community members under a number of different organizations:
- 2016-21: The Educators Dedicated to Growing Excellence, or EDGE program, paired students with instructors for after-school intervention on varying subjects.
- 2016: A partnership with Houston Community College increased enrollment in dual credit courses its first year throughout FBISD.
- 2018: Ridgemont Early Literacy Center provided Special Education Early Intervention for prekindergarten to first-grade students, demonstrating improvement of phonetic awareness after the inaugural semester.
FBISD implemented the EDGE program for the 2016-17 school year at Briargate and Ridgemont elementary schools after they were CSI-designated for two consecutive years, Community Impact reported. The program, costing the district $1.1 million for the first year, was partially funded by Title I funds.
While a 2019-20 external review by consultants found STAAR scores increased across EDGE campuses, participants still performed below other students on the math section of the test, FBISD Director of Strategic Communications Sherry Williams said in an email.
Board President Kristin Tassin, who wasn’t on the school board at the time, said the program ended for the 2021-22 school year due to administrative concerns that results didn’t justify the program's expense due to enrollment loss and the end of pandemic-era disaster funds. District officials couldn’t confirm why the program ended by press time.
Johnson, a proponent of the program, said she believes the new volunteer-based program will be more successful than EDGE due to the lower cost.
“Now you have a partnership between communities and schools that brings more accountability to maintain and maybe even spread around the district,” she said.
The memorandum of understanding states Title I funds will finance educational materials; however, Williams said the program is using campus-based resources, and FBISD isn’t allocating federal funds at this time.
The bigger picture
FBISD’s eastern portion hasn’t seen the growth of master-planned communities of the western area, according to demographic firm Population and Survey Analysts. For Riley, these development patterns are in relationship to school performance in the Willowridge area.
“Businesses don't come in [and] people don't buy houses unless the schools are doing good,” she said. “We are invested in that community being brought up to a level of excellence and standard that is going to stimulate the community [around Willowridge].”
Most Willowridge-area schools will continue to be underoccupied throughout the next decade, per PASA data. The exception is Blue Ridge-Briargate Elementary, set to open as Aldridge Elementary in August, which the district consolidated when the two campuses became too expensive to support individually, according to the district website.
Moving forward
Stephanie Brown, founder of the Marshall Advocacy Focus Group, said she hopes the continued advocacy for low-performing schools in FBISD will remind district administration that “they're only as good as their lowest performing school.” Marshall High School, for which the organization advocates, was previously CSI designated in 2023.
“I always say that we are not one FBISD. There's FBISD, and [the administrators] treat certain schools as the other,” Brown said. “I don't think our kids are incapable of being great students. It starts with [a partnership].”
Looking ahead, Tassin said she wants to expand the MOU to the Marshall High School feeder pattern by codifying the relationship between communities and the schools they serve.
“We could establish these kinds of partnerships and allow communities to take ownership of what's happening in their schools,” Tassin said, “And I just want to give a shout out to them for never giving up and for continuing to advocate, because that's what it takes.”
