Every final performance, class, and campus moment counts for Austin ISD teachers
On the first Monday of spring break, Andria Hyden sat at a table in the front room of her Round Rock home using a stylus to make notes on musical scores she had downloaded on her tablet. The scores she pored over were a mix of new and crowd pleasers. They are known as the fun songs, the ones that Austin Independent School District students perform at festivals in May. They are also the numbers students get to practice now that statewide competitions are over.
But they are also the last songs that the Bedichek Middle School Bobcat bands will perform together before the campus – along with nine others – shutters next year. Hyden, a four-year band director at Bedichek, will follow some of her students to Mendez Middle School next school year, where she’ll lead the Southeast Austin campus’ band. The campus has been under the operation of a charter for the past eight years in a partnership aimed at improving academic scores. But this fall, Austin ISD will regain operation of the campus, and the district will have to staff the entire school.
“That was where my heart was being pulled,” said Hyden, surrounded by photos of her own children in band uniforms through the years. “Since it was going to be restarting a new school and a new program, I felt like that was going to be better suited.”
She’s among the more than a thousand Austin ISD teachers and staff who began looking for new positions this spring after the school board voted Nov. 20 to close 10 campuses and International High School. This semester, as the district planned for closures, officials also launched plans to improve academic outcomes at a handful of other schools, which often resulted in large-scale staffing changes.
This spring, many teachers and staff members will say farewell to their home campuses. For some, the schools shaped their early careers or bore witness to personal milestones like marriages or pregnancies. Some teachers are bidding goodbye to the schools their own children attend. Others saw themselves retiring from the campus they now must leave.
About 65% of the 1,451 staff affected by the campus changes have found positions within Austin ISD, according to the district. Austin ISD officials have committed to finding a new position for all affected employees, though some staff with more specialized certifications may be harder to place, said Denisha Presley, the district’s interim officer of talent strategy.
Except for a few specialized positions like special education teachers, Austin ISD doesn’t plan to hire any external job candidates until April, she said. “If you want to stay in Austin ISD, we want to secure a position for you. It would be amazing if we could fully staff Austin ISD with Austin ISD employees.”
Navigating change
Hyden worked hard in the past few months to ensure she already knew where she’d be teaching next year. She sent in her resume, fired off emails and was among the first staff in the door at the district’s February job fair. She’s excited that she’ll get to build a new program essentially from scratch at Mendez. But that hasn’t made saying goodbye to Bedichek easy.
“I have kids that tell me ‘I only came to school today because I knew it was a band day,'” she said.
Oak Springs Elementary prekindergarten teacher Chetan Makan also felt a huge relief upon securing a position at Blackshear Elementary. The two schools are merging next year, but it’s not clear which of the campuses will close longterm. Students will attend classes at the Blackshear campus next year, but the district promised a brand new Oak Springs building as part of the 2022 bond. Construction halted amid closure talks in the fall and uncertainty remains if students will eventually learn at the Blackshear or the planned Oak Springs school building. The two campuses are located less than 1.5 miles apart.
Concern also bubbled up among Oak Springs staff when they heard their campus required a turnaround plan, a state-mandated document outlining how a district plans to quickly improve student test scores, Makan said. The state requires these plans when a campus scores multiple F ratings on Texas’ A-F school grading system, which is largely based on student results and growth on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, tests.
Other Austin ISD campuses with these plans have undergone major staffing changes. That’s because the plans often set higher standards for teachers in core academic subjects, including teaching experience and required proof they’ve improved student test scores in the past.
“There was a lot of angst about not knowing,” Makan said about the general sentiments of staff when they learned the campus would come with specific employment requirements.
A 24-year educator, Makan’s priority was continuing to teach pre-K. Makan has always taught pre-K and been at Oak Springs 14 years. “I, as a teacher, enjoy pedagogically utilizing play as a medium for teaching and learning,” Makan said. “Being a pre-K teacher is all about that – the spontaneity, being in the moment.”
District effort
Austin ISD has held two career fairs and virtual match fairs and assigned an administrator to each campus to answer questions for campus-level staff, Presley said. After standard student enrollment ends in April, the district will likely adjust staffing levels on campuses again to meet the new projected enrollment numbers. Officials will lean toward overstaffing, rather than risk understaffing, this year, she said.
Austin ISD’s teacher turnover rate – which measures the teachers who leave AISD each year – was 17.9% last year, slightly lower than the state’s average of 18.8%, according to Texas Education Agency data. Although slightly higher than AISD’s teacher turnover rate of a decade ago, the 2025 figure is a significant drop from the district’s pandemic-era high of 32% turnover in 2023.
Typically, AISD hires between 600 and 800 staff members every year to fill vacancies, but with the closure of 10 campuses, officials this year likely won’t need to hire that same number of people from outside the district, Presley said. “It’s a hard time for our employees, our teachers, our folks who are on the campuses,” Presley said. “We keep that top of mind.”
Looking ahead
Even though Hyden and Makan have positions to look forward to next year, they remain uncertain about some details of their new jobs. It also doesn’t make bidding goodbye to their current campuses any less difficult.
The Blackshear and Oak Springs staff still aren’t sure exactly how the turnaround plan will impact daily life or which building they’ll be in long-term, Makan said. “While they’re sister schools, they’re two different neighborhoods,” Makan said. “Unfortunately, whatever decision is made, one community is being displaced in order to be consolidated with another.”
Hyden, the band director, won’t have an assistant director for the first time in three years, a huge change for her. Her previous assistant helped manage the large bands, work with small groups and keep her sane during busy times. “If I’m having a bad day, he’s going to make it 1,000 times better,” she said.
Every day that ticks closer to the end of school gets a little tougher. It’s closer to the time the Bedichek band will be split up, Hyden said. But she’s glad some of her Bedichek students will be following her to Mendez. It’s the best possible outcome, she said.
These days, she keeps in mind a phrase her mother told her growing up. “‘When you’re handed things in life, you have a choice: you can laugh or you can cry,'” Hyden said. “And it’s laugh. Find the joy in it. As much as this sucks, and as much as losing a campus and my kids really sucks, I am working really hard to focus on all the cool things that we’ve done as a group. These kids, they’re phenomenal.”
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