Texas released its 2026 A–F school accountability ratings this week, and there was some encouraging news for Austin ISD. The district received an overall B rating, and many individual campuses performed well.
But here in 78757, the news hits a little closer to home. Burnet Middle School received an F rating for the fifth consecutive year. Webb Middle School received the same rating. Under Texas law, those results trigger state intervention that could ultimately include closing the campuses or replacing Austin ISD’s elected board with a state-appointed board of managers.
For those of us who live, work, worship and raise families in north central Austin, it would be easy to see this as simply an Austin ISD problem. But Burnet Middle School isn’t somewhere else. It’s right across the street from where we meet as a church family.
The students walking into Burnet Middle School are part of the same community we call home. And I think it’s possible to care deeply about those students while also asking difficult questions about how we got here, because caring doesn’t mean ignoring responsibility.
RAISING CHILDREN IN AISD
Our family spent more than a decade in Austin ISD. Over those years, we watched families leave for charter schools, private schools and other educational options. At different points, when I had the opportunity, I shared with administrators some of what I was hearing from parents and students about why they were leaving.
I didn’t always get the sense that those concerns were taken seriously. Obviously, the challenges facing Austin ISD are more complicated than any one explanation. Austin is changing. There are fewer school-age children in some parts of the city. School funding is complicated. The pandemic accelerated enrollment losses. Charter and private schools have created additional competition.
But at some point, leadership also has to ask why families who once chose AISD stopped choosing it. AISD now serves just over 69,000 students, more than 14,000 fewer than it did a decade ago. That’s not something we should celebrate. And it shouldn’t simply become another opportunity for people on different sides of the education debate to say, “See, I told you so.”
ACCOUNTABILITY AND COMPASSION
Instead, maybe moments like this require two things that we sometimes have difficulty holding together: accountability and compassion. Accountability asks, “How did we get here?” Compassion asks, “What do we do now?” We need both. An F tells us something important about academic performance. It doesn’t tell us everything about the people inside the building.
There are teachers walking into classrooms every morning trying to help students learn. There are parents trying to figure out how to help their children succeed. There are administrators carrying enormous responsibility.
And there are middle school students trying to navigate all the normal awkwardness of being 12 or 13 years old while also facing significant academic challenges. Those students didn’t make the decisions that brought Austin ISD to this point.
Neither did the teacher standing in front of them on Tuesday morning. So, perhaps the question for those of us living in 78757 isn’t simply: whose fault is this? Maybe there’s another question we can ask as a follower of Jesus? What does faithfulness look like now?
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
Jesus was once asked a fairly straightforward question: “Who is my neighbor?” His response was the story we now call the Good Samaritan. What’s interesting is that Jesus doesn’t spend much time explaining why the man was lying beside the road. He turns our attention toward the people who see him and asks what they’re going to do about it.
Loving our neighbor doesn’t require us to pretend bad decisions don’t have consequences. Compassion doesn’t require us to excuse poor leadership. And accountability doesn’t require us to stop caring about the people affected by it. We can do both. We can expect institutions to listen, learn and change. And we can move toward the people who are struggling right now.
At North Village Church, we’ve been asking a question lately: who are we becoming as a church family? I think moments like this give us an opportunity to answer that question. We want to become people who notice. People willing to ask hard questions without becoming cynical. It’s hard!
There will be plenty of conversations in the coming months about Austin ISD, the Texas Education Agency, school choice, funding and who bears responsibility for what has happened. Those conversations matter. But we don’t have to resolve every one of them before deciding what kind of neighbors we’re going to be in 78757.
WANT TO HELP?
We are in process of seeing how we can be helpful as a church family. It’s not the kind of help that will turn everything around overnight, but it is the kind of help to do something. If you would like to be involved with time or financial donation, email admin@northvillagechurch.com to get involved.
Serving North Central Austin 