The responsibility for being promoted is squarely on the shoulders of the students, with support from teachers, principals, administrators, volunteers and parents. Once the new policy was adopted to abolish social promotion, a lawsuit was filed by eight community members who felt that the action was discriminatory. The lawsuit was later thrown out by the Texas Education Agency and lost impetus in the judicial system as the policy yielded successful results. The new standards policy was a result of wrestling with lackluster student performance data, high dropout rates and sociological problems that beset public schools. The superintendent Dr. Rosanne Stripling and the school board of trustees committed to the new no nonsense standards.
Special emphasis is placed on early childhood readiness.
Accountability models were designed that show student performance at the beginning and end of the school year and follow performance from one year to the next. The sophisticated statistical model tracks individual students, classes by teacher, by ethnicity, by school and by economically disadvantaged. Student success is closely monitored and scores are maintained for each student to identify skills that are not mastered. Students attend summer school, learning the specific skills they missed, rather than repeating an entire grade. Support for student success includes volunteer hours from community members who work with individual students and small groups to reinforce learning.