Stories behind the 10 Austin ISD schools that are closing next fall

When a neighborhood school closes, a community loses more than a building — it loses a gathering place built around first days of class, graduations and everyday lessons.

This fall, the Austin Independent School District will close 10 campuses as it tries to cut a $65 million deficit after 15 years of declining enrollment. 

For decades, these campuses anchored neighborhoods, shaped families and kept traditions alive as new students grew and learned.

The process of closing schools is “a very disruptive, painful process for our community,” but “the pressures are gargantuan,” Superintendent Matias Segura said during the Nov. 20 meeting when the school board voted on closures. District enrollment fell below 70,000 students last fall, a 30-year low. Austin ISD leaders say resources are stretched too thin to effectively educate all students.

Families will spend the spring bidding goodbye to campuses that helped raise their children. Many of the soon-to-be shuttered schools have storied histories in Austin. Some have been on the front lines of racial integration or introduced innovative academic programs into communities. All brought siblings, cousins, friends and neighbors to learn in the same classrooms.

Below are the stories of the 10 schools Austin ISD will close this fall.

For more than a decade, Claudia Lopez joined other Barrington Elementary School mothers to cook a meal of turkey, potato salad, mashed potatoes, cornbread and chocoflan for Thanksgiving. Students, parents and family members arrived at the school’s Thanksgiving celebration by the hundreds, filling cafeteria tables and extra seats, with many left to stand.

“The beautiful thing is spending time together,” Lopez, 38, the mother of two Barrington graduates and a current fourth grader, said in Spanish. “You don’t care if you’re standing.”

For families like the Lopezes, Barrington represents two equally important spaces: a place to interact with the American tradition and a place to feel comfortable as oneself. The North Austin school first opened in 1969. In the decades since, immigrant families have framed the school’s traditions and intimate community. 

Today, more than three-quarters of Barrington students participate in bilingual education, and parents often enroll in on-campus English-language courses. Both students and parents pride themselves on the ballet folklorico performances they put together for Hispanic Heritage month.

Each spring, parents feed staff members with enchiladas, tamales and chiles rellenos during Teacher Appreciation Week. With homemade meals in hand, parents and grandparents routinely stop by campus to eat lunch with their children.

As the years passed, many parents became Barrington grandparents. Zarina Rodriguez, a 65-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, would bring her eldest grandchildren along as she dropped off her youngest child. She’d wait in the car, pointing up the school’s driveway at staff members or at the school’s plain functionalist facade and speak to her toddlers in the back seat. 

“I would say to them, ‘Look at that school. Look at those teachers. They’re gonna be yours,’” Rodriguez said. 

And for many years, they were. 

Band director Andria Hyden fights traffic for an hour every day on her commute to Bedichek Middle School. Hyden has taught in other parts of Austin and in the suburbs, but the commute to Bedichek is worth it — the middle school on South First Street and William Cannon Drive is the first where she could see herself retiring.

“There are so many generations who have come through those doors,” Hyden said. “A lot of families: ‘My dad came here. My cousin came here.”

For those families and alumni, pride runs deep. When Principal Sarah Atkinson runs into former students in the community, she often hears stories about how the school shaped them.

It’s hard to describe exactly how special the atmosphere at Bedichek is, said Atkinson, who has been principal for four years and worked at the campus for 13.

“When you first walk in, so many visitors are just like, ‘wow, it feels like a home and special and welcoming,’” she said.

The campus houses the district’s only middle school-level Junior ROTC program. It also boasts a top-performing AVID program designed to close college readiness gaps and build skills for post-high school success.

Opened in 1972, the school has been a constant in a part of Austin that’s gotten busier as Interstate 35 has expanded and the city has grown. The campus was named for Roy Bedichek, a writer and naturalist who was a colleague of J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, the namesakes of two other Austin ISD middle schools.

Bedichek is known for its loyal alumni, many of whom return each year to play an annual basketball game with staff and students or to hear the band play. 

Perhaps the reason so many remain loyal to Bedichek is that it’s where they found family, said alumnus Jay Gamez. He moved to Austin halfway through sixth grade and the campus embraced him, leading to 30-year friendships.

“Everyone was pretty open and honest, and some of the teachers went above and beyond to make sure you were successful,” Gamez said.

The campus reached silver screen fame in 1993 as the site of the fictional Robert E. Lee High School in director Richard Linklater’s teen film “Dazed and Confused.”

Gamez remembers the film crews working in the school’s eighth-grade wing. The blue and red murals of stars and Mount Rushmore that the crews painted remain all these years later above the lockers used in filming. At the time, the students didn’t think much about a hallway being closed off for filming, Gamez said. When the movie was released, students loved seeing their campus on screen.

For Chris Gonzales, Bedichek will always feel like home. Now the middle school’s athletic coordinator, he attended the school in the 1990s. He keeps pictures of the coaches who taught him — and later coached alongside him — on a bulletin board in the gymnasium, a tribute to the people he says raised him.

On the north banks of Lady Bird Lake, Martin Middle School has been a constant in a part of East Austin that’s so often swept up in change. For almost 60 years, the campus has stood as a symbol of its surrounding community.

The middle school was the first fully integrated campus in Austin, with Black, Hispanic and white students attending together. Opened in 1967, the campus bears the name of Samuel Lawton Martin, Austin ISD’s former vocational coordinator and director of the evening school program. 

But in recent years, Austin ISD decisions and neighborhood development altered the campus community. The district removed sixth graders from the campus in 2022 in an effort to improve student testing scores, only to bring those students back this year. 

Even as gentrification has reshaped the neighborhood, many current students have parents and grandparents who attended Martin, said Eric Ramos, a history teacher who has taught at the school for 11 years.

“It just shows how sometimes a school is more than a school to some people,” Ramos said.

Tributes to Martin’s East Austin legacy cover the campus. A bulletin board welcoming visitors declares, “Nadie como tú, ningún lugar como este.” (Nobody like you, no place like this.)

Ramos loves the way the school brings the community together during annual staff and student sports games. Some years, the school hosts so many games that it runs out of sports to play, he said.

The school serves as a neighborhood hub. Families in need of social services connect through the campus’ family resource center to food, housing or clothing assistance. Every spring, the school hosts STEAM Fest, which gathers community vendors, social service providers and children’s entertainment into a festival atmosphere.

The long-term future of Martin remains uncertain. Austin ISD officials have said they want to repurpose it for a future, but undetermined use.

But it’s clear to Principal Edna Cortinas that the staff and community of Martin aren’t yet done telling the school’s story. Students will carry their experiences at Martin with them to their next school.

“The time they spent with us on our campus,” she said, “we hope, shaped their future success.”

For many families, it already has.

Pecan trees once shaded the play areas behind Becker Elementary School; the trees’ branches hung heavy with nuts that Ana Swain’s father — the school’s beloved custodian of 30 years — would gather for her at the end of the day. 

Swain, now 52, remembers those pecan trees as clearly as the classrooms she learned in for nearly a decade. To her, Becker felt less like a school and more like an extension of home.

Many say they will lose that sense of belonging when the campus closes at the end of the year.

Located in the heart of South Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood, Becker has served generations of Austin families. First opened in 1936, it’s one of the oldest operating elementary schools in the district. 

To David Gallardo, who attended the school in the 1960s, the closure represents a loss of neighborhood history.

“They’re losing the character of the neighborhood,” Gallardo said. “I know progress happens, but it’s just the neighborhood feeling. It’s going away.”

Parents of current students said the community invests in Becker with time, labor and heart. Ashley Kimbell, a Bouldin Creek resident of 18 years, sent both of her children through Becker and described a level of parent buy-in there that she said is increasingly rare.

For 10 years, Kimbell volunteered weekly in the school’s Green Classroom, a volunteer-run outdoor learning space that operated for decades before becoming a standalone nonprofit. Each class tends its own garden plot and uses it to learn about science, environmental stewardship, healthy food and composting. Hundreds have contributed to its success since its inception in 1989.

“These are working parents who make the time to participate in their kids’ education — and the education of all kids,” Kimbell said. “This community believes in loving your neighbors.”

Alumni and parents alike said Becker will be remembered not just for its programs, but for the people who made it feel like home.

Swain, whose father was the school custodian for decades, said she moved to Round Rock when her children were young, but she always wondered what it would’ve been like to send them back to her alma mater. 

“It always felt like a family,” she said. “Part of me always wished that I stayed behind and had my children go to Becker, because there were such fun memories that I would’ve loved for them to experience.”

The South Austin neighborhoods around Dawson Elementary have changed dramatically since the campus opened in the 1950s — homes nearby are an odd mix of sleek, modern designs and traditional Austin bungalows.

Dawson has educated generations of South Austinites, some of whom returned to the neighborhood so their own children could attend the school, Principal Dolores Godinez said.

“They like how we know the children by name,” Godinez said.

The school was named after Mary B. Dawson, who was the principal of the first public school in South Austin, opened in 1886 on South Congress Avenue. Former First Lady Laura Bush, who later became known as a school reading and literacy champion, was Dawson’s librarian in the 1970s.

The campus is a staple of the neighborhood, even for families without school-aged children, said Julie Woods, president of the Dawson Neighborhood Association. Woods’ daughter, now an adult, attended Dawson.

Woods is one of the many people in the neighborhood who walk the perimeter of the property in the morning or afternoon. Neighbors often bring their dogs to the schools’ large field.

“It is a public space, community space,” Woods said.

Dawson is a fixture for many families, including Ashleigh LaRocca, whose husband and sixth grader both attended the campus. Their second grader is a current student.

“It’s easy on a Sunday afternoon for everyone to meet on the playground,” LaRocca said. “It’s just been a really great community.”

As traditions changed, there was always an event that brought the community to campus, like the Snowball Dance or Harvest Hop, where students performed dances they learned during PE class for their families.

Although the area of South First Street in Dawson’s attendance zone has experienced rising property values in recent decades, the school’s boundaries include several subsidized housing complexes.

About 80% of the students attending Dawson are economically disadvantaged, and 26% are learning English. Parents choose Dawson because they value its economic, social and racial diversity, Godinez said.

“We are [a] true representation of what being an urban school is,” Godinez said.

Oak Springs Elementary / Blackshear Elementary

Both Oak Springs and Blackshear elementary schools have been serving East Austin children for generations. The two schools opened to serve historically Black neighborhoods. 

Although the district decided to merge the two school communities, Austin ISD officials haven’t announced which campus will be the long-term home for the students.

The two schools sit on opposite sides of Boggy Creek in parts of East Austin that reflect the district’s fraught history educating Black children.

Blackshear sits along Chicon Street, with Huston-Tillotson University — a historically Black university — just down the hill and Kealing Middle School — once an all-Black junior high — just up the hill.

The school opened in 1891 to provide public education to Black children. It was renamed Blackshear in 1936 after a local principal, Edward L. Blackshear, who later became principal of Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College, now Prairie View A&M University.

A mural on the outside wall of Blackshear depicts Rudolph Rice, a principal who served from the 1930s through 1972 and hired one of the first school librarians at a Black school in the Southwest. He also opened a community garden and introduced hot lunches for students, which eventually became a district standard.

Today, Blackshear is known for its unique fine arts programming, drawing parents from around the district. Students can participate in dance, choir, music and other artistic activities. Gabe Hernandez’s son got to try his hand at improv comedy in school, a rarity for an elementary-age child, he said.

Oak Springs, which opened in 1958, is just a block from Eastside Early College High School at the L.C. Anderson Campus, a school that pays homage in name and appearance to the historic all-Black high school that a federal court order shuttered in 1971.

In Oak Springs’ halls, made vibrant by murals of children playing, students learn important values, said Sherwynn Patton, co-chair of Dream Together 2030, a nonprofit that works with East Austin families.

The school serves children from the Booker T. Washington Housing Complex, a Housing Authority of the city of Austin property. Many of the children walk across the street to school. Parents can use campus resources to get connected with social services.

“We have a community of people who are very resilient,” Patton said. “We have children that are very capable, that are learning, and they’re some of the best and brightest that we have.”

For the past decade, parents and loved ones have filled the wooden seats of Ridgetop Elementary’s auditorium for a local iteration of an American tradition: the annual spring play. 

Like parents all over the country, they have consumed miniaturized versions of “Annie,” “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast.” But unlike families in other auditoriums, they have seen fifth-grade Belle turn to the fifth-grade Beast and say something in English only to have the Beast respond in Spanish. It’s an eclectic production style in which each student can recite their lines in whichever language they prefer. 

“If you don’t understand the storyline you might be lost,” Principal Kara Schultz said, laughing. But, at Ridgetop, “people are just used to it.” 

The play has come to represent Ridgetop, a small, high-performing North Loop school located off Airport Boulevard that became home to one of the district’s first wall-to-wall dual language programs, which offers Spanish and English instruction in every classroom.  The school has existed at its current site for more than a century, with the two brick buildings on campus open nearly as long.

With a largely Hispanic and low-income student body at the turn of the century, Ridgetop has seen a thorough demographic shift to a whiter and wealthier population in the years since. The shift took place as the surrounding neighborhood evolved and in part because of the desirability of its wall-to-wall dual language program. 

Yet the school’s traditions helped preserve a sense of self, Schultz said. Every Halloween, students dress up as book characters and march around the school as parents watch from the sidewalk. José Salazar-Salas, a former assistant principal, still returns to campus for Christmas to lead students, alumni and parents as they spread cornmeal on husks for the annual tamaleada.

There is, of course, Sneaky, the orange-brown corn snake who curls between the mulch and branches of her smoggy terrarium in the corner of the school’s front office each day as kids pass by, just as she has for the past 21 years. 

“She’s gotten out a few times,” Schultz said. “We’ve had to go looking for her.” 

Schultz herself is an institution, having worked at the school for three decades. Roberto Sandoval, 34, had her as his fourth-grade teacher. His belief in Schultz and the tradition of Ridgetop convinced him to enroll his now second-grade daughter at the school. He’s saddened to know that his daughter won’t come of age associating the bright memories of elementary school with the same brick walls. But he knows for many, the school has already had its effect. 

“When it’s Back-to-School Night, it brings back memories of walking the halls again,” Sandoval said. 

He remembers lunches spent playing kickball, days spent setting up the garden and the day a tornado warning and harsh thunderstorm created a strong sense of nervous delight among the children. 

“I never felt the dread of going to school,” he said. “I only remember a profound sense of belonging.” 

Nestled in Dove Springs, Widén Elementary School is a community where support for students comes first.

The school has become an anchor on the corner of Nuckols Crossing Road, with a public library to the south, Mendez Middle School to the west and recreation and health centers to the east.

Teachers and staff work to ensure students excel academically and have their basic needs met. About 83% of Widén’s students are economically disadvantaged, so staff members take special care to make sure students are ready to learn, said Katelyn Damore, a bilingual content interventionist.

Campus staff works with families who may need help connecting with resources for food, rental or health assistance, she said.

“That’s something that most teachers understand here,” Damore said. “Students can be who they are. They trust that we’re here for them.”

The school bears the name of Swedish American musician Carl T. Widén, who was a member of the original University of Texas Longhorn Band in 1900 and founded the Austin Symphony.

The campus hosts community evenings, winter extravaganza parties and literacy nights, and it organizes trips to the YMCA so students can learn to swim. In February, it hosted a Lunar New Year celebration for families.

The sense of community involvement remains strong at Widén, where many families turn to the school first when they have a need, said Amy Rattananinad, the school’s librarian.

It’s hard to put that connection into words, she said — that sense of security that someone feels walking under the blue awning into the school.

The campus hosts parades for students, back-to-school bashes and other celebrations to make it a place children want to be and want to learn, she said.

“The joy is so abundant in our, just, day-to-day, the way we operate,” Rattananinad said. 

Stephanie Chavez Noell’s daughter Luna spends most of recess hanging from the monkey bars at Sunset Valley Elementary School. Years of swinging and flipping across the playground have toughened Luna’s small hands. 

“She has the hardest, most calloused hands for a 10-year-old,” Chavez Noell said, laughing. “She’s already talking about how she’s going to miss the monkey bars.”

This spring is Luna’s last as a Sunset Valley Cheetah. Soon, the playground — and the school — will be empty. Sunset Valley was built in 1971 in southwest Austin. In recent years, one of its selling points has been the strength and vitality of its dual-language program. 

Chavez Noell grew up in a bilingual household in the Rio Grande Valley and said Spanish-English instruction is why she chose Sunset Valley for Luna.

“Preserving that was really important to me,” Chavez Noell said. “Learning Spanish has contributed to her overall academic sense.”

This year, Luna won the schoolwide spelling bee for the second consecutive year as part of the Scripps National Spelling Bee program, and Chavez Noell said her daughter is “hungry for more.” She had hoped to return to Sunset Valley and take home the title for a third time.

Julia Ruiz, another parent and PTA leader, said four out of five families at Sunset Valley have said that they want to stick with a dual-language program when they transition to a new school next year.

“Because of the program being there now, it has really united our community,” Ruiz said. “We all want to be there and choose to be there, whether we’re zoned or transfer families.”

The school is also unique in another way: it’s the only school actually located in the small city of Sunset Valley, which lies entirely within the city of Austin. The community cherishes its influence. Katherine Johnson, whose husband is a City Council member, said the campus’ presence shapes daily life in the small community. All three of her children attended Sunset Valley.

Johnson’s house is right across the street from the school.

“For us personally, we’re feeling a big, big loss,” she said. “It’s what we see out our front windows.”

Many projects were born out of the community’s love for the school, including a Girl Scout-funded gaga ball pit, a well-tended rain garden, and murals and tile installations dating back decades. Johnson said losing those will be painful. They “can’t move with the families.”

She also pointed to the school’s close relationship with the Sunset Valley Police Department, which provided a sense of security that she said will be difficult to replicate.

“We benefit so much from being a part of this little city that has so much to give,” Johnson said. “It’s just hard to know that all of that is gone.”

On a quiet stretch of Susquehanna Lane in Northeast Austin, Winn Montessori School has long felt like its own small world. By nature, the curriculum nurtures a sense of independence and community for students and parents alike.

The school’s current campus first opened in 1970 and is named after the district’s first superintendent, John B. Winn. The only Montessori school in AISD, it will close at the end of this year. For the families who chose Winn — many of whom are not zoned to the school and travel across Austin to get their kids to class — the loss hits especially hard.

“We’re kind of a unicorn,” said Ryan Malone, a parent and president of the PTA. “Our teachers are not only dual-language certified, but they’re Montessori certified. That’s an extra level of commitment.”

Winn’s current identity took shape in 2017, when the school narrowly avoided a previous closure threat by transforming into a Montessori campus. 

Montessori programs offer a child-centered educational approach that allows students to direct their own learning in a specialized environment, with a focus on building community and practical skills.

Today, Winn serves students from prekindergarten through fifth grade in mixed-age classrooms. Its dual language program sets it apart even among other area Montessori schools. 

For Malone, that distinction was the reason she chose Winn over a nearby Montessori charter school. Her first-grade daughter learns primarily in Spanish. Winn offers both English- and Spanish-dominant classrooms, and its focus on equity has been central to its mission. Many Montessori schools exist in Austin, but the majority are private, with cost-prohibitive tuition rates.

“That’s something I really love about our school,” Malone said. “We make sure students who normally wouldn’t have access to a Montessori education do.”

That philosophy extends beyond academics, too. Students eat lunch family-style in their classrooms, serving one another and learning practical skills like composting and recycling. 

Outside, the 10-acre campus serves as a vast outdoor classroom. Parents and community partners worked together to build gardens, a mud kitchen and a 75-tree learning forest filled with native species. The school calendar is marked by traditions: the spring butterfly festival and a whirlwind week with the Missoula Children’s Theatre.

Starting in the 2026-27 school year, the Montessori program will continue at Reilly Elementary in North Austin. 

“It’s going to make it geographically prohibitive for a lot of our families,” Malone said. “Many of those families are the ones who fought really hard for the Montessori program in the first place.”

Winn students will receive priority transfers, but for many families, that won’t be enough to keep their children in the Montessori program.

“We were just hitting our stride, we were just getting in a groove,” Malone said, reflecting on the school’s progress since its 2017 restart. “And now we’re done.”