Beaumont ISD: Race to the Bottom
When Carrol Thomas arrived in 1996, Beaumont was struggling and divided.
The Spindletop oilfield, which had made the city rich, had dried up decades earlier. The oil crash of the 1980s stalled business at Beaumont’s port and prompted mass layoffs at its refineries. By the mid-1990s, years of white flight to exurbs along the interstate or north into the Piney Woods had shrunk Beaumont’s population to its lowest levels in 40 years. The civil rights movement, which seemed to take hold in Beaumont long after it did in the rest of the South, had an uneasy effect on the schools, with students riding dutifully each morning on buses from one segregated neighborhood to another, an imperfect but hard-fought alternative to segregation. Racial unease on the school board—largely about whether to continue busing—led to such dysfunction that two state monitors were dispatched from Austin to oversee the district. And then Carrol Thomas came to town promising to rescue the schools.
By 1995 the black community had gained a large share of the city’s population and a slim majority on the school board. After more than a century on the sidelines, African-American Beaumonters finally had a meaningful say in how their schools were run. Thomas was the man they picked to be Beaumont’s first black superintendent. He was a young school-turnaround artist who’d just saved Houston’s North Forest ISD from school board infighting and financial questions that prompted a federal investigation. As a sign of trust in the district’s new leader, the state recalled its monitors from Beaumont a few months before Thomas took office.
After just a few years, city leaders agreed that Thomas had delivered on his promise. The district was upgrading run-down schools in black neighborhoods, and had ended crosstown busing in a fashion that appeased both white and black community groups. With his firm but personable manner, Thomas built cooperation in a city that seemed doomed to wallow in distrust. As one white trustee told The Dallas Morning News early in Thomas’ tenure, “He enabled us to step back and see what was important.” Test scores rose, the district gained a sunny reputation and, perhaps most incredibly, the city itself seemed to be reversing its slow decline. “What he has done to improve the Beaumont school district has probably been the single biggest change for economic redevelopment,” the president of Beaumont’s chamber of commerce told the Morning News. “There’s a lot of movement back into the city.”
Little of that goodwill remains today. The district’s growth, test performance and financial stability once so celebrated now appear to have been, to varying degrees, illusions. Texas is growing, but neither Beaumont nor its schools are getting much bigger. Carrol Thomas spent 16 years as the city’s school superintendent—an almost unheard-of tenure for urban school leaders—and the multimillion-dollar surplus estimated when he left the district in 2012 has evaporated. Gone, too, are a $389 million bond package, much of it spent on projects that ran over budget, and millions in hurricane recovery funds. In their place, auditors discovered a $40 million budget shortfall, and federal investigators have found millions in embezzled public funds. The state has returned, this time to take over the district to save it from financial collapse. To remain solvent, Beaumont ISD has cut treasured school services like buses from after-school sports, tutoring and dozens of jobs.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/beaumont-isd-race-to-the-bottom/
