Thousands of Fort Bend Independent School District families will soon gather to honor their 2024 graduates. It will be a celebratory experience, even while allegations of residency fraud hang in the air.
That fraud is believed to be why the district abruptly changed valedictorians at two predominantly Black high schools, upending a hotly debated class ranking policy under which students have lived for four years. The 2019 policy said all high school students must be ranked at the high school where they are geographically zoned, even if they attend another school.
After community uproar and exclusive reporting from The Defender that some students had never set foot on the campus of which they’d been named Valedictorian and Salutatorians, district officials changed the rankings at Marshall and Willowridge high schools. The district says they have not changed the ranking policy, only the ranking of individuals based on findings after conducting a review.
“When we change a policy with respect to graduation requirements or GPA/Rank, the change must wait until a new cohort of students enters high school to ensure students are aware of the requirements from the very beginning of their high school careers,” FBISD said in a statement.
While the district wouldn’t elaborate on exactly what prompted the review, saying only that they’d done a “thorough assessment,” critics of the ranking policy say it involves the discovery of residential fraud in the district.
“Based on the fact that I wrote in saying that I had tips about students falsifying their residence, they started investigating,” said Community activist and Marshall PTO president Stephanie Brown. “People tipped me off about the falsification of residency of students who were not actually living in the Marshall zone. Without those tips, I would not have been successful in my advocacy and these honors would not have been returned to our students. It would have been a case of me venting with no action or results.”
The policy has come under fire because parents say they discovered families renting homes in their school zones so their child could be zoned to historically lower-performing schools while actually attending schools like Dulles, which has more AP programs. Families are being accused of never moving into those homes and, in some cases, falsifying residential documents altogether.
Brown says she’s grateful that a review was done at Marshall and Willowridge, but she is hoping for a full investigation.
“I don’t know how much of an investigation the district did….I would imagine if they did a full investigation – and I don’t know how much time that would take – but I imagine that they would find others,” she said.
The issue
The 2019 policy came after what was seen as unfair advantages to some students who enrolled in schools to which they were not zoned. This was usually done to enter Academies (magnet programs). District leaders started to notice that some students from schools with competitive rankings would transfer to another school where they could be ranked higher. Parents started taking advantage of the policy, which ultimately hurt students who did attend the schools, and found their rankings lowered.
“It (moving to areas to attend certain schools) has been going on for years,” Brown said. “But this was to the point where this is just not acceptable. I can see people transferring into schools to take valedictorian positions, but to do it in a way that you never have to step foot on a campus is just totally insane.”
Several students spoke at the May 20 board meeting about the matter.
“The way people have been able to achieve the ranks shows how horrible of a decision this was, and although claimed to be put into place to create more equitable outcomes, that clearly has not been the case,” said a Thurgood Marshall student whose parent didn’t want her name used. “Instead of focusing on banned books, how about we focus on the things that actually make a lasting impact on lives? Because this is a mess. Each year until the class of 2028, it will just get worse.” She added for board members, “You owe the class of 2024 an apology.”
The fight continues
The board of trustees has already eliminated the policy, starting with the class of 2028, when class rank will be based on the campus where the student received instruction. Brown wants the policy changed now.
“The temptation and attempts to cheat the system will be perfected and perhaps not caught the next time around. We don’t know how much of this is going on. So my next step is to try to make sure that they change the policy as soon as possible so it won’t affect the kids moving forward,” she said. “I’m looking forward to working with the new board members and the ones that are remaining to make sure that this policy gets changed as soon as possible so it won’t affect our future students. I have faith that is going to change, but I don’t know how much pushback that they’re getting from the people that have been benefiting for this kind of action. We have to keep the attention on this matter so they know we’re not going to go to sleep on this.”
