“Did you challenge yourself?” teacher Holly Elia asks while walking the length of her fifth-grade classroom at Highland Forest Elementary School, peering over pupils’ shoulders at the worksheet on their desks.

That day, students learned how to multiply tenths of decimals using grid models.

“It’s their very first day of that in life,” Elia said, but they caught on quickly. “I’m not having to close as many gaps. Our teachers before us are doing a great job with that.”

Located in East Central Independent School District, 74% of fifth graders at Highland Forest met grade level expectations on the math State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness this year.

For comparison, only 47% of fifth graders across Texas scored on grade level in math this year; 46% in the San Antonio region and 41% across the rest of East Central ISD.

Highlands Forest’s third and fourth grades saw similar gains in math, often described as the more difficult subject to teach and learn, and the school earned its second consecutive ‘A’ from the state’s rating system, largely based on STAAR testing.

But it’s taken Highland Forest a couple of years to get there. In the spring of 2025, 51% of fifth graders scored on grade level in math, up from 25% in 2022.

It’s the payoff that Principal Brittany Ervin has been working toward since first arriving at the Southeast Side campus in 2019, after it had been failing academically for years.

“When we got here, we had to make great gains, and we had to make them fast,” Ervin recalled. “It was a blessing in disguise for us to come into an F-rated campus, because it helped develop the tools and systems that we needed.”

How Highland Forest turned things around

Growing students one academic year at a time — that’s the task Ervin set before her administrative team and teachers, regardless of the level a student started at.

Because Highland Forest was failing, Ervin had to follow the Texas Education Agency “Effective School Framework,” a strict playbook on how to run and improve a school.

The school implemented a new math curriculum called Eureka, an early version of the state-written Bluebonnet Learning, which helped with scores, Ervin said. But the thing that shifted scales was hiring and developing teachers who could pivot based on what regular data reported.

“I really think it boils down to the teachers, their mentality, their philosophy on growing kids. We say every student, every day, in every way, and they really live that — they breathe that,” Ervin said.

Most Highland Forest teachers who teach STAAR subjects have Teacher Incentive Allotment designations, meaning they get paid thousands more from the state each year for showing “effectiveness” in the classroom.

Before even entering the class, teachers are trained to “internalize” lessons, to make the first teach as effective as possible.

After every lesson, students complete exit tickets, showing teachers where gaps remain day-to-day. Small group instruction and “turn and talks” are a common sight around campus.

Every week, educators meet in “professional learning communities” to analyze how students are performing on a larger scale and devise how to pivot, including administrators, educators and support staff — basically anyone who has a direct impact on student learning.

“Responding to data has been ingrained within our culture,” said Meagan Jarzombek, an academic facilitator who oversees K-5 math and connects lessons across different grade levels to ensure continuity. Before taking on that role, she was a teacher at Highland Forest for several years.

East Central ISD Superintendent Roland Toscano said the school has the lowest staff turnover, and Ervin ended a “string of a lack of continuity” at the campus.

“Brittany is among our most mature, skilled principals, and her staff has the lowest turnover, despite the fact that their student body is what would predictably be a group that maybe doesn’t perform as well. They disrupt that,” he said.

Located off Southeast Military Drive, Highland Forest serves a “highly-mobile” population, said Ervin. Nearly 70% of students are considered economically disadvantaged by the state and nearly 90% of students are Hispanic. Enrollment also grows every year — the school currently serves around 750 students this year, an increase from 550 in 2019.

“We’re not going to target a certain population,” Ervin said. “We’re going to educate all kids, and all kids deserve the same amount of effort, time, and dedication.”

Ervin and her team aren’t loosening the reins any time soon. She said she wants to keep operating as if the school were still failing.

Texas school ratings are based on two domains: how much students grow academically and actual achievement. The state takes the better of the two and that’s what’s usually reflected in a school’s letter grade. It’s not uncommon for a school to get a high rating based solely off growth, even if grade-level achievement isn’t very high.

On a scale of 100, Highland Forest scored an 88 on achievement and 94 on growth.

In other words, most students are learning what they’re supposed to and growing at similar rates. But even those two points that kept Highland Forest from scoring an A in achievement “killed us,” said Assistant Principal Sarah Harred.

The goal for this school year is to get an ‘A’ in achievement and growth, and go from an overall rating of 93 to 97.

A pattern of improvement

Highland Forest is an “exemplar” of the changes East Central ISD has been working toward districtwide, said Toscano.

For the 2022-23 school year, the district got a D-rating from the state, considered academically unacceptable. Only one school earned a B-rating, four schools got an F and three got a D.

Toscano said it was time to look in the mirror.

“I had to acknowledge the fact that we weren’t seeing the results that I know we were capable of,” he said. “I struggled with some of the overemphasis on state assessment and accountability, because I didn’t feel like it told the whole story of all the things that go on in a school system.”

Toscano and the board restructured the district’s systems to be more “reactive” to the state’s accountability system, so the kinds of strategies used at Highland Forest are used districtwide.

East Central ISD implemented new curriculum and tightened assessment processes to better inform teachers of student understanding in “real time.”

“There were no sacred cows, and the tail that wags the dog is the data, not feelings, not opinions. So there’s constant gentle pressure across the system. Everybody’s productively uncomfortable, and it’s just the way we prefer to operate,” Toscano said.

In the budget, this means ECISD prioritizes line items that directly affect student outcomes: curriculum, instructional support, competitive pay structures for principals and educators.

While growth at the district level has been slower than Highland Forest, it is showing progress. Within two years, the district went from having nine failing schools to three D-rated campuses, but no Fs this year and got its first A-rated campus in years at Highland Forest.

East Central ISD’s growth on several STAAR assessments outpace surrounding districts, despite facing a stubborn budget deficit and budget cuts made the past few fiscal years. This year, the board cut librarian positions at elementary schools, now run by paraprofessionals.

Positions were also cut at central office, in transportation and the police department. Unfilled teaching spots were eliminated, even as student enrollment across ECISD grows each year, affecting class sizes, especially at the elementary level.

While more students should mean more funding from the state, public school officials and advocates say that funding hasn’t kept pace with rising costs, which is why most districts are either in deficits or making cuts.

“It’s probably not sustainable long term,” Toscano said. “There’ll come a point where class size does matter from a management standpoint, safety and security standpoint, and the ability to give the individualized attention to students that are embedded in our system.“

In the process of opening new schools, the district is expected to keep growing in student enrollment. Over the summer, officials projected a $7.5 million budget deficit for the current school year if voters don’t approve a tax rate proposal in November that would help the district pay for student programs and salaries.

East Central ISD went out for a similar proposal last year, but voters said no. That’s why the district had to make the cuts that they did, said Toscano.

For now, the district has a system that works and Toscano isn’t looking back. The school board set a goal for 80% of schools to be an A or B by 2030. By 2028, the goal is to have no D or F-rated campuses, which East Central ISD is on track for.

Even though Highland Forest is gaining a little more autonomy after improving student outcomes, Ervin also wants to keep working with the same urgency.

“I would imagine that someone that been an A-rated campus for years and years may become complacent,” she said. “But we know no different. We’ve come from the trenches.”