FORT WORTH, Texas — Fort Worth Independent School District Superintendent Karen Molinar shared the district’s official spring 2025 test results for third through eighth grade during a school board meeting Tuesday night.

What You Need To Know

  • STAAR scores showed overall gains across almost every grade level and subject, surpassing the district’s score goals for this year

  • Molinar also announced the district’s new model for serving students with dyslexia

  • The district will use two programs, Bridges and Take Flight

  • The programs will be available in the fall during the upcoming school year at select schools

“We went beyond our goal. And so we’ll have to come back and do another goal for 2026, so we are on track for that,” explained Molinar. 

There was applause from families and district staff, celebrating the student’s increased scores and results from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exam.

Scores showed overall gains across almost every grade level and subject, surpassing the district’s score goals for this year.

“We had a goal at 32%, and you’ll see that our third-grade students in the area of math reached 35%. So once again, we went beyond our goal,” she says. 

Molinar also announced the district’s new model for serving students with dyslexia.

Fort Worth ISD has said they’re experiencing a growing gap between students in need and trained personnel.

The district will use two programs, Bridges and Take Flight.

Debra Buchanan, with the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders, says the two programs work together to help students.

“The curriculum, the scope and sequence, the lessons are the same. So in Take Flight, Bridges uses the Take Flight curriculum. And so the, the difference in Bridges is, is really just the delivery of that. And it’s assisted by the avatar, and they co-teach with the teacher who has the scripted lesson of Take Flight,” says Buchanan.

Starting this upcoming school year, the Bridges program will consist of teachers providing dyslexia intervention with a virtual avatar co-teacher.

Take Flight is a Scottish Rite for Children program. It’s an intensive, therapist-delivered intervention for students with the most significant dyslexia needs.

“Take Flight is a therapeutic program. And, that is important because if you think about any kind of therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, you are there to meet the needs of the child and just, just like that, Take Flight meets the needs of the child,” says Karen Avitt who the program’s director of dyslexia education. “The teacher is taught in a two-year program to become a therapist past all their other schooling.”

The two programs will be available to Fort Worth ISD students at select schools.

The programs will be available in the fall during the upcoming school year.