Hinojosa Launches Team Texas Public Schools

Gina Hinojosa Takes the School Fight Statewide

Texas school districts are closing campuses at a pace public school advocates describe as a crisis. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, launched Team Texas Public Schools on Monday, a nonpartisan organizing program designed to mobilize parents, teachers, and administrators across party lines to fight school closures statewide.

Hinojosa unveiled the program at Pease Elementary in Austin, a campus opened in 1876 as the longest continually operating public school in Texas and shuttered in 2020 due to budget cuts. The program trains participants as local coaches and deploys them into communities where school boards are weighing closures driven by enrollment declines and budget shortfalls.

The scale of the problem is documented across multiple districts. Austin ISD approved the closure of 10 campuses for the 2026-27 school year as its projected budget deficit grew from $19 million to $49 million inside of a year. Houston ISD plans to close 12 schools in fall 2026, following the loss of roughly 7,900 students, including nearly 4,000 immigrant students, in a single academic year. Fort Worth ISD approved 18 campus closures on a phased timeline running through 2029.

Statewide, total enrollment fell by more than 75,000 students in the 2025-26 school year, the second-largest single-year decline in four decades. More than 200 Texas school districts now run on four-day school weeks, affecting approximately 212,000 students. A February 2025 Texas Education Agency report, drawing on 2022-23 STAAR data, found students in four-day districts scored 6 to 8 percentage points lower in reading and language arts and 5 to 8 percentage points lower in math compared to peers in five-day districts.

"There can be no American Dream without strong public schools, but in Texas, our schools are on life support," Hinojosa said at Monday's launch event. She attributes the deterioration to Governor Greg Abbott's sustained underfunding of public education and his support for the state's school voucher program, which redirects public education dollars to private institutions. Abbott has maintained that expanding school choice broadens opportunity for families and per-student funding under the state formula stays intact.

Team Texas Public Schools arrives with a set of policy commitments. Hinojosa plans to remove Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath and replace him with a credentialed educator, pause the A-F school accountability system and the STAAR standardized test pending review, and redirect vendor contract funds toward teacher salaries. The timing of that pledge is notable. The TEA recently denied Austin ISD's request for a two-year pause in accountability ratings, a decision that puts the district at risk of state takeover. Opponents of pausing the A-F system and STAAR argue accountability metrics protect students from systemic institutional failure, and suspending them removes the mechanism by which underperforming schools face public scrutiny.

Hinojosa entered public life on the Austin ISD school board after her son's school faced closure. She was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley and attended Brownsville public schools. In 2016, she won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, and in 2019 she voted for HB 3, the $11.6 billion school finance bill raising per-student base funding, increasing teacher pay, and expanding full-day pre-K access across the state.

The program expanded beyond Austin within 24 hours of its launch. El Paso leaders held a Team Texas Public Schools roundtable on June 9, led by State Rep. Vince Perez, who represents House District 77. Hinojosa is conducting roundtables and a town hall in Dallas this week, with additional events scheduled in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth in the weeks ahead.

Greg Abbott has held the Governor's Mansion since 2015. In that time, Texas has lost hundreds of neighborhood schools, pushed more than 200 districts onto four-day weeks, and watched enrollment fall at a rate unseen in a generation. Eleven years is a long time to watch a system fail.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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