Students and staff at South Hi Mount Elementary School in Fort Worth were moved out of part of their building this past Wednesday as a precautionary measure, after an engineering assessment flagged concerns in one section of the 1936 campus. The entire school is now set to relocate to a vacant building across town on Dec. 1, with no firm timeline yet for when students might return.
What Triggered the Move
According to an email sent to parents from Principal Elizabeth Foreman White, the school received an onsite engineering assessment and recommendation that prompted the precautionary relocation, as reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The impacted section of the building has since been cleared and is no longer being occupied while the district works out further evaluation and next steps. South Hi Mount Elementary sits at 4101 Birchman Ave. in Fort Worth, in a building that dates back to 1936.
Per the same parent email, the entire school — not just the affected wing — will relocate to Western Hills Primary, a vacant building in the district located at 8300 Mojave Trail, starting Dec. 1. A return date back to South Hi Mount has not been set; the district says that will be determined in the coming weeks. Fort Worth ISD did not immediately respond to the Star-Telegram's questions about the relocation.
Parents to Get Answers Monday
School leaders are scheduled to address parent questions and concerns about the move at a meeting Monday at 5:30 p.m. in the South Hi Mount cafeteria, the newspaper's report notes. The outcome of that meeting, and any additional detail on what engineers found, hadn't been made public as of this report.
Second Relocation of the Fall
South Hi Mount's move marks the second time this fall that a Fort Worth ISD campus has had to pack up and relocate. Meacham Middle School closed Oct. 2 after heavy rainfall caused flooding inside the building, Superintendent Peter Licata said at the time, with teachers and faculty reporting to Briscoe Elementary starting Oct. 5 and students following a day later, according to earlier Star-Telegram coverage.
The back-to-back relocations land against a broader backdrop of aging facilities across the district. In October 2023, Fort Worth ISD was in the middle of a facility master plan costing more than $2 million meant to assess school conditions and guide long-range use, with a district facilities executive saying at the time that elementary schools hadn't been assessed in nearly a decade, according to the Fort Worth Report. That same fall, trustees had agreed to study how declining enrollment had affected the district's 122 campuses.
By May 2024, the scale of the maintenance backlog had come into sharper focus: a facilities report shown to trustees found middle schools alone faced $130 million in deferred maintenance needs, with 10 of the district's 22 middle schools classified as being in poor condition, per the Fort Worth Report. That same reporting noted the district was weighing the potential closure of McLean 6th Grade Center, Daggett Middle School, Kirkpatrick Middle School, and either Morningside Middle School or William James Middle School, though no official decision had been made at that time.
For now, South Hi Mount families are left watching for updates ahead of Monday's meeting, with the Dec. 1 move to Western Hills Primary looming as the next concrete milestone in a relocation still short on specifics about what engineers found or when students might head back to Birchman Avenue.
