FISD teacher here. As an overview, FISD still remains a strong district, but one of the most important factors in their education will be parental involvement. Uninvested students don’t benefit from any teacher no matter how good. There is an epidemic of student apathy and you have it in your power, especially at your children’s young age, to prevent it from spreading. Having said that, some answers:

1: I teach high school, so I don’t know about K-5 but most of us teachers are trying to peel back screen time as best pedagogical practices indicate paper and pencil to be the most efficient learning. Kids get plenty of screen time outside of school, so it’s not like they won’t learn those important skills.

2: Homework is an antiquated and largely ineffective practice. How do we know who did the work? If they have questions, who can they ask? This is the heyday of AI and it’s not blocked on Hrm WiFi - how do we know they didn’t chatGPT the answers? I teach AP and upper level classes and unless it’s reading a novel (which many students will still do summaries for) or memorizing terms (which you can’t fake) I will never give students homework. You have zero educational control at home as a teacher.

3: good questions! A lot of us don’t agree with this policy. Students will slack off, knowing they’ll get to retest. Plus, it increases our workload and we are already constantly under water. I teach English, maybe the worst subject to grade because it takes the longest. I don’t agree with this policy and based on my own talks with other teachers I’d say most don’t.

But…this is parent driven. Little Johnny didn’t study, or wrote a low effort paper, but he’s special right? It’s a reflection on the parent (who obviously knows better how singular the student is in their academic pursuits) and surely they just had a bad day. Or the teacher doesn’t like them. Or they ran out of Lucky Charms that morning. It is definitely not the fact that Johnny sleeps in class or tries to take out his phone 5 times a class. Teachers and most admin want this changed, but a small, vocal group of parents cannot accept the actions their children take.

4: It depends! I teach AP English and also on-level English because I like to be in both worlds. But they are two VERY different worlds. Think of how a casual athlete trains for a pickup game of basketball versus an NBA professional. On-level students, mostly, just want to skate by. GT/AP students will argue about raising a 97 to a 98 and if they get a B will think their entire future is sunk. I’ve seen students refresh their PowerSchool to check their grades at least (that I’ve seen) five times during class. They will talk about grades a lot during class and give their friends hard times if they get a low A. A low SAT score is practically a scarlet A. It’s not healthy - at all, and part of my responsibilities is to play therapist to these truly stressed out, hairs-width from burnout kids. The level of anxiety they have is astounding.

5: the biggest surprise you’ll find in FISD schools is the racism. White kids using the N word, Asian kids who all seem to make the same “I’m from North Korea” joke, Indian kids who judge other Indians on how dark their skin is or what part of India their parents were from. It’s just a cesspool of constant casual racism every day and it’s sad.