The churn is real, it predates this superintendent, and the specific failures you hit in August were named as unfilled positions in May.
Texas Tech K-12 went through four leaders in five years, two of them interim or acting. Academic ratings collapsed from an A in 2022 to three years of D, then recovered to a B five days ago. Enrollment fell by a quarter after COVID and is now growing again.
Robert Bayard arrived on 7 July 2025 into that. He is a career Clear Creek ISD administrator with a strong technology and assessment record, and this is his first superintendency. He inherited the D ratings and says so publicly.
In May he told the advisory board which posts were still open: two instructional coaches, a Dual Credit Program Director, a Science Program Director, and several full-time teachers. Three months later Alaina's dual-credit access broke, her science course arrived two weeks late, and her other science course has no teacher at all.
“Our goal is to reduce the full-time teacher ratios to less than 200 students per teacher. It is currently at 400 students per teacher.”
Robert Bayard, TTU K-12 Advisory Board minutes, 12 January 2026Meanwhile the school is expanding fast: partnerships with Clear Creek, La Porte, Lubbock-Cooper, Canyon, Deer Park, Brazosport, Pearland and Lubbock ISDs, international recruiting in Brazil, and 419 students admitted from a 500-applicant lottery. They are growing the student body faster than the teaching staff. That is the whole diagnosis, and your family is sitting in the gap.
The problems in this report are real. So is the fact that almost every one of them is already named, owned and being worked on by the people running the school.
Most districts do not tell a public board that their teacher ratio is twice what it should be. This one did, with a number and a target. The staffing gaps in this report are not things we uncovered — they are things the superintendent published. That is the main reason to believe the repair is real.
Among students who sit the tests, reading proficiency runs 81% against a state average of 51%, and science 75-79% — both in the top 5% of Texas schools. Maths is 53% against 44%. That is a real academic strength and it long predates the current rating.
Clear Creek (“Clear Tech”), Lubbock (“LIVE”), Canyon and Lubbock-Cooper have all publicly launched partnerships, with La Porte in development. Deer Park, Brazosport and Pearland were listed only as possibilities.
“You get all the resources and support from Lubbock ISD, but you get the incredible educational experience of TTU K-12. They have certified teachers, they have 24-7 tutoring, lots of experience and expertise, so it's the best of both worlds.”
Misty Rieber, Chief Academic Officer, Lubbock ISD, August 2026That is the strongest outside endorsement in this report, and note what it praises: teachers, tutoring and experience. No partner district cited the accountability rating.
Physics B arrived two weeks late — and Mr Mosley has since posted Zoom office hours four times a week, a DBA scheduler with real slots, and a welcome that sounds like a person. Where this school staffs a course properly, the teaching is visibly better than what either girl had before.
Collected from Canvas and the Focus SIS on 19 August 2026. Three of eleven live courses have no permanent teacher.
Dual-credit instructors are not captured by our collectors.
Both of Allie's temporary teachers posted the same thing on 14 August: DBAs cannot be scheduled until permanent staffing is in place. Her planner still tells her to sit them.
“While I am covering this course, DBAs will be scheduled once permanent staffing is officially in place.”
Mrs. Patterson, Geometry A announcement, 14 August 2026Both teachers say to skip past the DBA and come back. Sound advice, but it has to reach the planner before 28 August or Allie opens her list that morning and finds work she cannot do.
Allie's temporary teachers at least introduced themselves. Anatomy and Physiology A has produced nothing — no teacher of record, no name on the Canvas course, no announcement in sixteen days. It is Alaina's heaviest course, 582 points, proctored final. Meanwhile Physics B arrived two weeks late and now has the most engaged teacher of the eleven. Late is a better problem than absent.
One stable decade, then six years of churn — including a three-year interim and an eighteen-month gap in public governance.
James Taliaferro held the post for roughly seven years. Since he left in 2019 the school has had four leaders, two of them explicitly interim or acting.
The shape of that chart is the finding. Justin Louder was interim for three years, while simultaneously serving as TTU's Associate Vice Provost for eLearning. Scott Lucas lasted about two years and his departure was never announced; TTU published no release, no local outlet covered it, and the newsletters from those months have since been deleted from the site. Cari Moye covered the gap.
So Bayard is the first permanent, full-attention superintendent this school has had since 2019. That reframes your experience: you are not watching a good school destabilised by a new leader, you are watching someone try to rebuild one that was run part-time or temporarily for six years.
TTU K-12 has no elected school board. The university president appoints the superintendent and an appointed advisory board reports to the regents, so there are no public votes and no election paper trail. That board is still required to meet publicly — and between February 2024 and August 2025 it appears not to have. Meetings resumed one month after Bayard arrived, and the first minutes he brought forward for approval were those of November 2022.
The turnover that affects your daughters is not at the top. It is in the layer that teaches and advises them, and the board minutes track it month by month. Section 06 lays that out.
An A, a three-year trough, and a recovery announced five days ago.
TEA A–F ratings. Rating year 2026 reflects the 2025-26 school year, Bayard's first full year. No ratings were issued in 2020 or 2021.
Two caveats keep this honest. The 2022 A was almost certainly inflated by COVID-era hold-harmless scoring, so the drop to D is partly a change of method rather than a collapse in teaching. And the domain stuck at F throughout is Relative Performance, which compares a school against others of similar economic disadvantage — and at 0.6% to 6.7% economically disadvantaged, TTU K-12 is benchmarked against the most affluent band in Texas.
What this means for you: treat the B as evidence that someone competent is steering. The next page shows what actually moved, which is narrower than the letter suggests.
The rating rose without the passing rates rising. That is worth understanding before anyone celebrates it or dismisses it.
Closing the Gaps went from F to A and Relative Performance from F to C. But Academic Growth went down, 65 to 60 — and it was a B (84) as recently as 2023. That measure has fallen three years running.
So the honest reading is narrower than “the school improved.” More students tested, and far more graduates finished with a college-and-career indicator. Both are real administrative achievements, and both took deliberate work. Neither is evidence that teaching got better, and the one measure that would show it moved the wrong way.
The district's own November 2025 minutes record a Targeted Improvement Plan, FLIPS coaching, MTSS tutoring through IXL and Brainfuse, and two assistant principals assigned to professional learning communities. TEA's release does not name the school or attribute the rise to any of it. So these are the district's stated causes, not verified ones — credible, but not proven.
One caution for anyone reading the school's own materials: a partnership page still describes the district as “A-rated and approved by TEA.” That was untrue through three D years and is still wrong now. It is stale marketing rather than deception, but it is the kind of thing that costs a school credibility exactly when it has earned some.
He has diagnosed the problem precisely, published the number, and is short of the money the state promised him to fix it.
The State of Texas estimated a Teacher Retention Allotment of $428,000 for TTU K-12 and then revised it to roughly $120,000, covering about 18 teachers. He is trying to halve a 400:1 ratio with 72% less retention money than was budgeted.
TTU K-12 Advisory Board minutes, 11 May 2026.
The 2022-23 fall is the post-COVID unwinding of pandemic remote enrolment. The rebound is under current leadership.
He has hired: a Senior Director of Curriculum, a Director of Curriculum and Professional Learning, two assistant principals and additional advisors. He also moved the fall lottery forward to 30 April specifically so students could “get scheduled in their courses in a timely manner”. He identified your exact problem a year ago and acted on it. It was not enough this year.
The turnover that reaches a student is not at the top of the org chart. It is the teacher not yet hired and the advisor not yet replaced — and both are on the superintendent's own open list.
TTU K-12 Advisory Board minutes, September 2025 to May 2026.
Read in order, this is a leader hiring steadily and still losing ground. Six posts were filled across the year. The May list — two instructional coaches, a Dual Credit Director, a Science Director and several full-time teachers — was still open when school started.
TEA publishes no staffing data for this district at all. Teacher counts, turnover rate, students per teacher, average experience, average tenure — every one of those fields is blank in the 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 reports. For every other Texas district those are public. Here the only figure that exists is the one the superintendent volunteered to his own board.
So there is no way to answer "is teacher turnover getting better or worse" from outside.
A platform migration, a reorganisation, a rebrand and a programme closure, mostly unannounced.
This resolves a contradiction worth understanding. TEA counts only the full-time diploma students, which is why state figures show around 800. The actual service population is many times that. It is how a 400-to-1 teacher ratio and a federal figure of 18.7 students per teacher can both be true — they are counting different populations. The old correspondence business is still far larger than the diploma school your daughters attend.
HB 8 replaces STAAR with three shorter assessments per year. For an online district that means in-person testing three times annually rather than once, which is a serious logistical problem for a school whose students are scattered across the state. Bayard has been lobbying TEA for at-home virtual testing and has partnered with UT High School to share physical sites.
SB 569 may shift virtual-school funding from a completion basis to attendance. For a school with 60% annual mobility, that is a material change to the money.
Nothing found sits with the people who teach or advise our daughters. What exists sits above them, in how the district is governed and what the Legislature has done.
Texas Tech K-12 has no elected school board. The university president appoints the superintendent; the State Board of Education approves advisory-board nominees; the advisory board and superintendent report to the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents, whose nine members are appointed by the Governor of Texas. There are no public votes and no election paper trail — which is why so much of this report had to be reconstructed from meeting minutes.
The System's own posture is on the record. Board chair Cody Campbell, describing the 2025 hire of former state senator Brandon Creighton as chancellor, said Lubbock and the System are “conservative” and “we do not subscribe to the ideas around DEI and are supportive of a merit-based culture.” Creighton co-authored the state's higher-education DEI ban. That is the System board on a System hire — not a vote about this school.
A search of FEC and OpenSecrets-indexed records, Texas Ethics Commission filings, press and board minutes turned up no campaign contributions and no political statements for any of the eleven people named in this report — Bayard, Moye, Lucas, Louder, Still, or any advisory-board member. For school administrators that is the ordinary result. It should be read as an absence of evidence, not as reassurance or as suspicion.
The one substantial record belongs to Bayard, and it predates this job. Presenting a contested equity audit at Clear Creek ISD in August 2021, he said repeatedly that the district “does not support, and will not implement, CRT”; that the audit covered academic and social-emotional equity, “not financial or racial equity”; and that “rather than focusing on parity of student outcomes, we want to focus on maximizing the growth of individual students.” Read it as you like. It shows an administrator defusing a political fight rather than joining one.
SB 2 created about $1 billion in Education Savings Accounts for 2026-27 — and none of it can follow a student to Texas Tech K-12. ESA money is for families enrolling outside the public system. TTU K-12 is a public district that is already tuition-free. Lake Country Christian School, by contrast, states on its own admissions page that “LCCS is a TEFA-approved school,” and appears on the Comptroller's participating list. The state's new voucher programme subsidises the school you left and does nothing for the one you moved to.
Career Clear Creek ISD, strong on technology and assessment, no prior superintendency, nothing adverse on the public record.
Ed.D. in Educational Leadership, University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2012, with a dissertation on eighth-grade Algebra I and later mathematics achievement.
He ran the district's 1:1 device programme and switched it from tablets to laptops after finding students needed keyboards and mice. During COVID he distributed 12,000 laptops and got every student onto a device. As deputy superintendent he put $7.1M of federal relief money into personalised learning across all 27 elementary schools.
In 2021 he presented a contested equity audit during that district's peak anti-CRT period, reframing it away from group outcomes toward individual growth. Read that as you like; it shows someone who can absorb a political fight without escalating it.
“The state's A-F accountability system is hijacked by STAAR, politics, and educational narrowness.”
Robert Bayard, on his consulting siteOne connection to simply be aware of: in April 2026 TTU K-12 launched a partnership with Clear Creek ISD, his former employer, expecting 300+ students. Neither announcement mentions his history there. There is no allegation of anything improper, and districts routinely partner through former colleagues. You should just know it exists.
Probably stabilising into a better position, but not this school year.
A competent operator who diagnoses accurately and communicates unusually specifically, in year two of a turnaround, running a school that drifted through three years and two caretaker leaders. The 2026 B is genuine movement. But he is growing the student body faster than he is staffing it, and the two vacancies that hurt your family were known in May and still open when school started.
The gap closes over the next 12 to 24 months if the hiring lands. It does not if the retention funding stays short.
Watch Academic Growth in the 2027 ratings. It was a B (84) in 2023 and has fallen every year since, to 60. The 2026 B was built on more students testing and far more graduates carrying a college-and-career indicator — both genuine administrative wins, and both largely exhausted now. If Academic Growth climbs next year, the instructional side is really improving. If it keeps sliding while the headline letter holds, the school has learned to score the system without teaching materially better, and what you are seeing this term is the steady state rather than a transition.
Two smaller things worth watching with it: the four-year graduation rate of 69.9%, which nobody is currently talking about, and whether the teacher ratio actually falls below 400:1.
They did not leave Lake Country Christian School for academic reasons. The academic picture is what surfaced afterwards, when measurement arrived.
The family's own decision notes from January 2026 are unambiguous. Alaina was being steadily excluded by peers while being, in the same document's words, “loved by teachers.” Allie was quieting a naturally outgoing personality to hold on to a shrinking friend group. The academic items were secondary: dual credit versus AP, and tuition at university-level cost. Alaina left carrying a 4.375 GPA.
Focus graduation record, read 19 August 2026.
Four of the five end-of-course exams behind their credits were never taken. Texas exempts private-school credit from STAAR, so LCCS granted the credit and the state waived the check. That is not something LCCS did wrong — it is how Texas treats every private school — but it means that for every subject but one, nobody outside the building ever verified anything. The one exam Alaina did sit came back strong: 4644, Meets, just under Masters.
Allie, 8th grade, 2025-26 semester averages. LCCS grades on A 90-100, B 80-89, C 70-79, F below 70 — there is no D at all.
Every grade is an A. Three of the nine courses are non-academic and automatic. And Algebra 1 sits at the floor in both semesters, at 92, while she carried 100s in Art, Theatre and Athletics. The signal was there, but a ten-point A band with no plus or minus makes a 92 and a 100 the same letter. Nobody panics about an A.
Alaina's card reads the same way: eight courses, six of them Honors, averaging about 97, with Science Lab Aide and Strength & Conditioning at a flat 100.
Selective intake, compressed grades, no external test, and its own run of leadership churn. None of it hidden — but none of it measured either.
“The student must have semester averages of 80 or above on current year and previous years' report cards/transcript.”
LCCS admissions criteriaThis matters more than any other single fact about LCCS. A school that admits nobody below an 80 will naturally report a high average GPA and a 100% graduation rate. Those figures describe a population filtered at the door, not a representative one. Add a grading scale where A runs 90 to 100 and there is no D at all, and a flattering picture is close to guaranteed before anyone teaches a lesson.
There was also an entrance test, a good-standing requirement from the previous school, and a faith condition: “At least one parent must be a Christian, affiliated with a local church, and in regular attendance,” with the family agreeing in writing to the statement of faith. That statement is ordinary orthodox Christian doctrine, including that “marriage is only between one man and one woman.” Published openly, and exactly what a family choosing a Christian school would expect.
Note what the published non-discrimination clause covers: race, colour, and national or ethnic origin. Religion, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity are not in it.
Form 990 officer lines, EIN 75-2402082.
The most recent handover ran through the same window in which both girls left, and Justin Jordan's four-year tenure ended in July 2025. No reason is documented anywhere public, because a private school has nothing it is required to publish.
The instability you were trying to get away from was, on this evidence, also present in the school you were leaving. It simply was not visible from outside.
LCCS now takes state money. That brings the first external academic check in its history — and it was built to be as light as the law allows.
Revenue rose from $5.6M in FY2020 to $10.7M in FY2025, with net assets of $11.3M. Liabilities jumped from $2.5M to $9.5M in a single year, unexplained in the filings but coinciding with the new stadium. Published tuition ranges from $14,180 to $16,345 depending on the source; nobody audits those figures, which is why they disagree. The one independent count, from the federal survey, is 649 students and 54.1 full-time teachers, a ratio of 11.4.
LCCS now takes state voucher money — its own page says “LCCS is an approved participating school.” The award for 2026-27 is $10,474 per child, which against published tuition leaves a family owing roughly $4,000 to $6,000. A subsidy, not a free ride.
Participation does require, for the first time, an annual nationally norm-referenced test in grades 3 to 12 for voucher students. The state's list records the school's chosen instrument as the Pre-ACT. Parents, not the school, report the scores.
That is the whole of it. The Comptroller's rules state that they “do not impose additional operational requirements,” the statute bars treating a participating school as a state actor, and regulators specifically declined to attach non-discrimination or disability-services conditions. So the first external academic check in the school's history arrives with the voucher, the year after you left, and it was designed to be as light as possible.
Grades cannot tell you whether the material was covered. The diagnostics at Texas Tech K-12 can, because they ask directly.
These are fundamentals Allie missed in her first fortnight, in subjects where she carried A's at LCCS. None of them is high-school course content. They are middle-school and earlier.
Her lowest mark on either report card is 81, Science 7 first semester. Science process — hypotheses, independent variables, what science is for — is exactly where the clearest gap now shows.
It would be natural to read Allie's 2 out of 10 on her first Geometry quiz as a weak Algebra 1 foundation showing through. The actual questions say otherwise. All eight misses were definitional — labelling parallel lines, identifying a ray, the properties of a plane, defined versus undefined terms. No algebra is involved. It was the lesson's own just-taught content.
Which points somewhere more useful. Geometry is one of the two courses with no permanent teacher. She missed eight of ten in week one and nobody at the school noticed. She was at ten of ten by lesson 01.03 — but that was her mother catching it, not the school.
Her Anatomy pretest misses are course content she has not been taught yet, and her two real quizzes came back 9/9 and 9/9. Her Physics misses are semester-B material she is entering cold. On the evidence available, LCCS served her well academically.
The missing pieces are small, teachable and mostly already paid for. The deadline is not the school's — it is the two state exams Allie sits this year.
Look again at what she missed. Phrase versus clause. Tone versus mood. The parts of a plot. What an independent variable is. Every one of those is a definition, not a skill. They are an afternoon of work each, not a year of remediation. That is the good news buried in the diagnostic.
Her Geometry sequence already proves the pattern: 2 out of 10, then 6, then 10 out of 10 inside three lessons. When she meets a gap, she closes it.
The improvement plan the district approved in November 2025 funds IXL and Brainfuse tutoring, and Lubbock ISD's academic officer cites “24-7 tutoring” as a reason her district signed on. Nothing in our records suggests either girl has used them. It is the cheapest available fix, it is already bought, and it targets exactly this kind of definitional gap.
Allie is enrolled in Biology A and English I A. Both carry state end-of-course exams, and those will be the first externally-normed measurement of her academic level in her life. There is no baseline to compare them against, because Texas exempted every prior credit as private.
Neither is urgent this month. Both are worth starting before spring, when the courses will be moving too fast to also be filling in middle-school vocabulary.
Her Anatomy quizzes came back 9/9 and 9/9, and her one external measurement was near the top of the Meets band. There is no evidence of a gap in her work, and the dual-credit load she is carrying is genuinely hard. The attention belongs on Allie.
In order of urgency. The first has a deadline nine days out; the fourth has one at the end of September.
Not “things feel disorganised”, which invites reassurance. Instead: three courses without permanent teachers, assessments frozen in two of them with the first due on 28 August, and a course with a proctored final that has not communicated with the family in sixteen days.
Specific, dated, and checkable. That is much harder to absorb into a general apology, and it matches how the superintendent himself talks to his board.
What was checked, what could not be established, and where the evidence runs out.
Checked directly against TEA's identification lists for 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026: Texas Tech K-12 has never been identified for federal Comprehensive, Targeted or Additional Targeted Support in any year. Structurally it is close to exempt — those triggers apply to Title I campuses, and this district reports zero Title I students.
A state improvement process is running, though, driven by the ratings rather than federal law. The September 2025 minutes record a “3rd 'D' Trigger” under the Effective School Framework; Region 17 reviewed the curriculum that October; a Targeted Improvement Plan was approved in November 2025. The district also appealed the ratings.
Two figures in this report have no independent confirmation and are flagged where they appear: the district's Cognia accreditation, which is a badge on its own site rather than a registry entry, and its current Purple Star status, which is press-verified for 2021 but not on the state's most recent awardee list.
Where every figure in this report came from.
| TTU K-12 Advisory Board minutes, Aug 2025 – Aug 2026 | depts.ttu.edu/k12/advisory-board | Staffing, vacancies, improvement plan, lottery |
| TEA accountability summaries and domain tables, 2023–2026 | rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov | Ratings, STAAR components, CCMR, graduation rate |
| Texas SB 2, Comptroller TEFA rules and participating-school list | capitol.texas.gov, educationfreedom.texas.gov | Voucher award, testing condition, LCCS listing |
| LCCS statement of faith, admissions criteria and TEFA page | lccs.org | Entrance requirements, published positions, voucher participation |
| IRS Form 990, EIN 75-2402082, FY2020–FY2025 | ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer | LCCS finances and head-of-school sequence |
| NCES Private School Universe Survey | nces.ed.gov | The one independent LCCS enrolment and teacher count |
| Partner district announcements and local press | ccisd.net, kcbd.com, canyonisd.net | Why districts contract TTU K-12, in their words |
| LCCS report cards 2024-25 and 2025-26 | family Drive | Grades, grading scale, course load |
| Focus SIS graduation record, read 19 Aug 2026 | this project | STAAR mastery and private-school exemptions |
| TEA 2026 statewide multi-year ratings spreadsheet | tea.texas.gov | All A–F ratings and domain scores, 2022–2026 |
| TEA CSI / TSI / ATSI lists, 2019–2026 | tea.texas.gov | Confirms no school-improvement identification |
| Texas Academic Performance Reports, 2022-23 – 2024-25 | depts.ttu.edu/k12 | Enrolment, mobility, demographics, dropout |
| SBOE Committee on School Initiatives, item 2, Sept 2021 | sboe.texas.gov | The document behind the "csi2" filename |
| Texas Tech Now, Jul 2025; Toggle Magazine, Jul 2018 | ttu.edu, togglemag.com | Bayard appointment and Clear Creek record |
| Community Impact / Galveston Daily News, 2020–2022 | communityimpact.com | Clear Creek roles, personalised learning, equity audit |
| Archived TTU K-12 staff pages and newsletters | web.archive.org | Leadership timeline before 2025 |
| Canvas announcements and Focus SIS, 19 Aug 2026 | this project | Teacher assignments, DBA freezes, course readiness |
Figures carry the year they belong to. Unsourced numbers were left out rather than estimated.