At the beginning of this school year, Makenzie was to move up to Wedgwood Middle School. But Hazel Harvey Peace was never a good fit for Makenzie, said her grandmother, Lisa Henley, Parent Shield parent. Makenzie, who has dyslexia, struggles with reading, Henley said, and she never got the one-on-one attention she needed at her old school. She was also withdrawn and didn’t speak up in class, Henley said, because she was embarrassed about the fact that she was struggling. At the beginning of this school year, Henley transferred Makenzie to the Academy of Visual and Performing Arts, a new charter school located in La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth.

"Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of the education advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said she hopes the changes will put parents in a better position to help them if they’re children are struggling. Lack of access to information has been an ongoing challenge for parents in the district, she said. The organization, which lobbied the district for both changes, held a series of literacy clinics across the city last summer.

Inside the library on a scorching July afternoon this summer, Trenace Dorsey-Hollins and a group of parents were making their own history. The Parent Shield leaders, a grassroots organization that Dorsey-Hollins launched in 2022, were hosting the first of nine “Freedom July” mobile literacy clinics.

“A report card is really tricky in our opinion, because you’re just looking at A’s and B’s and C’s,” Carpenter said. Nowhere on the report card does it say “what reading level your baby’s on, and that’s what’s throwing parents for a loop.” By talking to parents about issues like literacy and the nuances of grading, families are better able to advocate for their children in the school system and work in partnership with educators, said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, a parent and founder of the advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth in Texas.

A parent advocacy group is calling on Fort Worth schools to give parents better access to information about how their kids are doing in school. Parent Shield Fort Worth released a report Wednesday outlining findings from a series of literacy clinics the group held over the summer. The report also included recommendations for boosting literacy rates among the city’s public school students.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of Parent Shield Fort Worth, told the crowd that parents have to demand better for kids who are falling through the cracks. During the group’s literacy clinics held over the summer, 70% of parents who attended told organizers that they thought their kids were reading on grade level. But when school staff members gave kids reading assessments, the results mirrored what state test scores show, she said. “Our children are not being taught to read, and reading is true freedom,” she said.

“The balloons are going up, and from this day forward, so will the literacy rate,” Dorsey-Hollins said. “It’s only up from here, and we’re going to lift literacy as a community.”

Six in 10 students who live in Fort Worth, a city that has 12 school districts, did not meet grade level on the state reading test in 2022, according to parental advocacy group Parent Shield.

Parents in Fort Worth ISD have told Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, leader of the parent advocacy group ParentShield, that they have students in the special education program in Fort Worth ISD who are not receiving adequate services. Instead, she said, students are labeled as a discipline problem.