Austin ISD presents draft plan to close Sunset Valley Elementary and move dual‑language program to Odom

Superintendent Matias Segura and Austin ISD staff presented a draft consolidation plan at a community meeting at Sunset Valley Elementary that would close Sunset Valley Elementary as a zoned campus, reassign its neighborhood students to Cunningham and Boone elementary schools and move the campus’s wall‑to‑wall dual‑language program to Odom Elementary.

The district described the proposal as a regional, multifaceted effort to reduce empty seats, align feeder patterns and address financial strain. “We simply cannot continue without introducing real risk into our system, financial risk,” Superintendent Matias Segura said, explaining the urgency behind the one‑year timeline the district proposed.

The plan and why it matters

District staff said the plan seeks to position programs where student populations support sustainability and to reduce the number of under‑enrolled classrooms across Austin ISD. Under the draft, Odom would become a non‑zoned, receiving school for the wall‑to‑wall dual‑language model; Sunset Valley’s neighborhood students would be rezoned to Cunningham and Boone. District staff said they aimed to avoid concentrating consolidations in one part of the city and to preserve access to dual‑language instruction for emergent bilingual students.

“We do have enough seats at Odom for if we just basically took all of the students that are participating in dual language at Odom Elementary and took all of the students that are participating in dual language here in Sunset Valley, we would have enough seats for both campuses,” said…