FWISD Set For Huge Pay Day After Approving Bible-Infused Learning Materials

Last week, the Fort Worth Independent School District became the second-largest school district in Texas to adopt Bluebonnet Learning, a state-developed collection of instructional materials that has been criticized for its selection of Bible-influenced lessons. The materials are not required by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), but adopting them carries a significant cash bonus, several million dollars, depending on the district’s enrollment. The school board of trustees’ vote comes on the heels of approving a 2025-26 fiscal budget that comes with a $43 million deficit. 

The Bluebonnet Learning materials, which use stories and parables from the Bible in reading materials, starting in Kindergarten, have been heavily critiqued for their lack of secularism. But at an additional $60 per student, the price of Christian-influenced learning may seem worth it to districts struggling under cost burdens. The TEA maintains that the boost in financing is to negate printing costs for the materials, but free digital versions are available for parents, teachers and students to access online. 

“All that is saying is state-sanctioned indoctrination,” one of the three nay voters, Trustee Quinton Phillips, said at the board meeting. 

 FWISD, with more than 67,700 students, will earn an additional $4 million by adopting the materials, though the total cost is estimated to be $2.4 million. 

“If there are resources that not only help my teachers, my parents and my students, then I need to take advantage of that,” FWISD Superintendent Karen Molinar said. 

The district approved the massive hole in their budget in June, after approving to close a grand total of 18 schools by 2029 in May. 

Bluebonnet Learning is heavily backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and the governor-appointed TEA Commissioner Mike Morath. 

“We will ensure young Texans have access to high-quality, grade-level appropriate curricula that will provide the necessary fundamentals in math, reading, science, and other core subjects and boost student outcomes across Texas,” Abbott said in a release when the materials were approved by the agency. “I thank the Texas Education Agency for working tirelessly to bolster students’ educational foundation and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead bright, successful lives in Texas.”

Morath has defended the learning materials and their Christian-based learning, which makes up a small fraction of the entire materials. 

“I am unaware that this is an actual conflict in instructional materials,” Morath said to the State Board of Education in late 2024 when questioned about the potential issue with Christian materials in tax-funded schools. “I have heard this news argument, and it is not based in fact.” 

The Role Of Religion In The Classroom

Though the Christian materials in Bluebonnet Learning are limited, experts have continuously discouraged districts from adopting the materials. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the same organization behind one of the lawsuits challenging the controversial law requiring teachers to hang a framed copy of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms, wrote a letter to every school district advising against the materials. 

“We urge you to refuse this invitation to promote one type of religious belief in public schools,” reads the letter. “Decisions about whether and how to instill religious beliefs should be made by students and their families, not state and local officials. Implementing the Bluebonnet curriculum in your district would unlawfully impose a set of religious beliefs upon your students and violate their constitutionally guaranteed right to be free from religious coercion.” 

Biblical context is already part of elective course materials for high school students in Texas, and as the Bible remains a major influence in American literature and culture, removing religious texts entirely from education is unlikely. 

“I believe that learning about the content of the Bible is important for understanding not only religion, but also world history, politics, art and literature,” wrote Caryn Tamber-Rosenau in an op-ed for Forward, a Jewish non-profit. 

Tamber-Rosenau is a theology professor at the University of Houston, with a speciality in Judaism. She argues that while the Bible’s cultural relevance is undeniable, Bluebonnet Learning propels “biblical illiteracy” in a particularly focused Protestant interpretation of the Bible. 

“ The Bluebonnet curriculum takes a rich collection of texts that are sacred for multiple religions and reads them in ways that are inaccurate, misleading and offensive — and that will produce biblically illiterate Texans,” writes Tamber-Rosenau. 

The Troubles Aren’t Over For FWISD

School closures and budgetary deficits are just the tip of the iceberg for FWISD, which is facing a district takeover. 

Commissioner Morath has been taking trips to Cow Town as he considers ceding control of the district, unseating the board of trustees and the superintendent and replacing them with his own choices in an effort to improve district scores. It sounds totalitarian, but it’s legally required. 

If a school district has any campus that receives five consecutive failing grades in its annual A-F accountability grade, determined by state-sanctioned standardized testing performances, the TEA is required to step in and commandeer the district. 

In the latest released reports, the Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Middle School received its fifth failing grade, triggering an intervention from Morath and his agency. The school has since been dissolved, and the students rezoned to other schools, but even if only one campus in an entire district meets the threshold, the entire district can be upended. 

“Since the campus earned its fifth consecutive unacceptable academic rating in that year, the school’s subsequent closure has no bearing on, and does not abrogate, the compulsory action the statute requires the commissioner to take,” Morath wrote in the letter obtained by the Fort Worth Report.

Superintendent Molinar said at the board meeting that the adoption of Bluebonnet Learning has little to do with the potential takeover, but the district is staring down the barrel of a Morath’s cocked gun.