A central Texas school district will be the first to join parents in a lawsuit over STAAR testing.

The small, embattled Marlin ISD has a lot riding on testing.

It’s been failing for years. Even after having a state monitor appointed, the district about 35 miles southeast of Waco has missed state standards for five years in a row and could be forced to close.

Superintendent Michael Seabolt said his 900-student district shouldn’t face such high stakes from a deeply flawed test. The Marlin ISD school board approved joining the lawsuit Tuesday night in a 7-0 vote.

“We’ve been trying to get out of academic trouble for years, and you give us an illegal test on top of that? That doesn’t help,” Seabolt said.

“It’s quicksand. In accountability, you get into a cycle that makes it harder and harder to get out of. We get deeper and deeper, and now I can’t hire teachers because of our bad ratings. Then this test? We have to do something.”

In May, a grassroots group of parents called the Committee to Stop STAAR filed a lawsuit to have this year’s STAAR results scrapped for elementary and middle schools across the state, saying the state-mandated tests violated a new state law setting time limits on the tests.

The Legislature required that tests be designed so that 85 percent of elementary students can complete them within 120 minutes and 85 percent of middle school students can do so within 180 minutes.

The parents, including one from Lake Dallas, contend that the agency ignored the law by deciding not to comply with new requirements until 2016-17, which they say makes the tests illegal.

The state is fighting the parents’ right to bring the case forward.

But Seabolt said districts need to join parents in fighting STAAR. He came to the struggling district about a year ago and said progress has been slow. The use of a questionable test doesn’t help.

For example, he said, Marlin sent about 30 high school writing tests back for rescoring after seeing so many other districts question the accuracy. Five came back with new, passing scores and some students are still awaiting results.

State officials “say they have some 30 studies that speak to the validity of the tests?” Seabolt asked. “If I can get a test for kindergarteners on the study of nuclear decay reactions, it can be a valid test, but does it make sense?”

The lawsuit comes after a bungled year of testing that included computer glitches, delivery problems, scoring issues and a shortage of graders. Just last month, Texas announced that STAAR vendor ETS must pay $20.7 million in fines and to make improvements as a result.