A public charter high school focused on serving at-risk students and those in need of credit recovery will open a campus in San Antonio in August, welcoming about 100 students for its first year.
An open enrollment charter, the school will accept any students on its campus located inside loop 410, off of Fredericksburg Road, with rolling admissions throughout the year. But the educational program is targeted toward students that have ventured away from the educational system and are finding their way back, according to school officials.
The Triumph Public Charter High School network grew out of a San Antonio-based nonprofit, Student Alternatives Program Inc., which was founded in 1990 to provide services and advocacy for those students.
Triumph Public High School San Antonio will be the eleventh school in the Triumph network, joining campuses in Brownsville, El Paso, Laredo, Lubbock and Abilene, among others.
Frances Berrones-Johnson, who has been the superintendent of Triumph Public High Schools for 23 years, told the San Antonio Report on Tuesday that the school will serve students that have not been able to receive the education they need elsewhere and feature small class sizes.
“We felt that it was important to bring another choice of educational programming for the students here in San Antonio, specifically students that are traditionally underserved,” she said. “We are going to be located right inside 410, off of Fredericksburg Road, so we feel that that community could really benefit from the program we have to offer.”
The school opened for enrollment recently, and will be connecting with community partners including agencies that work with at-risk youth as well as the juvenile justice center to identify students that could benefit from the program.
Berrones-Johnson said the school will offer flexible scheduling with morning and afternoon classes to allow students to accommodate a job outside of school if needed.
The school’s dropout recovery program will only serve grades 9-12, and will offer flexible options to help students with reentry into the education system. Students ages 14-21 will be eligible.
“We work with students that perhaps [due to] their current circumstances they had to leave high school for a while, coming back,” she said. “So we meet them where they’re at, so we can catch them up and they can graduate with their peers.”
Geneva Salinas, the inaugural principal, said the school will focus on college, career and military readiness for students.
“Students may need just additional support with catching up on their high school credits,” she said. “Really finding things that motivate them also, maybe industry-based certifications, just making sure that we have a plethora of those options to offer them and hopefully gain their interest.”
With the addition of Triumph Public High School, there will be 93 charter schools in Education Service Center Region 20, which includes San Antonio. A growing number of additions in recent years have focused on gaps found in traditional school districts.
Other examples include Celebrate Dyslexia, which will be opening for the first time next year with a focus on serving students with the reading disability, and Essence Prep, which is a charter school that recently moved into a new campus and aims to help uplift and affirm the cultural identities of Black and brown students.
Inga Cotton, the founder of the San Antonio-based Charter Moms blog, website and Facebook community , said the growth of these schools is “not so much a trend” as it is a return to “the original intent of the charter law” which passed in Texas in 1995.
She pointed to examples like the George Gervin Academy, which was founded as a charter school with a similar mission to Triumph: dropout recovery, later expanding to a broader mission.
“The first 10 years or so, charter schools based in San Antonio … were very much designed to serve a specific population,” she said.
Charter schools in general have come under criticism in recent years for what critics say is redundancy with the traditional independent school district system across the state. During a school visit to Burbank High School, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said charter schools should be specialized if they are moving into an area already served by a neighborhood school when talking to reporters about the closure of schools in the San Antonio Independent School District.
“There’s been a proliferation of charter schools, some of which are performing well,” Castro said. “But my philosophy is, if you have a charter … it should be performing a function well above and beyond what you’re seeing in a neighborhood school, or serving some underserved population.”
He added: “In other words, I don’t think you put charter schools out there just to recreate another school system.”
Cotton said the most recent schools serve a necessary purpose.
“The response from the charter school world is we’re not [duplicating], we’re meeting unmet needs,” she said.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the date of the first charter law in Texas.
