Hundreds of district and campus leaders will attend a small group training session during the San Antonio Independent School District Leadership Summit later this month to learn about a law that bans the suspension of students experiencing homelessness in all but a few extreme cases.
The training is the most concrete step taken by a district in response to a San Antonio Report investigation published in May that revealed hundreds of students had been illegally suspended since the 2019 law was passed.
The details of the training were still being finalized as of the last week of June, according to SAISD spokeswoman Laura Short.
On the state level, a compliance review is still ongoing after both the Report and the Houston Landing asked questions about the dozens of districts across the state apparently violating the law, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
SAISD isn’t the only district taking a look at their numbers.
Officials with the Northside Independent School District said in May that they would be reviewing suspension data to refine the district’s process and ensure clarity in how infractions are coded to avoid any possible inadvertent illegal suspensions. They did not provide an update on that review despite multiple requests in June.
Communities in Schools San Antonio, a dropout prevention nonprofit that works in hundreds of schools across a dozen San Antonio school districts, also plans to add a review of the law to their back-to-school training in August, according to President and CEO Jessica Weaver.
In the wake of the Report’s findings, lawmakers, advocates and readers shared a desire to reexamine the law when lawmakers return to Austin in 2025 to give it more teeth and to force compliance.
But as districts work through a difficult budget planning season this summer, labor leaders are calling for more resources and internal accountability — not state punishment — to ensure alternatives to suspension for students experiencing homelessness.
Luke Amphlett, a teacher at Burbank High School and a representative on the Executive Council for the San Antonio Alliance, a union representing teachers and other staff at SAISD, called state enforcement a “poisoned solution,” pointing to the use of compliance investigations to take over school districts.
“Our union is very invested in ensuring that our school district follows the law, ideally, using internal mechanisms of accountability,” he said, adding that the state compliance process has the potential to be “weaponized not in the interest of our communities and our students, but instead for a very political takeover process.”
Amphlett, who credited SAISD with making progress in reducing overall suspensions in recent years, said any accountability must come with a significant increase in state funding “so that there can be meaningful … investment in the services that students really need.”
“We know that students don’t need suspension, but they do need other services,” he said. “And the way that the state, chronically and deliberately underfunds public education, makes it extremely difficult to provide those services.”
Melina Espiritu-Azocar, the president of the Northside American Federation of Teachers, another teachers’ union, echoed Amphlett’s comments, adding that the district should balance teachers’ safety with students’ needs.
“I think … the district needs to ensure that they’re doing a good job of providing resources to students experiencing homelessness,” she said, such as mental health support, food and medication. “So I think wraparound services are what is necessary to ensure these kids have everything that they need.”
Amphlett also said SAISD, from the campus level all the way to the board and superintendent, should go beyond training to track compliance starting next year
“They should have metrics that they’re checking in on over time to ensure that it’s happening, and they don’t wait until the end of another school year, or until there’s another newspaper report,” he added.
However, the district has made significant progress in recent years in reducing out-of-school suspensions overall, giving Amphlett hope for what comes next.
“In the nine years that I’ve been here, the transition toward more restorative practices, less … out of school suspension, is very real and very tangible,” he said. “It’s a thing that the district has moved on a lot. That is very real, and it’s also work that is incomplete.”
Even without extra state funding, SAISD has allocated $2.4 million for mental health, relationship building and restorative practices, according to Short, all of which “are intended to reduce out of school suspensions.”
“In addition, the district created two full-time positions for social workers and a new coordinator position, all of which are specific to working to provide support to our students who qualify for services under McKinney-Vento,” she added, referring to the federal law regulating education for homeless youth.
