Four San Antonio Independent School District schools shuttered over the summer are already being reopened as “swing campuses” where students will be transported in the event temperatures become too hot at their home campuses.
The contingency is one of three developed in response to aging HVAC infrastructure, which buckled during a winter freeze in January, prompting a facilities assessment and overhaul of the district’s operations department.
As part of that overhaul, the district created a dashboard, where conditions can be monitored by district staff in realtime. It’s color-coded based on conditions with green for fully operational and red for ongoing issues.
One day before students return for the school year, four campuses were still in the red-zone including Bonham Academy, Cooper Academy, Green At Riverside Park and Highland Hills Elementary.
Patti Salzman, the deputy superintendent, said the district is getting regular updates and is aiming to have all campuses operating by the time school starts in the morning.
“That is definitely our goal,” she said.
And if not, Superintendent Jaime Aquino said SAISD is ready to “pivot to use our swing space.”
That level of specificity and detail is a dramatic change from January, when “the District did not know which schools were cold, or why, let alone which solutions were being put into place,” as highlighted in the after-action report.
Swing campuses are the most extreme measure put in place to ensure the continuity of education, unlike past years when both overly hot and cold classrooms led to the cancellation of school for a day, or an early release.
First, the district will deploy portable air conditioning units to quickly bring the temperature back to a comfortable level.
If that isn’t sufficient, students will be moved to other spaces within the same building, including other classrooms or the library. Swing campuses are the last resort.
In a letter sent to parents the week before students returned, Aquino referenced the Texas Administrative Code, which advises that the room temperature for a typical occupied office or classroom environment should be kept between 72 to 76 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.
The district is also working with campus leaders to have communication plans in place in case students have to be moved during the school day.
In an interview Monday, Aquino revealed that the estimated cost of bringing the district’s infrastructure up to standard is substantially more expensive than initially estimated, with a $350 million price tag increasing to $575 million following a facilities assessment.
That cost could be substantially reduced, however, if more schools are closed through another phase of “right-sizing,” or closing campuses to consolidate the remaining students in fewer buildings to utilize capacity. The after-action report requires the district to complete a study and present a list for possible closure by Nov. 2025.
Aquino pointed to the 30 schools still open across the district with fewer than 400 students in attendance, oftentimes costing more to operate than they bring in from the state.
“Imagine if we were to close 30 schools, we would … be left with 55 buildings,” he said. “It makes it much easier to maintain with our limited resources, and [then] we can invest our bond dollars better, as opposed to trying to spread all our dollars into so many campuses.”
In the meantime, the district is playing whack-a-mole with HVAC problems, which span across nearly 100 buildings, at varying ages and levels of deferred maintenance and operating on six different HVAC systems.
“Last week, we installed a chiller at one of our campuses and it was working,” Aquino said. “Well … today there’s a pump that’s not working, so it’s almost on a daily basis.”
