Walking through the classrooms in Graebner Elementary gives visitors a window into how students are learning across the San Antonio Independent School District.
During an Oct. 21 visit of the campus, district officials pointed out classroom elements that would also be in schools districtwide, including smart board presentations and whiteboards on students’ desks.
This was the case a couple of weeks ago.
At the start of October, SAISD’s new leadership rolled out a learning model all schools are required to use, from preschool to high school, from consecutively failing campuses to the highest-achieving pockets.
Called the “High 5,” the model standardizes lessons, teaching practices, student data reporting and classroom setups across the district’s 80 schools.
It’s one of Superintendent Adrian Bustillos’ first and most dramatic overhauls of SAISD since he took the helm in July. The San Antonio Alliance, the district’s teacher and support personnel union, sharply criticized High 5, but Bustillos is banking on the changes to save the district from a state takeover.
“There are different philosophies and ways to get to the end. This is the approach we’re taking today,” Bustillos said during a school board meeting on Monday, after dozens of teachers publicly shared their concerns over High 5, calling it formulaic and overly prescriptive.
During that meeting, veteran teachers said they felt disrespected, others said they felt unheard. Some teachers also said High 5 didn’t leave room to teach beyond what state tests require.
Bustillos said making changes is what he was hired to do.
Currently, 34 of SAISD’s schools have a failing rating from the state, which largely relies on state testing scores to measure learning. Of those schools, three have gotten four consecutive failing scores with no improvement, putting the district at risk of state intervention if a school earns a fifth bad rating at the end of the 2026-27 school year.
“If we keep everything the same, the status quo, our destiny is already selected for us,” Bustillos said.
What is the High 5?
Located in the Palm Heights community, Graebner Elementary school is one of SAISD’s largest elementary schools by enrollment. Last year, the school got a D rating from the state.
But principal Laura Hernandez-Lopez believes the High 5 method could take the school up to a B rating. She said the methods aren’t that different from what Graebner teachers were already doing with their dual-language students.
The five principles of the High 5 are: classroom board configuration, checks for understanding, professional learning communities, data tracking and regular classroom walk-throughs by principals and district leaders.
Teachers use the same lessons across the district, have similar classroom layouts, take temperature checks every few minutes and use daily exit tickets to pinpoint exactly where students are struggling.
In the classroom, this means all desks must be clumped in groups of at least two and facing the front. This is to make sure students have a buddy for “turn and talks,” a High 5 strategy that asks students to discuss among themselves before working individually.
“We’ve noticed it’s sometimes the teachers doing most of the talking,” said Hilarion Martinez, SAISD’s Chief of Schools, a new role Bustillos created in his executive cabinet. “We want to be intentional about the students being able to have that opportunity to have discourse.”
At Graebner, some desks are clumped in pairs, others in fours. Every desk is marked with an “A” or “B,” so teachers can ask students to turn and talk every seven to eight minutes.
The desk configuration is a point district officials recently had to clarify in recent days after several teachers expressed frustrations that grouping desks in pairs facing the same direction was difficult for different size classrooms with varying furniture design.
“Sometimes they’re partners, sometimes they’re quads, sometimes they’ll make a bigger group as long as [students] have someone as a partner,” said Hernandez-Lopez.
High 5 also requires students to use whiteboards for practice questions. Like the turn and talks, this is a way to check for understanding.
Martinez said the High 5 standards are the minimum teachers can do, and they can always add to the lessons and personalize instruction.
Classroom walls should display a “Board Configuration,” outlining each step of the day’s lesson: the warm up, the learning objectives, the practice questions and the exit ticket.
Each desk should also have a guide on the “RACE strategy,” which stands for “Restate the question. Answer the question. Cite evidence. Explain the answer.”
At Graebner, some students had laminated copies of the strategy taped to their desks; others had them hanging from a corner of their desks with binder rings.
“In the past, this reference material might have been on the walls,” Martinez said. “Now we just want it to be there, available for students.”
Some early-grade teachers have pointed out that the RACE strategy isn’t developmentally appropriate for students who may just be learning how to read and write, but district leaders say it’s a way to get students used to the strategy before they start using it in older grades.
The High 5 standards are expected in all classrooms, including advanced placement, dual credit, and courses that aren’t measured under the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness.
A focus on data, setting a floor
As part of High 5, teachers meet every week in “professional learning communities,” which include principals and academic coaches, to analyze student progress by grade and campus level.
At Graebner, Hernandez-Lopez and her administrative team walk through classrooms at least three times a day, observing and coaching teachers.
Students have their own “data binders,” where they know how they scored on the STAAR last year and set a goal for this year. Students also use these binders to log how they do on quizzes and unit testing, done every nine weeks.
They can also see how their entire class is doing using a data-tracking chart prominently pasted to a classroom wall.
Having earned a few failed ratings in a row, Graebener was put on an academic turnaround plan last year, so the focus on growth and structure isn’t entirely new to the campus.
But the increased level of district oversight is affecting all SAISD schools, not just the ones academically struggling — a point of contention for the teacher and support staff union.
“The High 5 is unnecessarily prescriptive, too rigid, and is being too widely rolled out,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel. “The district should roll back the universality of this plan and instead focus attention, resources, and energies on campuses with most needed support.”
SAISD has 33 schools with A or B ratings, considered academically successful scores. Several of those are the district’s top “choice” schools, meaning families may enroll at those schools even if they don’t live in the school’s zone or in SAISD.
But the new administration says “pockets of excellence” aren’t enough, given that SAISD is on the cusp of state intervention. Martinez and Bustillos say the only way to get effective results is to implement the system with “fidelity.”
“This is the foundational level,” Martinez said while walking through the halls of Graebner. “This is what we’re going to do in every classroom in our district, whether it’s an A- or F-rated campus.”
Addressing teacher concerns
Known as a leader in innovative school models and choice, SAISD draws more out-of-district students than other area districts. SAISD also has more in-district charter partners than anyone else in Texas.
When asked whether the High 5 could affect the district’s level of school choice, Martinez said it would strengthen SAISD’s appeal to families.
“The High 5 alone will not move this district forward,” he said. “But we believe that when our student outcomes improve, that when the ratings of our schools improve, that’s going to draw parents in as well.”
While school districts call this instructional model by different names and implement it with varying degrees of intensity, it’s become an increasingly popular model used to win the state’s A-F accountability system.
East Central ISD has seen success following similar instructional strategies: granular data analysis, constant checks for understanding, daily exit tickets and weekly professional learning committees. ECISD is not at risk of state intervention, and changes have been more gradual under its longtime superintendent.
Third Future Schools, an education nonprofit that operates three of SAISD’s schools and several schools across Texas, works similarly. The network specializes in quick academic turnaround by using much more rigid, but similar, systems as the High 5.
Martinez said the schools under Third Future Schools are not adopting High 5, and SAISD’s other in-district charter partners, who operate 26 of the district’s schools, have the choice to opt in or out.
At Monday’s tense school board meeting, some trustees asked whether the administration would consider teachers’ criticisms of High 5 while others defended Bustillos, saying this is why he was hired.
“We needed somebody who, with surgical precision, could come in, diagnose the problem, and help us figure out our way out of this, and to make sure that we were not taken over,” said Christina Martinez, one of the board’s most senior trustees.
Bustillos said he would take feedback but stressed that the High 5 had only been rolled out a couple of weeks. He insists that High 5 isn’t a “top-down model,” that teacher input is being considered, and it’s too soon to pivot strategies. Students just took their first nine-weeks assessment, which reflected a little growth across SAISD’s failing schools.
Officials said they’ll have a clearer picture of how the High 5 is working in December, when students test after the second nine weeks.
“This is the starting point … we are two weeks into this new initiative, so we need the foundation,” said Bustillos. “We will work and evaluate the data in January when we take our middle of the year assessment, and at that time we’ll take direction on which way we go.”
