Jazz band, lunch periods and passing math tests. These are things San Antonio Independent School District students said they like about going to school during an”State of the District” event on Tuesday.
Held every other year, the room was packed with district leaders, city council members, state representatives and current students, all gathered to learn and share what’s going on at SAISD: the wins, the challenges and plans for the future.
At times celebratory, at times pessimistic, the event was a sort of appeal for local leaders to get more involved in public education. It also unveiled SAISD’s plan for dealing with outdated and under-enrolled campuses.
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who ran on supporting traditional public school in San Antonio, said SAISD was a “very special district” which deserved more attention from the community.
SAISD is San Antonio’s oldest and most central school district, founded 125 years ago and serving some of the city’s most underserved communities. Jones tied the district’s outcomes to the city’s outcomes in terms of workforce development, affordable housing and business development.
“There is no future of our city without a strong SAISD,” Jones said. “It’s not impossible that SAISD could be gone within a generation… It is not impossible that SAISD would cease to exist if we do not step in.”
SAISD by the numbers
SAISD is the third largest district in San Antonio, operating more than 80 campuses and serving about 44,000 students across 79 square miles.
For the 2024-25 school year, the district received a C-rating from the state, a small improvement from the previous year.
During Tuesday’s event, Superintendent Jaime Aquino celebrated that nearly two-thirds of SAISD campuses have a passing academic rating from the state; 30 campuses have an A or B and 19 received C ratings.
Last year, 18 campuses received failing ratings for the third consecutive year, making them “priority” campuses requiring turnaround plans. Getting a failing score for a fourth year could open the district up to state intervention.
In January, SAISD decided to close one of those campuses because it was under enrolled and projected to receive another failing rating from the state, a first of the district’s rightsizing efforts.
Still, Aquino is optimistic despite the high number of failing campuses — 20 campuses are only one point away from getting a higher letter grade, he said. And students are adapting to increasingly rigorous state standards and still recovering from the COVID-19 shutdown.
“For the first time this year since the pandemic, we have more students reading on grade level than we had prior to the pandemic,” Aquino said. “This is in a much more rigorous state assessment.”
Aquino also pointed to SAISD’s 7,000 out-of-district students as indication that the district is headed in the right direction.
“We are suffering from declining enrollment, however we lead the region in the number of students who come outside SAISD’s boundaries,” he said.
Declining enrollment and rising costs in recent years has led to a budget deficit of approximately $46 million for SAISD, as well as other districts in the city.
Challenges and bright spots
SAISD faces several challenges because of its century-old age and size.
Similar to most school districts in San Antonio, student enrollment at SAISD has steadily decreased in recent years as birth rates decline, more charter schools pop up and populations shift outward.
These factors led to mass school closures in 2023 and under-enrolled campuses too expensive to maintain, since funding is based on enrollment.
Public schools in Texas are also bracing for the state’s new education savings accounts, which could draw students away from public school districts and into private schools.
The district also spends a lot on maintenance and renovation. Deputy Superintendent Patti Salzmann said the average age of SAISD buildings is 63 years.
While SAISD has been slow to finish on 2020 bond projects, the district has completed more than 100 projects so far and is considering going for another bond this year.
Last year, the district invested $95 million into heating and cooling renovations to keep up with intensifying extreme weather events. During the last few cold snaps, SAISD has experienced heating outages, cold classrooms and school cancellations.
“We just had a freeze, and we were business as usual,” Salzmann said, getting a loud round of applause from the room.
On the student outcome side, attendance has gradually improved since COVID. SAISD’s latest metrics show the district’s average attendance sits at 91.7%, nearly a three-point increase from 2024-25, translating into an additional $10 million from the state
Aquino also spoke about SAISD’s college enrollment metrics. About 88% of 2025 seniors enrolled in college within their first year of graduating.
SAISD also offers several career and technical education pathways students can take, potentially earning a certification and landing a job right out of high school.
But industries are changing quickly, especially with the introduction of artificial intelligence, said school board Trustee Ed Garza. He encouraged business leaders in the room to get more involved through participating in internship and mentorship programs to strengthen the local workforce pipeline.
The district has also made true on its promises to pad mental health support, installing “peace rooms” in nearly every secondary campus and adding more mental health professionals in schools.
‘A new way forward’
Facing mounting internal and external pressures of funding, possible state oversight, declining enrollment and aging infrastructure, SAISD officials unveiled their “new way forward” at Tuesday’s event at The Red Berry Estate.
The strategy is twofold: build new and consolidate, said Salzmann. This means getting campuses to healthy enrollment by consolidating and tearing down some of SAISD’s more outdated buildings to build state-of-the-art campuses.
These new buildings would be community “beacons,” blending indoor and outdoor learning, incorporating telehealth and community-based counseling in schools and homing in on the latest technology.
When asked how these projects would be funded, Salzmann said there are still unused bond dollars from 2020. SAISD could also ask taxpayers to support a new bond this November.
While this is the district’s first time publicly discussing “the new way forward,” SAISD officials have been hinting at this new strategy for months, especially when discussing the recent closure of Carvajal Elementary School.
During several meetings with the Carvajal community, district officials suggested the idea of tearing down Carvajal and the neighboring Rhodes Middle School campus to make room for a brand new building better equipped to support student programs and a pre-K-8 academy model.
When asked why SAISD doesn’t simply renovate its historic, oftentimes beloved, buildings, Salzmann said it would be more expensive to renovate than to build new, adding that those buildings were made before the state created certain rules and guidelines for student programs.
School buildings are not designed to last past 50 years without major renovation. Even if the district closed more schools, the campuses that remained open wouldn’t be able to accommodate all the children moving in.
“We have very limited ability to close schools the way we have in the past by just moving students into a building because the footprint is so small,” Salzmann said.
“The new way forward shifts our investment from maintaining empty hallways to building fewer, larger, state-of-the-art buildings, and closing older, inefficient buildings at the conclusion.”
