As San Antonio Independent School District begins what district leaders are referring to as “rightsizing” — a process that will close district schools — it’s important that we center families and community members as decision-makers, discuss the downsides of school closures and reject simplistic and unmeasurable promises about the future of our district.
The next few months will shape SAISD for decades to come. Decisions made before November will determine which schools in San Antonio will close and which communities within our city bear the brunt of a “rightsizing” process.
The district’s “rightsizing” framework will apply primary criteria — objective metrics of school facility use, enrollment, facility quality — to all district schools, generating a list of potential schools to close or consolidate. Then, district leaders will engage school communities in public meetings and feedback sessions, applying additional contextual criteria which will lead to a final list decided by district officials.
We should celebrate both the scale and seriousness of the “rightsizing” process and district leaders’ commitment to community engagement, and the great strides taken by this SAISD administration to meet the moment in public education over the last year. But we need a much deeper and more serious discussion about the merits of school closures as a means to achieve district goals.
That means situating school closures in an accurate historical context, digging into research from across the country and rejecting superficial accounts that fail to mention the considerable negative impacts of closing schools on students, families and local communities.
Across the United States, school closures have been disastrous for working-class communities of color. School closures negatively impact student academic performance, attendance and graduation rates. They lead to decreased student enrollment, accelerating the very trends that district leaders are trying to overcome. They tear communities apart and accelerate the disintegration of social bonds that can only be maintained through the shared public space that forms the fabric of social life in American cities. And they create enormous trauma for students, school workers and families.
And school closures rarely save money. Surprisingly, closing schools doesn’t produce the kind of savings many would assume once costs related to increased transportation and continued building maintenance are taken into account.
In city after city, ambitious “rightsizing” promises are made and not kept. Improved services don’t materialize. Students’ and families’ lives are not transformed for the better. Closed school buildings, slated as affordable housing projects, community centers, and nonprofit hubs, lie empty years later. They just don’t work.
This is why throughout the country school communities have been organizing against school closures.
Here in San Antonio, district leaders are vague and noncommittal when describing the future of our district and the improved services that school closures will bring to students, families, and school workers. Superintendent Jaime Aquino laid out a vision that was light on detail and contained no measurable commitments to which he and other champions of school closures can be held accountable.
But students, families, school workers and community members deserve more than vague, unmeasurable maybes.
Last month, our coalition of students, parents and guardians, school workers, unions, and community organizations laid out a vision for a truly transformative approach to rightsizing. As part of 10-point plan, we called for concrete, measurable commitments to improved student and family services, improved working conditions for school workers, and improved enrollment, attendance, and graduation rates for students, a commitment that no school workers lose their jobs because of school closures, and to ensure that all students displaced from one campus to another receive increased supports by making all receiving schools community schools with wraparound services for students and their families — an evidence-based intervention that consistently improves student and family outcomes across the country.
We also called on the district to democratize the “rightsizing” process by truly centering families as decision-makers: giving families the right to vote on future plans for their schools. Public schools belong to the people, and decisions about the future of SAISD schools should be made by school communities. That doesn’t mean they should be made by district officials after hearing and ignoring community input. It means letting school communities — the families our schools serve — make these decisions for themselves.
There’s precedent: for years, SAISD has imposed a rigorous threshold for major decisions about campus life, requiring a two-thirds majority of parents and school workers for schools to become in-district charters. The much more significant, truly final decision to close a school should be made by those most directly impacted. There’s simply no good argument for requiring a two-thirds majority vote for the former and refusing to hold one for the latter.
If school closures will lead to a better future in SAISD, district leaders should be clear about what that future will look like, and have the conviction to commit to ensuring that it becomes real. School workers across SAISD will support them in implementing plans that will change our students’ lives. Indeed, we’ll be the ones doing the heavy lifting in classrooms and cafeterias, on buses, in band halls and on sports fields across the district.
But that vision needs far more substance than what we’ve heard so far. We need a bold commitment to our students, families and school workers, one to which we can hold district leaders accountable as they make decisions that will shape the lives of 45,000 students and their families.
