This story has been updated.
Some school campuses in the San Antonio Independent School District are using less than 40% of the square footage they occupy, leaving empty classrooms, and even some empty buildings to be operated and maintained using taxpayer dollars.
That is one of the leading arguments that SAISD’s administration has used when proposing a plan to study usage and eventually present recommendations to the board on how to downsize the district starting in the 2024-2025 school year.
Laura Short, a spokeswoman for the district, said that while enrollment and utilization will be a large factor, the decision-making framework is not yet decided.
“Enrollment is a large factor in the decision to look at rightsizing the district,” she said. “The criteria for determining which schools may be affected has not yet been determined, though. Now that the board issued and approved the resolution, determining the criteria is the next step.”
Do you want to see how much of your SAISD school is being utilized? You can get the details by using this searchable table.
Groups question district methodology
Groups opposed to the possibility of closures have cited the potential academic and psychological harm closures could do to communities, and questioned the methodology used by the district in determining the utilization of campuses.
Alejandra Lopez, the president of the San Antonio Alliance, told the San Antonio Report Thursday that low campus utilization alone is not a fair way to decide its fate.
“Oftentimes, utilization rate is based off of the original intent of the building,” she said. “A lot of our buildings were built at a time when the expectations of what a school does were slightly different than they are now. So if you have a building that was built in 1955, it's going to tell you what the capacity is, based on 1955 ideas of facility usage.”
But capacity and utilization are standard formulas, according to interviews with school officials and an architecture firm, and are used to show the optimal number of people that should occupy a space to remain efficient.
"Capacity is simply a calculation using the number of students (loading factor) and square footage based on the type of space it is,” Kate Mraw, the director of K-12 for LPA Design Studios said. “So if it is a classroom with four walls, the size of the room and the use of the room determine the capacity, not necessarily the amenities or features that are within that classroom."
Kamal ElHabr, SAISD’s former associate superintendent for facilities and construction, said school capacity is calculated by counting the number of students per classroom, and multiplying it by the number of classrooms in the school. Speciality classrooms, like those used for music and physical education, are excluded from the calculation, and the number of students per classroom varies depending on the grade level and type of program, he said.
But optimal, or functional capacity, is the industry standard for what a building's expected use should be. In the case of SAISD, that is 85% of the overall capacity. This is what appears on the district's website as school capacity, and in the table above.
Of all the schools that are currently operating, only 68% of the capacity is being used by students. But the district owns schools that have been closed over the years, putting the district’s overall utilization of schools at just 54%.
Mraw said that when a district is seeing enrollment fall below optimal utilization levels, that is when they generally start discussing school closures.
“If you have a school that has a utilization factor that is below that … range, that's when you really start to consider [school closures], especially if there are several and there's no projected enrollment growth meant to happen.”
But the district has not yet decided on a criteria, and when they do, Mraw said, capacity is likely to be only one of several factors that go into deciding which schools close.
Mraw also added that community engagement and other factors are important parts of the conversation, with campus utilization being one part.
Lopez said that at the end of the day, a community knows best and should have the final say on whether a school should close and what happens to the building in the event that it does.
“Ultimately, we trust that our communities can make the best decisions for themselves,” she said. “We have deep inherent trust that our communities know what they need in order to thrive, and that's why fundamentally they should be given the opportunity to make a democratic decision about what's going to happen to their school.”
This article has been updated to clarify the degree to which schools are underutilizing space.
