This story has been updated.
The San Antonio Independent School District administration is recommending a list of 19 schools for closure — 17 in the next school year with two more the following year —over the next two school years, with others slated to be merged or co-located at campuses.
As a result of the recommended scenarios, 23 campuses will receive more students and teachers, according to the district. No final decisions have been made yet.
The draft recommendation was presented during a school board meeting Monday night, capping off weeks of community engagement meetings, where SAISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino and district staff gathered feedback on a framework the district used to narrow down the schools on the list.
“I believe that the board resolution was courageous,” Aquino said. “It admits that the district needs to look into this issue long in the making.”
The 19 schools on the list for closure include:
- Baskin Elementary School
- Carroll Early Childhood Campus
- Collins Garden Elementary School
- Douglass Elementary School
- Forbes Elementary School
- Foster Elementary School
- Gates Elementary School
- Highland Park Elementary School
- Huppertz Elementary School
- Knox Early Childhood Campus
- Lamar Elementary School
- Lowell Middle School (merging with Kelly Elementary School)
- Miller Elementary School
- Nelson Early Childhood center
- Ogden Elementary School
- Pershing Elementary School
- Riverside Park Elementary School
- Storm Elementary School
- Tynan Early Childhood center
Other changes include:
- Cotton Academy (merging with Beacon Hill Academy)
- Gonzales Early Childhood Campus (Merging with Twain Dual Language Academy)
- Green Elementary School (merging with Bonham Academy)
- Japhet Academy (Redesigned as an elementary school)
- Steele Montessori (Relocating)
Details of the closures will be shared in a series of YouTube videos, broken down by each high school neighborhood in the district. They also will be available, along with a rationale for each closure, on the district’s website.
Huppertz Elementary School, for example, is suggested for closure “to make fuller use [of] two other neighborhood facilities,” Woodlawn Hills and James Madison elementary schools.
Trustee Sarah Sorensen, who said the process didn’t include true engagement with families, said that the videos would not go over well with the community.
She also pushed back on the idea that the closures were needed to afford recent historic raises for staff.
“I will not stand for talking points that pit our workers against our children and our families,” she said.
Aquino, who has said the closures were not driven by finances, said that regardless the district is in a “dire financial situation,” and needs to think about the future.
Another round of community engagement meetings will begin Saturday, in which impacted school communities will have a chance to provide feedback before a final vote on the closures occurs in November.
If the board votes to close the schools, a team of transition specialists will help families and students navigate the next steps. Before the vote, parents and community members shared concerns, support and disappointment during public comment for more than an hour.
Ashley Treviño, who has children at Kelly Elementary School, said parents should have had more advance notice of the declining enrollment and the possibility of closures.
“The community should be kept in the loop and we should be entitled to see the receipts to be aware of where taxpayer money is going to be utilized properly with the utmost effectiveness,” she said. “Closing the smaller schools is robbing the community of its very identity and sense of security.”
“We need to stop thinking in terms of business and more like advocates for our children,” she added.
Shannon Oster-Gabrielson, who has children at Lamar Elementary school, also had concerns with the way the community meetings prior to the vote were run. At each meeting, parents went to a variety of stations, and shared concerns or questions with staff, who wrote the feedback down on sticky notes, which were analyzed by district staff.
“I would have loved to have had the opportunity to have a dialogue with staff about what this data means and how staff and the community can tackle these problems together,” she said. “Instead, we were given a stack of post-it notes and a few minutes to go to each station. I couldn’t get any answers to any questions I had thoroughly researched.”
Henrietta LaGrange, a community member, lambasted the board for “lying to the people,” pointing to a recent conversation she had with an SAISD principal who said she was part of a transition team for closed schools, even though no decisions have been made yet.
 “They didn’t tell you they were gonna make you a piñata, did they, Dr. Aquino,” she said. “That’s what they have done to you.”
How the district got here
The situation comes after years of declining birthrates and competition from open enrollment and charter schools in San Antonio whittling away at the enrollment of the urban district at such a fast rate that the district is now more than 4,000 students below what a demographer said was “the worst case scenario” in 2010.
Board President Christina Martinez shared those numbers in June shortly before the board voted on a resolution tasking the district with generating the list of schools.
“Since 1998, student enrollment is down more than 15,000 students,” she said. “We had an independent demographer who presented to our board in November and in January and tied this reduction to a historic decrease in birth rate, and therefore, to school-aged populations across the United States, as well as the shortages of affordable housing options for young families in the urban core.”
The overall decline in enrollment is expected to continue for another decade, according to district officials.
Even as the number of students dropped off, however, the district has maintained nearly the same number of buildings. Since schools in Texas receive funding based on the number of students in the building, low enrollment schools are left with fewer resources for electives, extracurricular activities and even core academics.
The closures will allow the district to more equitably share resources, according to Aquino.
Teachers gathered nervously before the meeting, with several sharing disappointment in the lack of details before the decisions were made.
For example, the presentations at the 14 community meetings focused on the high cost of “small schools.”
“But they never provided a definition of what a small school was,” Dayton King, who teaches at CAST Tech, said. “I asked several officials at one of the meetings, and they couldn’t tell me.”
In the meeting Monday, Aquino gave that answer: elementary schools with less than 350 students were considered “small” for the purposes of the initial analysis.
Others were upset to find out that the seven comprehensive high schools in the district were never under consideration.
The district released a draft equity report Monday night, highlighting the impact of the potential closures on subgroups of the community.
A statement released by a coalition of educators, students, community members and the San Antonio Alliance union said that the list of schools slated for closure was too lengthy and questioned the impact it could have.
“District plans to close 19 schools, including a large number that serve historically underserved communities on the Eastside, Westside, and Southside of San Antonio are incompatible with our understanding of equitable decision-making,” the statement said.
“Working class Black and Brown communities cannot be better served by reduced investment, and plans to close East, West, and Southside schools cannot be understood except in their historical context: as a continuation of a long process of divestment from minoritized communities in our city,” the statement added.
This story has been updated to correct information released by SAISD that Hot Wells Middle School would be converted into an elementary school. The reference has been removed.
