Two familiar faces from South San Antonio Independent School District, currently under state takeover, are planning their comebacks to the school board. Although they’ll have no power on the dais.
Even with a state-appointed board of managers and superintendent, the district is still required to hold regular trustee elections.
South San’s elections take place in November of even years, and school board terms are four years long. This year, Single Member Districts 1, 3 and 6 were supposed to go on the ballot, but only one person signed up to run for each seat.
When the Texas Education Agency took over South San Antonio ISD in February of 2025, elected trustees were put on “suspended” duties, locked out of district emails and stripped of their governance power. Two of those trustees were Manuel R. Lopez, board president at the time and then-vice president Cynthia A. Ramirez, two longtime South San trustees who were last elected in 2022.
Lopez and Ramirez both signed up to run again for seats in District 1 and 6.
Lopez, 71, is a retired police officer who was first elected in South San board in 1998.
Ramirez, 62, was first elected in 2000 and recently retired from Harlandale ISD after 26 years of working on the administrative side. She also runs Cinderella’s Closet, a program that helps Harlandale students find formal wear for special events.
Both Lopez and Ramirez have served on the board on and off for years.
Karla Gomez Sanchez, 40, signed up for District 3, and she currently serves on South San’s state-appointed board of managers, which she had to apply to TEA for. Gomez Sanchez has two children enrolled in the district and works from home for a company that provides mobility devices to veterans through the VA.
Because the races are uncontested and it would cost money to do so, South San ISD will not put them on the ballot. Instead, Gomez Sanchez, Lopez and Ramirez will be sworn in within 30 days of the Nov. 3 election, where South San voters are already being asked to weigh in on a school tax election.
But their duties as school board members will still remain suspended, said a TEA spokesperson, and they will not take the dais except for Gomez Sanchez, who will be a simultaneously elected trustee and state-appointed board manager.
Ramirez and Lopez will also not be privy to confidential information or personnel files. They will basically have as much access as anyone else in the public, said state appointed superintendent Saul Hinojosa.
Why is South San under state control?
The decision to take over South San ISD came after TEA found the district was in violation of five different state education codes and demonstrated the district “failed to oversee the management of the district when it engaged in actions or inaction that could negatively impact district personnel and the students of SSAISD.”
While the takeover was announced and went immediately into effect on Feb. 19, 2025, South San’s problems had been brewing for years.
South San Antonio ISD is aptly named for its far Southside location, stretching from Palo Alto College to Pearsall Park and up to the Quintana community. The district serves around 7,000 students across 14 schools, and 89.8% of students are considered economically disadvantaged by the state.
In the years before the takeover, South San headlines were largely about the district’s mounting budget deficit, board dysfunction and how the district was trying to fix the problems as new trustees cycled through.
Board trustees often got into public disputes, disagreeing on board resolutions, arguing over everything from board dress code to whether to reopen previously shuttered schools in 2019, an issue which led to Lopez being escorted out of the board room by school police during a 2023 meeting.
For several years, the district was also under supervision from a “conservator,” someone who could “correct” the board and superintendent and report back to TEA.
By 2024, with the election of new trustees, things had mostly mellowed out and the board passed a balanced budget. Then conservator, and past South San superintendent, Abe Saavedra even told the Report in September of that year that things had “calmed down.”
“We were all voting unanimously,” recalled Ramirez. “We were moving in the right direction when the turnover happened. Now, did we have problems? Yes, we still had problems with the numbers. We still had problems with our rating…but the numbers were showing progress. I mean, we were moving up.”
At that point, the board was still dealing with trustee attendance issues, and board member training had fallen behind, Saavedra said. He also flagged the lack of participation in the board election process with no challengers in four races in November of 2024 — an issue the South San community has struggled with for years.
Two days after that election, Saavedra wrote a letter to TEA recommending a takeover to “facilitate a clean break from the governance failures that have persisted in South San Antonio ISD.”
“We were trying to do all the right stuff… I think he [Saavedra] even told us, ‘Hey, y’all are doing a good job,’” Ramirez said. “And then the next week… he sent to TEA that he recommended a board of managers, and we just couldn’t believe it.”
How is South San doing under takeover?
There have been several changes at South San since Hinojosa and the board of managers took the helm.
They’ve been able to maintain a balanced budget and even boasted a small surplus this year — a rare feat across public education in Texas right now.
From 2024-25 to 2025-26, South San went up 10 points in the state’s A-F accountability system, taking them from a D (65) to a C (75).
Several South San campuses saw improvements on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR), and the total number of failing campuses went down. Overall, eight campuses showed improvement on its letter grade and South San saw a 5-point jump in students who scored on grade-level or higher in reading.
Under Hinojosa, the district was also an early adopter of the state-written Bluebonnet Learning, whose reading portion is oft-criticized for including Bible stories as part of the curriculum. Hinojosa and the board of managers have also invested in more aggressive teacher recruiting efforts and have placed new leadership at almost every campus.
If the district keeps improving at the same rate this year, the state could potentially reevaluate and decide to end the takeover and start rolling back to local control by August of 2027, said Diana Sayavedra, South San’s current TEA-appointed conservator.
Sayavedra is a retired superintendent from El Paso ISD, who came on as the district’s conservator in March after Abe Saavedra stepped down for personal reasons.
“It’s really too soon to tell,” Sayavefra told the San Antonio Report. “What I would say is that yes, based on their accountability data… if they remain focused and they’re diligent, there’s a significant likelihood that they would meet their exit criteria by the timeline that’s been set.”
To meet the exit criteria, districts under state intervention can’t have any consecutively failing schools, must be an A or B rated district, have finances in order and show good governance.
But the decision ultimately lies with Mike Morath, the state’s education commissioner.
By law, TEA must reevaluate state intervention on the two-year anniversary of the takeover, which falls on February of 2027 for South San, and interventions cannot last longer than four years.
Few board applicants again
Two years later and under state takeover, South San’s November 2026 elections ring a similar bell to the 2024 elections.
“We wish there would be more people running,” said Board President Ray Tijerina, a South San alumnus who co-founded and leads an educational support company. “If you look at the district the way it was in the past, that’s probably part of the problem.”
Gomez Sanchez said she’s also worried about the low participation.
“It’s not apathy. I know the people from South San, and I know they care,” she said.
Gomez Sanchez remembers several community members showing up to workshops and interest sessions that TEA put on to find people who would want serve on the board of managers if the state took South San over. In all, 20 people applied.
“I know [the community] is invested… I just don’t quite know what it is that’s stopping people from running, and that’s something I really hope to change.”
Lopez, another longtime South San board member, did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.
“Voter participation in those races — it was pretty low generally,” said Councilman Ed Mungia (D4), who served as a South San trustee in 2018 for a few months to fill a vacant position, but there is a concern when an elected officials is “sidestepped” by a state appointment.
But he says it gives him “peace of mind” that of the seven board of managers, five are South San alumni and the others live in the area. They’ve also been involved with groups like the South San Foundation and South San Kids First, a group of South San alumni and parents created a few years ago to recruit board candidates that’s no longer active.
“I think it would have been different if the state came in and appointed all these people that I had never heard of,” Mungia said. “No one’s really come up to me and said, ‘Hey, my voice doesn’t count over there anymore.’”
Ramirez, who served on the board several times, said she signed up again because she didn’t want her community to be “dismissed” by not having someone show up to represent them.
“Regardless of what happened to us, I was going to throw my name on that ballot. And I know Mr. Lopez feels the same way,” she said. “We were elected to this board by the people, and we were not going to let them down by letting this position just go just for nobody to run — for it to be open and nobody cared. Well, we do care. That’s why we put our names on the dotted line.”
Even if the state does release South San next year, it’s unclear how the district would phase back to elected leadership, which seats they would start with or if Gomez Sanchez would be the first seat to roll back since she’s already on the board of managers.
