Port SA spends big to sell its high-tech jobs to kids on San Antonio’s South, West sides

Jose Loera remembers watching both his older brothers attempt college, then drop out. He figured if they couldn’t do it, he probably couldn’t either.

But engaged teachers at South San Antonio High School encouraged him to pursue his interest in computers and apply for a summer internship at Port San Antonio.

Even though it was just a few minutes north of his neighborhood, Loera had never heard of Port San Antonio. He was too young to remember when it was Kelly Air Force Base, teeming with jobs that created a middle class for the mostly Hispanic families who lived in surrounding areas.

That internship — he worked with the Port’s IT team — opened his eyes to a world of possibilities he had not even known to dream of.

“I realized I wanted to go into cybersecurity, and they encouraged us. They got us our first certificate, the CompTIA, and that sparked the light in me to continue my education,” he said. “It didn’t seem unattainable anymore.”

Today, this first-generation American works in cybersecurity for H-E-B after earning a degree from Texas State University.

Loera’s story is one that Jim Perschbach, president and CEO of Port San Antonio, is determined to replicate — at scale.

In addition to its internship program, which draws students from South San Antonio and Edgewood high schools, Port San Antonio supports the Kelly Heritage Foundation. Through the Boeing Center at Tech Port Arena, the foundation turns what Perschbach joked are “the world’s most outrageously expensive beers” sold at the venue into funding for educational and career opportunities for local students.

Perschbach likes to say the Port supports students “because it’s the right thing to do,” but he’s also frank about his less altruistic reason for exposing young people from surrounding South and West side neighborhoods to careers in computing, aerospace, space technology and others: he wants today’s students to be tomorrow’s employees.

The foundation invested $560,000 just in the past year on local student initiatives, he said Friday: “But the investment we are making goes beyond the Kelly Heritage Foundation. It is millions of dollars a year into education, because those are the people who are going to fill these jobs.”

‘We can’t do that’

Perschbach is keenly aware of the implicit — and sometimes explicit — messages kids like Loera can hear. “We have this tendency, unfortunately particularly in San Antonio, [to say] that they can’t achieve something.”

Perschbach tells the story of visiting a nearby neighborhood when he was first named CEO in 2018, telling residents about plans for developing the former base into an innovation campus filled with companies driving global innovation in aviation, cybersecurity, computing and logistics.

An older woman approached him after his enthusiastic pitch. “‘Jim, those aren’t jobs for people in this neighborhood. We can’t do that,'” she told him, in his retelling. Her words gutted him, and have stuck with him all these years.

Today, the Port pulls in thousands of young people each year through everything from programs where they can build their own computers to Fiesta de Los Niños, which mixes interactive STEM exhibits, robotics demonstrations and esports activities in with more traditional Fiesta fun like carnival rides, games and live music.

“What they’re learning is that they can do this stuff,” Perschbach said — and by connecting students to companies at the Port, like Boeing, Knight Aerospace, Plus One Robotics, CNF Technologies and dozens of others, “they can recruit this talent before they’re even thinking of getting a job.”

And that, in turn, helps revitalize the neighborhoods surrounding the Port that suffered so greatly in the years after the base closed, eliminating thousands of good-paying jobs.

‘I was discouraged’

On Friday, the Boeing Center played host to back-to-back events that embodied the Port’s focus on innovation and its commitment to the next generation of San Antonio leaders

First, at the Dee Howard Foundation’s annual San Antonio Aviation and Aerospace Hall of Fame awards luncheon, the nonprofit dedicated to advancing aviation and aerospace via K-12 programs, honored Siddhi Raut, a recent high school graduate and space researcher whose résumé is already more impressive than that of many adults.

Raut, who founded SpaceTourist, a nonprofit that encourages student interest in space exploration, was one of the first students enrolled in the Lunar Caves Analog Test Sites (LCATS) program, developed by the San Antonio-based WEX Foundation and supported by the Kelly Heritage Foundation.

Onstage to accept her award, Raut described being “really really bad at math” as a younger person, and being discouraged from pursuing her interest in astrophyisics.

“I felt like I didn’t belong,” she said. “And you wouldn’t expect people to discourage people who love science in fourth grade, but I was discouraged. And it took me a lot of effort to understand that math is just a skill — and as with all skills, you can get better at it.”

In an essay she wrote earlier this year, Raut credited Area 21 at the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology, within the Boeing Center, as an increasingly important connector for exposing young people in the community to STEM-related careers.

That’s where 18-year-old Pedro Palacios built his first gaming computer. Palacios, who will graduate in June from South San Antonio High School, is headed to UTSA to study AI at its School of Data Science.

‘Seeing the connections’

Palacios also took part in Port San Antonio’s internship program, which restarted last year after a pandemic pause. He was encouraged to apply by Domingo Ruiz, the same teacher who pushed Loera to apply in 2019.

Ruiz, who heads up South San’s IT pathway, one of 19 career and technical paths students there can follow, got to see Palacio take the stage at Friday’s luncheon before hustling out to prepare for a student drone competition on Saturday for third graders through middle schoolers.

Ruiz’s IT students, including Palacios, recently turned a largely empty classroom at South San into a state-of-the-art esports STEM lab. The students themselves built 30 gaming systems, assembled desks and chairs and wired up the room.

“We don’t play anything we don’t build,” said Ruiz, who will be adding cybersecurity concepts and ideas to the IT curriculum at South San next year. Students “are seeing the connections” between the fun things they like to do — like fly drones and play esports — with STEM careers, he said.

Palacios, whose grandfather served in the Air Force at Kelly, was unaware of what was happening at the Port before he got hooked in, as were his parents.

“When I came, I was just completely mesmerized by everything happening here,” he said. “Like, how all these opportunities are happening right here on the South Side of San Antonio?”

Friday’s final event was an indoor drone competition that drew almost 300 middle school students from seven local school districts. Part of the Dee Howard Foundation’s latest initiative and supported by a grant from the Kelly Heritage Foundation, Boeing and others, the program, by Iconic Drone Education, spent months teaching the kids how to build, fly and maintain drones. They also learned about industries using drones, including energy, supply chains and defense.

In between the luncheon and the drone competition, the Port hosted a conversation at Area 21 on the rapidly developing air transportation technologies that have the potential to move people and goods in ways leaders in the industry are still dreaming up.

Chris Combs, who holds the Dee Howard Memorial Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Mechanical Engineering at UTSA and oversees the Hypersonics Lab in the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design, took a moment to address Raut’s speech from the luncheon during a panel discussion about the future of the aviation industry.

“Nobody’s born bad at math, all right? Kids in third grade hear that they’re bad at math, and that’s it. You’ve ended that possible career path for them,” he said, his mini-rant earning a round of applause from the audience.

“We’ve got to change that mindset in San Antonio to take advantage of this opportunity that’s coming down the pipe, so we can fill it up with people from here.”