This story has been updated.
What comes next for the 15 schools on the San Antonio Independent School District’s closure list?
After May 2024, will the buildings sit vacant in their neighborhoods, a shell of the activity they once were, dust collecting on what remains inside and the playgrounds silenced?
Or will the facilities, destined for closure after a vote by trustees in November, continue to be the heart and hub of their communities?
Schools provide many resources beyond simply education, said Kate Mraw, an architect and director of K-12 at LPA Design Studios in San Antonio. Thus, the buildings tend to be solid structures with nutritional spaces and gymnasiums that make them well-suited to other uses that could serve a community.
In the Austin Independent School District, plans are already in the works to turn one school campus, closed since 2020, into a child care center operated by United Way, another into workforce housing and two others into district offices.
Those decisions came after a multi-phase public input process but the ultimate fate of two other shuttered schools remains undetermined.
Along with SAISD, the Edgewood, Harlandale and South San Antonio independent school districts all voted in 2023 to close schools, although it is unclear what will become of some of the vacant facilities.
In Harlandale, plans to relocate the police department and other offices were included as part of the package voted on to close schools. Those changes went into effect this school year.
In 2021 and 2022, there were 755 public school closures across the country, including 324 elementary schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In SAISD, adapting closed schools for different uses appears to be on the horizon. A “facility repurposing panel” is being developed, said spokeswoman Laura Short, with nominations open until Dec. 8 and meetings expected to start in the spring.
The panel will discuss proposals already on the table, with the aim to find “entities that provide services that continue to bring value to the community,” Short said in an email.
District officials have already had preliminary conversations with local nonprofit organizations looking to repurpose the school buildings, she said. The district plans to launch a formal request for proposals process to review those repurposing concepts.
The cost to repurpose a school building can vary widely depending on the planned use. The work to convert Austin’s Pease Elementary to a daycare has been promised $3 million in federal funds and United Way will have to pick up the rest.
“Repurposing facilities can be anywhere from maybe $80 a square foot to $300 a square foot or more — there’s such a huge range,” Mraw said.
LPA has also worked on school facility projects that were initially slated for renovation, but because of the cost, it became more affordable to demolish and start from scratch, she said.
Though school buildings tend to be good structures because of the rigor of building codes for education facilities, things like heating and air conditioning systems and security and technology needs drive up the price to repurpose, Mraw added.
The first step is a feasibility study that would explore two to three different uses and find the best fit for the building’s future use. The process can be hard but fruitful, she said.
“Although it can be very challenging, I know how delicate the connections are to an existing school and that school closures are very thoughtful, challenging decisions to make for districts, there may be really strong opportunities that add value back to the community, as well,” Mraw said.
Service to families
In the early 2000s, Edgewood ISD went through a downsizing process due to declining enrollment.
District leaders elected to close the 70-year-old H.K. Williams Elementary School, 3014 Rivas St., on the West Side of San Antonio.
The district then leased the building to Family Service, a nonprofit founded in 1903 focused on economic stability, education, health care and neighborhood support. The organization is embedded in many schools throughout the city.
Family Service turned the closed school into a community resource center known as The Neighborhood Place. In 2016, Family Service paid the district $1 million to buy the building.
It took several million dollars more to renovate for the needs of the organization and its partner agencies, said Mylinda Swierc, Family Service’s senior vice president for quality and service.
“And that did not cover everything that needed to be done,” she said. “We still have future work that we try to do every year and big projects that we’re trying to do fundraising for over time.”
But having a physical space that it owned in the neighborhood was a game changer for Family Service and its clients, Swierc said.
“The Neighborhood Place also helped give us some visibility around our services,” she added. “It’s made a big difference in getting to the people and getting them and those trusting relationships and coming in for services.”
Family Service is watching what’s happening in SAISD because the organization provides services in its schools, said Mary Garr, president and CEO of the nonprofit. “Our services would shift to other schools in the school district,” she said of the closed facilities.
The district has not contacted Family Service about leasing or buying buildings, Garr said.
Fabric of the community
Alejandra Lopez, president of San Antonio Alliance, said she plans to be actively involved in discussions about what to do with the closed school campuses and buildings. The Alliance is a workers’ union representing all non-administrative school staff at SAISD.
As a member of the superintendent’s children’s cabinet, Lopez already has participated in brainstorming around the repurposing of buildings, she said.
“I would say any of the schools on the list, I could imagine or envision them becoming something like a daycare, a senior center, an art center,” Lopez said.
One of the 10 positions that the Alliance has put forward asks that the public be included in all discussions around school repurposing in neighborhoods where the facility has been a part of the fabric of the community for generations.
“One of the most important commitments we’ve gotten from district leadership is that these buildings are not going to be sold,” Lopez said. “A lot of these schools are in communities that are [experiencing] gentrification at a really alarming rate.”
What comes next for the 15 schools on the closure list is of particular interest, of course, to parents of school-age children in the district.
For Mariel Gastélum-Baray, it means another laborious search to find the right school for her daughter who has special needs. And no time remaining in a busy mom’s day to participate in any public process to decide the future of closed school buildings.
Because her neighborhood school couldn’t meet their needs, the other option was to bus the kindergartner to another SAISD school that is a 25-minute drive away.
Following the recommendation of a therapist, Gastélum-Baray went searching for a better option. The mother of two visited Choice schools, but none were a good fit, and she found most charter schools to be “severely lacking,” she said.
While searching on a Facebook platform, “a couple of the teachers messaged me saying you should come check out Lamar, so I did and I fell in love with it,” she said.
The 54,000-square-foot Lamar Elementary, at 201 Parland Place, was built in 1924 in the Mahncke Park neighborhood and renovated in 2005. Surrounding the school and its playgrounds are single-family houses, townhomes and an affordable apartment complex owned by Merced Housing Texas.
Gastélum-Baray isn’t interested in talking about repurposing Lamar and isn’t waiting for the district to help her find a new school.
“I’m approaching this the way I did last year,” she said, by canvassing parent groups on social media. “It’s just become like a grassroots movement. We’re all just kind of splitting up but still sticking together.”
Education reporter Isaac Windes contributed to this story.
This story had been updated to remove a paragraph that incorrectly stated that Superintendent Jaime Aquino mentioned the possibility of leasing Lamar Elementary School to the Witte Museum.
