This story has been updated.
Parents and teachers across the San Antonio Independent School District experienced a combination of anticipation, disappointment and relief Friday after being informed that four campuses were removed from a list that originally recommended that 19 schools be closed. The news came in advance of a vote by trustees on the proposal Monday.
Pershing, Collins Garden, Ogden and Riverside Park elementary schools are no longer being considered for closure, letting parents like SetaleneBlu Trejo, who works and has a 5-year-old daughter at Pershing breathe a sigh of relief.
“It feels good,” she said while standing outside of the school on a gray afternoon. “Because now I know that I can keep my daughter here … where she started [and] with her friends.”
Trejo said she was dreading the possibility of having to decide where to send her daughter in the event Pershing closed down.
“You don’t want to just send your kids to another school because you have to,” she said. “What if I don’t like the way that school is? I just got comfortable in this school. We’re familiar with them.”
But hundreds of other families are facing that exact dilemma, with 15 schools still slated for closure if the board of trustees decides to approve the proposal next week.
Superintendent Jaime Aquino notified families and staff in an email Friday afternoon about the changes to the upcoming vote. Under the new proposal, Ogden Elementary School will stay open, but Rodriguez Elementary School will co-locate on the same campus, and Riverside Park Elementary School will stay open while accepting students from Green Elementary.
The campus formerly known as Green will become an extension of Bonham Academy, which currently has a waitlist.
“We deeply appreciate everyone who gave input into the initial recommendation to our right sizing study,” Aquino said in the email. “We recognize the range of emotions that surround this work, and we want to respect your contributions by sharing the final recommendation, with changes, that we intend to give the board on the evening of Monday, Nov. 13.”
The announcement comes at the end of a lengthy and often emotional process the district began at the end of June to realign resources with a dwindling student population.
Before the board meeting Monday, each impacted school will receive a decision memo, which will include the benefits and reasoning behind the closures and projected staffing considerations for modeled staff movement based on the assumption that staff will move with students to the receiving campus.
A campus financial summary will also be available for the public and campus staff to see how the changes impact the number of positions and type of resources each campus gets.
San Antonio Alliance President Alejandra Lopez said Friday that the process moved too fast, and should have included a direct vote by the community.
“Although there are bright spots on the revised school closure list, fifteen school communities will still continue to grapple with the profound challenge in the coming years,” she said.
Parents at some of the impacted schools were disappointed when learning their school had not been spared Friday afternoon.
Raylin Penn, who was waiting to pick up her young daughter from Douglass Elementary, said her daughter loves her teachers, and the school goes above and beyond.
“I come from Houston and they’ve never given groceries to the parents that come up here every two weeks,” she said. “They are doing field trips … I just feel like they take it to the next level.”
Douglass Elementary is also only four minutes from Penn’s house.
Lamar Elementary, which had its community organize in opposition to a possible closure, was quiet Friday, with the campus closed for the day.
Standing in her front yard near the school, Ana Collins said the last few weeks have been emotional, adding that she hopes the school somehow stays open.
“Here, we know everybody, we know the teachers since my oldest has been there,” she said. “We love the school.”
Collins has four children who attend Lamar and a baby that she was hoping would be able to attend in the coming years.
The family hasn’t discussed where they would want to send their children, with the district plan having students merging with Hawthorne Academy. She worries that other options won’t have tutors who have dyslexia and special education experience that Lamar has, she said.
Other parents told the San Antonio Report via text that they are regrouping, and will discuss what to do next in the coming days.
But Aquino said Friday that without changes, benefits like those at Lamar would not be available for every student across the district, which he said is an unacceptable status quo.
In an interview Friday, Aquino said that the district will become more equitable and have more significant resources to focus on historically low student outcomes if the proposal passes, pushing back on critics who have said the process has been rushed and could impact at-risk communities negatively.
"The purpose behind this was to try to ensure that we are providing every single kid with the investment they deserve and giving them the school they deserve," he said.
However, Aquino said that disinvestment concerns played into the district's calculus when choosing to remove Pershing Elementary School from the closures list.
"When we went to the community, they talked about the significant number of schools on the east side that were impacted," he said. "And that community has been highly impacted by disinvestment, not from us, but from the city."
The school is also part of the feeder pattern into Sam Houston High School, which is also critically under-enrolled, according to district data. More housing in the area also signals future growth, Aquino said.
Another school that was removed from the closure list is Collins Garden Elementary School, one of the district's oldest and largest elementary schools.
Community members shared concerns about transportation safety and the possibility of students having to cross railroad tracks under the initial proposal with the district and in interviews with the San Antonio Report.
According to materials shared by the district, the decision to remove the school from the list came partly because the elementary school had the highest enrollment of any school on the initial recommendation list.
Meanwhile, the district also released the results of an equity audit conducted by Terrance L. Green, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, on Friday.
When asked about the concerns surrounding the equity of the process and the length of the school closure community engagement, Aquino said he was disheartened by the lack of concern by parents and the community for student outcomes.
"What has been absent in this conversation has been the student body," he said. "It seems like equity has become so important now, when two-thirds of our kids cannot read, can not do mathematics or do science on grade level in all grades. Why wasn't there a public outcry around the equity that we are graduating students that are not going to the real world ready for life?"
Several groups have been outspoken about low reading scores, including MindShiftEd, which held a candlelight vigil for low reading scores in May to draw attention to the particularly low scores at J.T. Brackenridge Elementary.
Both that organization and City Education Partners, a nonprofit focused on education citywide, also provide classes for parents to become more involved and knowledgeable about their child's academic outcomes.
Aquino and other district officials have said the process in recent months is long overdue, with Aquino pointing to a list of 30 schools recommended for closure in 2009, many of which are on the current list due to continued loss of enrollment.
"How long are we going to postpone this if it's our inability to deliver high-quality education today?" he said.
If the proposal passes, Steele Montessori will relocate next year "to a facility to be determined after further community engagement," according to the district. During past community engagement, parents and educators said they were "open to relocating at campuses other than Riverside Park," which is accepting students from Green under the new proposal.
Under the rationale for the original proposal, the district said Steele was being relocated because of structural issues at the campus, the lack of a fully-functioning kitchen and high enrollment.
Trustees also will later determine what happens to the school buildings that are being vacated after further community engagement.
SAISD Trustee Ed Garza said during a San Antonio Report CityFest 2023 panel Thursday that the district was committed to not selling any of the properties so it could remain flexible in case enrollment trends reverse and schools need to be opened again.
Charter schools and the growing popularity of open enrollment districts have contributed to the decline in enrollment the district has faced in recent decades, in combination with declining birth rates.
"There's more competition in San Antonio, as we've seen elsewhere, and so more institutions are competing for fewer and fewer students that are spread out in a very large geographic urban and suburban living area," he said. "Our density is very low compared to cities of the Northeast or on the West Coast, and that has a price … in terms of how we serve students that are in families that are spread out."
Aquino said the district will be working to provide individualized "VIP" service to every family and student impacted by the closures, adding that the decision would be up to families at the end of the day.
"We're going to hold the parents' hand and give them personal attention to make sure that they don't go to charter school," he said. "But if they go to charter school, who am I? Who are you? Who is anyone to tell a parent that they should not exercise the choice of what they believe is right."
He added that parents have already been "voting with their feet," with more than 10,000 students who would have attended SAISD schools enrolled in charter schools in the 2022-23 school year.
SAISD's board of trustees will meet Monday at 5:30 p.m. at 514 W. Quincy St.
Reporter Raquel Torres contributed to this article.
