Not long after school began across San Antonio Independent School District on the morning of Jan. 16, principals and teachers began fielding frantic texts from parents who had heard their kids were sitting in frigid classrooms due to failing heaters.
Some parents picked their kids up shortly after.
One parent brought in a space heater to try to keep kids warm as outside temperatures hovered between 20 and 30 degrees on one of the coldest days of the winter season. But no communication was coming from the district administration, which decided to open schools that morning after consulting with other regional districts days earlier.
Unlike past frigid spells, no precipitation was forecast, making hazards like icing and slippery roads, which often lead to weather closures in local schools, less of a concern. Operations staff had also assured Superintendent Jaime Aquino multiple times in the preceding week that schools were operational and ready.
So, district officials were caught off-guard and largely unaware of the widespread heating failures in the early hours of the crisis, eventually leading to the district closing for the remainder of the week. They also didn’t know what campus staff was doing about it across the district, which has a patchwork of heating and cooling systems running on separate systems with no central monitoring.
As highlighted in an after-action report released Monday, “the District did not know which schools were cold, or why, let alone which solutions were being put into place.”
According to a chronological summary of Jan. 16 events released in the report, the district’s first indication of the issues was media inquiries, which began to trickle in around 8 a.m.
District leaders took responsibility for the failures in the report and promised extensive change to prevent a similar event from occurring again.
The Board of Trustees unanimously approved the findings in the report, and the dozens of included recommendations after a brief discussion at a board meeting Monday night.
Solutions include overhauling the district’s HVAC infrastructure and work order process and revisiting the usage of district facilities to decrease the number of HVAC systems that need to be maintained. That discussion, which last resulted in the decision to close 15 schools, was requested by the Board of Trustees to be completed within five years previously.
The latest crisis has moved that timeline up — and it all comes with a cost.
Decades of problems
Trustee Leticia Ozuna, who headed the ad-hoc committee of the SAISD Board of Trustees investigating the crisis, told the San Antonio Report that the errors that led to the January episode go back decades and include human error and a lack of resources.
“The crisis was the result of multiple layers of human error that accumulated over the last 20 years,” she said. “Not only human error that happened during the crisis.”
One of the most consequential errors that compounded over time has been the uneven installation and quality control of HVAC systems across the district, with some schools over 100 years old.
Those older campuses were retrofitted as bond funds became available, adding new mechanical systems to the old buildings.
“You are adding new systems to old infrastructure,” Aquino told the San Antonio Report. “The buildings should have been demolished and they should have created new ones.”
However, at the time, retrofitting was presented as an economical solution.
With no standardized monitoring system, however, the district-wide nature of the disaster overwhelmed officials, leaving staff scrambling for days to even assess the full extent of the problem.
The report recommends that within a year the district purchase computerized enterprise systems to provide real-time, standardized, and comprehensive data on HVAC hardware across all school facilities, as well as accurate records of maintenance.
By the end of the year, the district will have spent $8 million on repairs related to the crisis, with interim operations staff requesting $12 million to continue work next year, according to Aquino and the report.
The cost of overhauling the system to bring facilities up to industry standards, however, is an estimated $353 million, according to the report, with $250 million going to HVAC updates.
Broken work order system
Problems with the physical infrastructure were not the only ones brewing in the months and years leading up to the breakdown.
Work order and call center systems had fallen into a state of disrepair to the point that campus leaders would seek other ways to fulfill their needs due to their “reputation of not being reliable,” according to the report.
So when hundreds of work order calls flooded the call center on the morning of Jan. 16, the system buckled, and stayed down when hundred more flooded in the next day.
“The Operations Call Center became swamped and there was no apparent system for ordering or prioritizing responses to issues,” the report said. “Campus staff were just as likely to rely on workarounds — calling assistant superintendents or colleagues in the central office — as they were to use the Operations Call Center to report issues.”
This led to a failure of recordkeeping, a substantial barrier to managing the crisis as HVAC systems went down across the district, creating a “pervasive problem of uncertainty.”
Officials had also continued to relay confidence in the continued operations of campuses in the first days of the crisis.
But by the third day, Ken Thompson, deputy superintendent of operations, and Mike Eaton, chief of operations, resigned.
In response to these findings, the report recommended that the district commit to reviewing the current work order system, “refining or adopting a new system,” and ensuring follow-up communication between schools and operations staff.
Aquino declined to comment on whether other employees were disciplined or fired due to the breakdown, citing a policy not to comment on personnel issues.
Too many campuses?
In addition to the mismatched systems, district leaders point to an overall need for more funding, exacerbated by campuses that cost more than they generate in revenue from the state. In Texas, the state funds schools based on the average daily attendance of students.
Aquino and board members pointed to the lack of state funding increases since 2019, even though inflation and the cost of operating and materials have risen substantially.
However, the remarks about schools with low enrollment contributing to the district’s woes echo the “right-sizing” conversations that wrapped up weeks before the HVAC crisis came to a head.
Similar to the recently completed process, the report recommends the district conduct a comprehensive study of excess facility capacity, complete with recommendations for the reduction or right-sizing of schools, academic programs, and the central office. The deadline set in the report is Nov. 2025. Aquino said the solution was a simple matter of resource allocation.
“We have about 100 buildings, a lot of them small schools, so we need to maintain 100 HVAC systems,” he said. “We could only have 50 buildings, for example, and maintain 50 HVAC systems.”
Bond dollars, which the report found haven’t historically been allocated based on a thorough analysis of district needs, could also be more efficiently apportioned over a smaller number of schools, he said.
To solve for that, the report urges the board to adopt policies requiring that five percent of future bonds be dedicated to investing in deferred maintenance until that is no longer needed, and requiring that decisions are made “based on reliable external data obtained from a facilities conditions assessment conducted by an independent third party.
The district held dozens of emotional meetings over several months last year, facing pushback from local elected leaders and parent groups as they sought ways to better align district resources by closing school campuses.
The community and district could be repeating that process in the coming months.
Other solutions
An outside review by the Texas Association of School Business Officials (TASBO) identified critical failures in 10 key areas, including a “lack of budget funds of mismanagement of budget to support needed ongoing maintenance of equipment,” as well as inadequate leadership, poor departmental culture and a lack of documented procedures and processes.
Beyond the lack of critical systems, the organization found competing interests on the campus level leading to unnecessarily deferred maintenance.
“In recent years, budgets have become increasingly difficult to balance. However, the district’s facilities have suffered due to a lack of monetary resources to repair aging equipment,” Tracy Ginsburg, the executive director of TASBO, said. “In the same manner, it appears that campus principals have been allowed to override the recommendations for repair and replacement of aging equipment in favor of other projects.”
That competition and potential mismanagement has led to a culture of distrust which needs to be addressed to prevent similar breakdowns in the future, according to Ginsburg.
Dozens of solutions and changes were included in the report including a new guardrail guiding board policy focused on safe school environments, the adoption of business continuity procedures by August 2024 and a market study to study compensation and benefits packages for HVAC and other operations professionals in Texas.
With that, the district can find ways to be more competitive and to fill vacancies in critical HVAC positions, which also contributed to the disaster earlier this year.
Ozuna said that the ad-hoc committee hopes the report will result in a restoration of trust as well as a roadmap towards solutions for the district.
“This report is being made open and public… to make sure that our families understand … how we got here, and how we’re committed not to have a redo of this event,” she said. “But number two that we are laser focused on academic outcomes, and we will do anything that it takes to make sure that we can deliver high-quality education.”
