San Antonio Express-News
By Michelle De La Rosa
Maureen Gonima wanted her children to be taught in both English and Spanish, so she searched long and hard for an elementary school that offered that kind of dual-language program.
She finally discovered Bonham Academy, in the San Antonio Independent School District.
“Bonham was the only school that offered an emphasis on languages but at the same time was focusing on all the other academic disciplines, and we loved the small size and the diversity of it,” said Gonima, who lives in the suburban North East Independent School District.
SAISD officials and the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel are partnering to attract more parents like Gonima to the district, located in the city's core. Enrollment has declined by some 20,000 students since the 1970s, putting student rolls at about 55,000 today.
On Thursday, the American Federation of Teachers awarded the Alliance, one of its affiliates, a $150,000 Innovation Fund grant to get that effort off the ground. The amount itself is relatively small, but it represents the genesis of what is expected to be a years-long push to revitalize the district through such initiatives as converting schools to in-district charters and marketing them individually. The grant covers only the first year of the effort.
“We've been talking about some of these ideas, probably for at least seven years,” Alliance President Shelley Potter said. “The Innovation Fund grant gives us the opportunity to actually be able to get resources that would allow us to take some of these ideas ... and to put them into action.”
AFT also funded six other projects across the nation — the first recipients of the new Innovation Fund grants.
Potter's group has criticized SAISD Superintendent Robert Durón for focusing too heavily on closing schools and not enough on coming up with creative solutions to boost the student count.
Durón did not return telephone calls seeking comment Thursday.
His staff is reviewing — and could modify — a proposal by a community advisory committee to downsize the district by closing more than a dozen schools over a decade and restructuring others. Trustees are scheduled to vote on a plan later this month.
Some of the grant money would be used to encourage schools to convert to in-district charters — SAISD campuses that have a special curriculum focus, such as Bonham's dual-language program, and more leeway in the classroom — and help them through the process.
The district currently has seven such schools, which serve neighborhood children as well as students throughout the district and outside of SAISD. The Alliance wants to have 30 in-district charters within three years.
The charter staff would be trained how to measure charter competitors that are independent of SAISD so they can better market themselves.
Another part of the plan calls for creating community schools to serve as one-stop shops for neighborhoods, that could include academic, medical, mental health and social services, depending on the community's needs. That, Potter said, would allow SAISD to make use of the space at half-empty schools.
Another key part of the plan is a Grow Our Schools summit, where a cross section of Bexar County leaders would examine issues that contribute to the enrollment problem.
State Rep. Mike Villarreal, whose daughter attends Bonham Academy, said he would work to garner support for the event, which will be held in March. He said he is excited about the project because it focuses on promoting individual schools, not the district as a whole — SAISD hired a marketing firm in July to do that.
“It misses the point, which is there are existing assets that are in and around our individual schools,” Villarreal said. “Let's identify them, and let's put together a plan to play to those strengths.”