Going back to school can be nerve-wracking, full of questions and wonder for almost anyone — even when you’re over 50, retired and brilliantly silver-haired.

Such was the case for students of the Academy of Learning in Retirement, or ALIR, attending a recent orientation day.

With roughly 40 first-time students crowded into a room on the second floor of the North East ISD community learning building, Kelleigh Lewis shared her story of finding community and purpose after retiring from teaching nearly nine years ago.

“I really did not know what to do with the rest of my life,” she recalled. But one day, her husband found a newspaper ad for ALIR and left a note saying, “This may be for you because I believe that you are a lifelong learner, and your life is changing.”

Lewis admits she didn’t like ALIR the first time she tried it out, but she gave it another go two years later and hasn’t looked back since.

“My friends are now ALIRians… you’ll meet new people and have these wonderful experiences,” Lewis reassured the crowd. “We are the best kept secret in town.”

A full class of Academy of Learning in Retirement students sit and listen during a morning class session for the History of the CIA course at the NEISD Community Learning Center on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

ALIR was founded in 1989 as an extension of the University of Texas at San Antonio as an all-volunteer learning academy offering a variety of classes to an over-50 crowd. Initially housed at the old Institute of Texan Cultures, ALIR outgrew its space and moved to NEISD’s Community Education Department in 2006.

To this day, ALIR is fully run by volunteers, and on that Jan. 21 orientation day, Linda Comeaux, vice chair for the ALIR’s council, said 450 students were signed up for the spring semester.

The academy uses a similar schedule to traditional school systems, with spring, summer and fall semesters and some mini semesters for certain classes.

Unlike traditional schools, ALIR students get to pick freely from a list of 100 different course offerings, varying from Spanish and watercolor painting to chair yoga, mahjong and the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. Students pay $85 per semester and are free to register for as many classes as they want as long as there’s space.

Some more offbeat offerings include a history class called “Our Presidents Did What,” a film course titled “Murder is … Still Funny” and a current events class named simply “Donald Trump.”

Linda Comeaux, ALIR Vice Chair of Marketing, assists with getting students enrolled and situated ahead of their 11 a.m. class at the NEISD Community Learning Center on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

All courses are taught by volunteers, said Comeaux, usually recruited from ALIR’s own student pool. Some instructors sign up to offer classes in subjects they’re really interested in, others have years of professional experience behind them.

Peter and Julie Nyren, two retired CIA officers, teach a class on the history of the agency on Thursdays. It’s a popular class, Comeaux said, and seats filled up almost instantly when registration opened. Currently, the class has about 35 students.

On Feb. 26, while the Nyrens held class, learners sat in old school wooden desks, quiet, hanging on to every word, and unafraid to raise their hands to ask questions.

After wrapping up that class, Peter makes his way to guitar class to learn from maestro Felix Cerna, a bespectacled and mustachioed retired English professor who’s turned to music in his later years.

Cerna’s class, though smaller with seven students, is livelier, as students strum through chord progressions and poke gentle fun at themselves when they mess up. The goal that day was for students to learn “West Virginia” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

Lewis, who started off as a student and now sits on the academy’s curriculum committee, teaches a chair-based yoga class after realizing there was a need for something that offered more support than practicing yoga on mats.

ALIR Instructor Kelleigh Lewis leads a group of students in a Yoga-inspired Stretching class at the NEISD Community Learning Center on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

One of the few classes held on the first floor of the building, Lewis leads about 20 students through gentle stretches, incorporating chairs for balance.

“I let extra people come in, because it’s something that people need,” she said.

This spring, Comeaux is taking an American Sign Language course and teaching a history class on Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken without her knowledge and became the first immortal human cell line, which was crucial in developing vaccines and fundamentally changing medicine practices.

While most classes are held in an NEISD building off Tesoro Drive, ALIR also offers virtual options. Comeaux’s class on Henrietta Lacks is online, as well as a memoir writing class and a course on “enhancing peace and happiness.”

Through its virtual offerings, ALIR has found students from outside of San Antonio and eight other states. Like the rest of the education world, ALIR was forced to move operations online during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

While moving online was a technical adjustment for several ALIR students, it was necessary to keep the community alive, Comeaux said.

“We had closed everything, and we depended on each other. We were our community. We needed each other, so we decided to try Zoom,” she recollected.

Before the pandemic, ALIR’s enrollment had hit an all time high of 650 students. The program has been rebuilding slowly but surely since then, and ALIR kept its virtual offerings even after businesses and schools opened back up.

“We still have a group of people that, for various reasons, need to be home or they’re out of town,” Comeaux said. “We want to keep those people. Maybe they have mobility issues, maybe have transportation issues. Maybe they live in a different county.”

ALIR student Joseph Kilchrist takes notes during a morning class on the History of the CIA at the NEISD Community Learning Center on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

While ALIR students and instructors come from all walks of life, a similar thread pulls them all together.

“It’s my brain — it’s not the same. I need to be stimulated and engaged,” said Linda Crawford. “It’s like an itch that I have to learn something.”

Crawford, 63, is a retired banker and a first-time ALIR student. Having left a demanding job only last year, Crawford said she was antsy to keep active, so she signed up of a couple of ALIR courses, including an online course called “Study of the Book Revelation.”

Her story, along with Lewis and Comeaux’s, is not unique. In Bexar County, nearly 30% of the population is over 50, a group that commonly reports feeling lonely or isolated.

“Social connection is so important,” said Comeaux, and that’s why she keeps going back to ALIR every semester.

The program even has students and instructors around 100 years old, and students’ social calendars are often packed with potlucks, luncheons and showcases for the dancing, music and art classes.

ALIR is what students make of it, Lewis and Comeaux say, and it has so much to offer.

“You don’t have to be a professional to either take or teach classes at ALIR, because we come from all over and and that — that is the greatest thing,” Lewis said. “We’re all lifelong learners.”