The start of a new school year, a time of hope and excitement for students and parents, has a special meaning this week at Mead Elementary School, which recently elevated test scores to dodge a threat of school closure by the state.
After three straight years of getting an F from the Texas Education Agency, the 20-year-old school near the South Texas Medical Center is projected to score an 87 — a strong B, above the C the school needed to be removed from the state’s list of at-risk campuses, according to estimates by the Northside Independent School District. Had Mead scored two more Ds or Fs, the state would have been forced to order the school’s closure or place the entire 95,500-student school district under TEA oversight.
Mead is among 132 Northside schools that began classes on Monday, along with East Central and South San Antonio ISDs and Harmony, Jubilee and KIPP charter schools. Boerne ISD, Edgewood ISD, Great Hearts Texas and IDEA Public Schools will reopen Tuesday. Other school systems start a new academic year in the next two weeks.
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Luis Estrada was the first parent waiting for Mead to open, arriving with his three children more than an hour before classes began. A steady stream of parents escorted their children up the hill to the campus, greeted by the principal and cheerful children’s show tunes blaring from a loudspeaker.
Despite its academic struggles with the state, the school has good reviews from parents, and the teachers are friendly, Estrada said.
“It’s an open community for everyone. They have all kinds of races here. They have all kinds of people here. That’s what I like about it,” he said.
Luis Estrada III holds his son Luis, 7, outside Mead Elementary before dropping him off on the first day back at Northside ISD on Monday.
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Luis Estrada III hugs his daughter Addison, 9, before the first day of school at Mead Elementary on Monday.
Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News
Ayesha Jamalzai, 9, was ready to start third grade with a new backpack, a fresh, clean pair of tennis shoes and dreams of someday becoming a meteorologist. It’s been nearly a decade since her family came to San Antonio from Afghanistan.
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“I like the classes, and I like working on the computers,” said Jamalzai, whose favorite subject is science.
Mead, with a diverse student population that’s more than 90% low income, and over 60% of kids learning English as a second language, serves hundreds of resettled international refugee children. The school was placed last year on a state-required turnaround plan to improve scores on state standardized tests.
Along the way, Amanda Garner-Maskill, now starting her fifth year as principal, said she found her voice as a school leader.
“Last year, it was about breaking the mold,” she said.
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With help from the district’s curriculum staff and bilingual/ESL department, Mead saw a 15-percentage-point increase to 58% of students passing reading portions of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. About 62% passed the math portion — a nearly 25-percentage-point boost.
The improved test scores remove the school from the TEA chopping block — at least for now. State letter grades at the elementary school level are entirely based on STAAR results.
‘Closing gaps’
Northside reported gains at other struggling campuses this year, but none compared to the dramatic breakthrough at Mead, named for a pioneering San Antonio educator who died in 2017. The school serves a broad cross-section of students from around the world, including the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Central and South America. The top three languages among Mead’s families are Pashto, Arabic and Farsi.
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“I know that we will be an example of, ‘If Mead can do, anybody can do it,’ ” said Garner-Maskill. “It gives us a great springboard to continue to invite families to have conversations about their child’s academics.”
The school applied research-based practices that suggest multilingual learners need to be challenged more to attain grade-level performance and used “aggressive coaching” with its teachers, tossing aside slower, incremental coaching models, the principal said.
Leelani Hernandez, center, 8, smiles at her grandmother, Betty Gaytan, alongside her mother Sasha Herrera, left, on the first day back to school at Mead Elementary on Monday.
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Ayesha Jamalzai, 9, left, and Mehnaz Khawri, 7, look at their class schedule on the first day of school at Mead Elementary on Monday.
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The turnaround also involved confessions. Garner-Maskill acknowledged to her teachers her “misstep” in applying accepted methods for academic improvement without a sense of urgency in past years. Last year, she asked “harder questions” and demanded more from teachers and district staff.
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She noticed one of her fourth-grade ESL classes, taught by veteran educator Amy Mendez, had the highest test scores at Mead and generated more student participation in classroom discussions.
When cornered by her principal, who asked what she was doing differently, Mendez admitted she wasn’t “following the curriculum step-by-step” in English, math and other subjects. She was often giving students more time to grasp concepts before moving to the next topic. Sometimes, when the principal wasn’t present, she deviated from the lesson time frame.
“I did tell her, ‘Once the classroom door closes, I just teach to support my students,” Mendez said. “We’re not only teaching fourth-grade students. We’re closing gaps that they have, because some of them are coming straight into fourth grade from coming from another country.”
Shaped by her own highly structured upbringing as a military child who moved frequently and has since visited 16 different countries, Mendez said she uses student peer mentoring, daily homework assignments, extra credit opportunities and relationship-building with families to “light their fire to do good for themselves.”
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“They want to do good. And that’s what we’re trying to teach them,” she said.
Garner-Maskill held up Mendez, who was recently honored as Mead’s elementary educator of the year, as a model for other teachers at the school, and gave them flexibility to deviate from curriculum timelines, while providing instruction required under state guidelines. She said she’ll continue working with Mead’s educators to improve academic performance.
Although the state’s accountability grades won’t be publicly released by the state until Friday, Garner-Maskill said there’s a new level of excitement among the teachers to start the 2026-27 school year.
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“We are happy, but we also know that sustaining is just as hard as getting out, if not harder,” she said. “We cannot take our foot off the pedal.”
Parents walk their children into Mead Elementary on the first day of school on Monday.
Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News