SAN ANTONIO — For Mary Catherine Uribe, walking by her son’s old school was surreal.
“I haven’t been here in a couple of years, it’s kind of like a ghost town it’s so eerie,” Uribe said.
Uribe pivoted when her son’s campus shuttered two years ago.
“I made the choice to move because I didn’t want my son in an overcrowded school and I wanted him to have more access to resources,” Uribe said. “It’s unfortunate that where you live is tied to that.”
There are lots of public school options in San Antonio, and there are more than 17 school districts in this area.
“I moved to the Northside, now I have my son in a school over there. He’s in special education and one of our policy priorities is special education for the Bexar Builds Coalition,” Uribe said.
The Bexar Builds Coalition is a network made up of area school districts, nonprofits and businesses.
The group recently held a summit where 14 local school districts, more than 100 organizations and 20 businesses discussed their top four priorities for the upcoming legislative session. School leaders feel a united front with a list of priorities districts can all agree on could help them in obtaining the additional funding they say they need.
“We talked teacher pipeline, we talked about special education investments, and safety and security,” Eduardo Hernandez, superintendent of Edgewood ISD, said.
The other two priorities were investing in early childhood education and reevaluating the cost to operate schools.
“As we have inflationary impacts on utilities, transportation, fuel, etc. We need the state to cover the cost of doing business,” Julia Grizzard, executive director and founder of Bexar Builds, said.
The business community was invited to the summit to see how these issues impact the future workforce.
“We are a business state, and the state legislature listens to our business community, and so it would mean so much more to have them show up and say, ‘Hey, these are problems worth exploring and worth finding solutions for,’” Uribe said.
Hernandez agrees.
“We live in a city that is hospitality-based. We also live in a city that is moving towards cybersecurity,” Hernandez said. “So what type of internal pipelines are the school districts providing so that students can move out of their high school into higher ed(ucation) whether it’s the workforce or training programs.”
Uribe believes the concerns of Bexar County districts aren’t exclusive to the area.
“Bexar County represents Texas in a lot of different ways. Geographically have rural districts, we have school districts in the downtown, city area,” Uribe said.
The deadline to pre-file — which include the formal steps lawmakers make to file bills and resolutions — is a month away.
The 90th legislative session begins next January.