SAN ANTONIO \u2014 For Mary Catherine Uribe, walking by her son\u2019s old school was surreal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t been here in a couple of years, it\u2019s kind of like a ghost town it\u2019s so eerie,\u201d Uribe said.<\/p>\n
Uribe pivoted when her son\u2019s campus shuttered two years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI made the choice to move because I didn\u2019t want my son in an overcrowded school and I wanted him to have more access to resources,\u201d Uribe said. \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate that where you live is tied to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are lots of public school options in San Antonio, and there are more than 17 school districts in this area.<\/p>\n
\u201cI moved to the Northside, now I have my son in a school over there. He\u2019s in special education and one of our policy priorities is special education for the Bexar Builds Coalition,\u201d Uribe said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Bexar Builds Coalition is a network made up of area school districts, nonprofits and businesses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe talked teacher pipeline, we talked about special education investments, and safety and security,\u201d Eduardo Hernandez,\u00a0superintendent of Edgewood ISD, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The other two priorities were investing in early childhood education and reevaluating the cost to operate schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we have inflationary impacts on utilities, transportation, fuel, etc. We need the state to cover the cost of doing business,\u201d Julia Grizzard, executive director and founder of\u00a0Bexar Builds, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The business community was invited to the summit to see how these issues impact the future workforce.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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, \u2018Hey, these are problems worth exploring and worth finding solutions for,\u2019\u201d Uribe said.<\/p>\n
Hernandez\u00a0agrees.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe live in a city that is hospitality-based. We also live in a city that is moving towards cybersecurity,\u201d Hernandez said. \u201cSo 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\u2019s the workforce or training programs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Uribe believes the concerns of Bexar County districts aren\u2019t exclusive to the area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBexar County represents Texas in a lot of different ways. Geographically have rural districts, we have school districts in the downtown, city area,\u201d Uribe said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The deadline to pre-file \u2014 which include the formal steps lawmakers make to file bills and resolutions \u2014 is a month away.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
The 90th legislative session begins next January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN ANTONIO \u2014 For Mary Catherine Uribe, walking by her son\u2019s old school was surreal.\u00a0 \u201cI haven\u2019t been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[836,1570,163,6294,223,82,84,83,27,1569,835],"class_list":["post-459975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-app-education","tag-ctv","tag-education","tag-jose-arredondo","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-texas","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}