Alamo Asks: Why are there so many school districts?

The question “Why so many school districts?” can be answered in one sentence from a story by a San Antonio ExpressNews education reporter, Krista Torralva, in the summer of 2020: “Today’s school district boundaries evolved from almost 50 years of segregated real estate development in San Antonio — the formal, legal kind common in U.S. cities in the early and mid-20th century.”

But that’s only half the question.

If the sheer number of school districts means some of them are really small — often leading to inefficiencies and bizarre school board politics — and if this displays their many differences in income, resources and outcomes, then why on earth don’t we merge some of them?

A few brave souls have tried to raise that question. Some say Bexar County could be one big megadistrict; others favor consolidating the small ones into a more manageable handful. But they never get anywhere, especially with the leaders and residents of the school districts themselves.

State law makes any consolidation subject to an election. Voters in the districts involved would need to approve it. An array of forces is ranged against any such move. There’s pride. There’s tradition. There’s football (no kidding, it comes up as a factor). There are the employment and business relationships and other economic benefits of the status quo. There’s sheer inertia.

As Express-News columnist Gilbert Garcia noted in 2017, merging school districts is “the two-ton boulder of Bexar County politics; fun to talk about, but hard to move.”

We’re not that unique.

The disparity in student outcomes based on race and income — test scores, college and career readiness, graduation rates and other metrics — is something you can see all over the United States. And there was nothing unusual about the racial deed restrictions in San Antonio’s outlying neighborhoods and small cities as they sprouted up,

many of them in the 1920s, with names like Harlandale and Alamo Heights.

Some parts of town had no deed restrictions, of course. In some cases, they also had houses without indoor plumbing well into the 1940s.

The state’s “independent school districts” were created from existing school systems in urban areas and, slightly later, from the patchwork of rural single-school communities that joined each other in the World War II era. Our existing districts were pretty much in place by the 1950s.

Some districts organized themselves from a sense of community identity. At least one formed because its residents were almost 100% Mexican American and poor — and the larger district next door refused to include it. That larger district now has a Hispanic enrollment of more than 90%, because history never stops and metropolitan areas are dynamic.

Speaking of dynamic: Four ISDs inside Loop 410 are closing schools, or facing up to that necessity, because of shrinking enrollment. The reasons vary. They have aging populations and fewer kids, charter school competition, the desire of younger families to move out of highpoverty areas.

And yet, one of them, San Antonio ISD, has families affluent enough to choose other options besides neighborhood schools. Its rising housing values make living there less affordable to those not as affluent.

These four districts have an enrollment crisis. Will people finally start to think about consolidating, so they have more resources to work with? That’s doubtful. One of the smallest, South San Antonio ISD, is going to have a tough enough time just taking its likely next step, consolidating its two high school populations into one.

Zoom out to school districts like East Central, Southside and Southwest ISDs, and parts of Northside ISD, and you can see areas that until fairly recently had a lot of rural space and only a few subdivisions. They now are being transformed into the opposite, with subdivisions squeezing out the ranches, farms, horse trailers and mesquite breaks.

Pay attention, class. This is called “exurban” growth, and there’s something about it that will shape the schools now being built.

School board politics might take a while to catch up to this reality, but exurbs have the most racially integrated public schools in the San Antonio area, because most people came from somewhere else. That’s another thing that’s true across the United States.

Keep an eye on that. It’s the future.

Kin Man Hui/Staff photographer Northside ISD is the fourth-largest school system in Texas. Some readers propose combining some of the area’s smaller school districts, but state law requires elections for that.