SAN ANTONIO — Most San Antonio ISD campuses will close until Monday as technicians address what Superintendent Jaime Aquino called "a system-wide failure of our heating systems" in a week that brought freezing-cold conditions to the region. Only the district's two early college high schools will still be teaching students this week.
Aquino announced the district-wide closures Wednesday afternoon, saying he takes "full responsibility" after 70% of the district's nearly 90 schools experienced system failures to some extent this week. He said the problems stemmed from "human error" after boiler systems weren't manually overridden to run around the clock at some campuses, causing them to break down.
"Too many of our students and staff across SAISD were in unfavorable conditions," Aquino said. "While we do have some schools that are operating efficiently, too many are not. And we have been unable to ascertain in real time on the ground information in an efficient manner."
San Antonio ISD received criticism from frustrated parents who told KENS 5 on Tuesday that their children were being moved to other areas of school, some of them saying it was less than 50 degrees in their classrooms. In a letter sent to families Tuesday afternoon, Aquino acknowledged that "preparations fell short" as they welcomed students back after the MLK Day holiday.
Aquino said district staff did check facility heating systems on Monday and had them running correctly. However, staff did not program, or "manually override" the boilers to run for the next 24 hours. As a result, those heating systems turned off before Tuesday morning and then became difficult to restart. Without the system running, the schools had additional issues with water pipes freezing and breaking in the buildings.
That left SAISD more than 30 campuses and sending technicians to at least 30 more on Tuesday and Wednesday, trying to access and fix the damage. The district found more issues than they could handle as students arrived to find cold classrooms once again.
Aquino said, in retrospect, the district should have closed those schools on Wednesday.
"As we move forward, we are not going to open a single school until it is warm, safe and a good place for learning." Aquino said. "We realize that some of you are wondering why this decision was not made sooner. I take full responsibility for making the wrong call."
The district is still sending technicians to every campus to determine the full extent of the damage at this time. Aquino said the district will also hold its staff accountable for the situation.
"I am taking a deep look, not only at the infrastructure causes of this issue, but (also) at the personnel involved. We have made adjustments to the responding team to insure that we receive on-the-ground, real-time information so we can made sure our buildings are fully operational and provide a safe environment for our students and staff," Aquino said.
SAISD Board President Christina Martinez said the school board will also be putting together a special committee to "understand and detail how this happened and make sure it doesn't happen again."
"We will get to the bottom of this," Martinez said.
Late notice
SAISD said late Tuesday night that 20 of its schools would be closed the following day for heating system-related repairs to be made, resulting in outcry from the district community.
By Wednesday morning, that list had grown to 31 schools.
Parents made their frustration known on social media.
"Get it together SAISD," one Facebook user wrote.
"Why not just close all the schools till this is over this is nuts," another commented. "Parents work then yall want to penalize for attendance. Ridiculous."
Some said they wouldn't be sending their kids until their campus was property heated.
"We dont have time to be going back and forth and getting them more sick," another parent wrote.
Asked why just 31 schools – or less than a third – were closed or classes canceled on Wednesday when 70% experienced heating problems, Aquino said issues at individual campuses arose at different times.
"Some of (those issues) actually surfaced, 9, 10, 4 or 5 in the morning," he said. "That’s the reason why. As soon as we knew, we made the decision.”
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