SAN ANTONIO — Thousands of students in San Antonio ISD returned to the classroom on Monday morning. The district said most campuses have been reopened after widespread heating failures last week.
Late Monday morning, a press conference was held at SAISD, when school officials said most schools were operating as normal.
Superintendent Jaime Aquino said all but two schools opened Monday morning. Those two schools were closed due to a power outage unrelated to the ongoing heat issues. Parents with students at those schools were notified of the outages directly.
"All issues that would interfere with student learning had either been resolved or mitigated," Aquino said at the news conference. "We procured and deployed portable climate units as part of our district-wide contingency plan.
Two key administrators resigned last week, the Deputy Superintendent and the previous Chief of Operations. Aquino said he accepted both of their resignations after a week of severe breakdowns in their heating systems. This caused the closure of nearly all SAISD campuses last week during the frigid cold temperatures.
SAISD officials said at the press conference that while schools did reopen, some of them still needed repairs.
"As of this morning, we had five campuses that had rooms that were too warm. We had three campuses that had rooms that were too cold and that was an improvement over last night," said Toni Thompson, Chief of Staff with SAISD.
About 1,100 climate control units were deployed to different campuses as part of a contingency plan so they would be warm or cool enough to support students. Thompson says as of last night 10% of campuses were functional meaning they were up and running, may have needed some adjustments for classroom readiness.
“Another 50% that were in stages of readiness and that’s one of the main reasons we just wanted to have climate control units out there so that they would be prepared and still serve students today," she said. "And then about last night about 27% still had some issues to include boiler issues and even that number has decreased today.”
Aquino says the failures were a combination of human error and faulty equipment, as well as infrastructure. However, he is planning to make to good on his promise of opening up the district’s 90-plus campuses on Monday. He said as many as 50 technicians worked though the weekend in preparation to reopen.
The district is asking a third party to conduct a thorough investigation to identify all causes that have contributed to the infrastructure failure. Thompson says districts are required to have 75,600 operational minutes, that time will have to be managed through the use of bad weather days or extending school days by five or 10 minutes for a period of time.
“Our campuses have different schedules," she said. "So that analysis is happening for each particular campus and as soon as we have that information available, we will share that with families and staff.”
KENS 5 crews spotted some trucks from another district working at Cotton Elementary on Sunday. In addition to fixing the problem, Aquino also said he plans to publish a full report of the breakdown.
SAISD officials said at the news conference that funding will not be lost due to the closures. The days will either be made up using previously scheduled bad weather days or via a waiver from the state.
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