Bringing the goals to life.

The district, together with all stakeholders, created Always Learning, a five-year strategic management plan, to bring the board's commitment and goals to life. Achieving the outcomes in Always Learning will ensure we deliver on our promise of a high-quality education for every child. 

As part of this plan, we committed to enter into a long conversation with our community about what it means to be successful - or thriving. One of the ways we hope to help bring these goals to life is the Rightsizing study. View the Rightsizing timeline below. 

We can do better for our children.

Our Thriving Profiles cause us to reflect on whether we can deliver on our communities’ definition of a successful and thriving school. This reflection drove us to our data, and we concluded that we are at a crossroads.

In order to deliver educational equity, we need to address school facilities that are becoming emptier, underutilized and under-resourced. SAISD has been losing enrollment steadily for more than 20 years, and we have not closed school buildings at the rate our enrollment declined. Fewer students are the result of lower birth rates and families unable to afford living in the urban core. Only about 20% of our student loss is a result of in-district parents selecting out-of-district options. In fact, in large urban districts across the nation, school district leaders are facing the same challenge of the need to downsize.

Read the text or hear the rationale for the resolution.

Rightsizing the district has advantages for both students and teachers.

Change is always difficult, but it also brings new opportunities. As demographers Van Schoales and Brian Eschbacher said in EdWeek last year, “Many demographers have focused on the long-term risk to Social Security or Medicare posed by the lower birthrates, but K-12 education is actually the first institution to be dramatically affected. Shrinking is hard. But it does not have to be catastrophic, and if done thoughtfully, can even be an opportunity to restart or build higher-quality schools."

In SAISD, we believe that rightsizing will allow us to reimagine the way we support all students so both children and educators benefit.