The Educational Opportunities Committee of the San Antonio City Council convened at 10:04 AM on June 16, 2026, with a quorum present. The meeting focused on presentations and discussions regarding the community schools model, youth budget priorities, and higher education student barriers and recommendations. No public comments were heard.
Well, good morning, everybody. It is 10.04 a.m. and we will officially call the educational opportunities meeting to order. Madam Clerk, we please call the roll. Councilmember Corr. Councilmember McKee Rodriguez. Councilmember Mungia. Councilmember Castillo. Here. Chair Godland. Sir, we have a quorum. Thank you so much. First things first, do we have any uh edits to the minutes? If not, can I get a motion to approve? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, any abstentions? Moving along. Um, do we have any public comment today? All right, then we will jump right into it. Today we have a couple presentations. Uh, we have first and foremost a conversation around community schools, a kind of model of ways that uh communities can intervene with and support our local schools and ways they can kind of help our larger community in that work itself. Uh so for that model, we have Alejandro Lopez who we're presenting today, so come on up. Not to be confused. There's an Alejandra Lopez who is the executive assistant to the superintendent at SAISD, so there's three of us. There's three of us. Okay. Uh hello, everyone. I do want to say that my very cute typeface did not transfer into this, and so um I would not choose Times New Roman for this topic. I just want let the record reflect. Um, my name is Alejandro Lopez. It is an honor and a privilege to be here in front of the committee today. I am a second grade teacher on leave for my position and currently serve as the president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel. We're the union that represents teachers and support personnel in San Antonio ISD. Um, and so excited to be here to give a very brief overview of the community schools model. So when we talk about community schools, the term community schools gets uh, I would say enters into the conversation often. And oftentimes people are talking about a model which is largely around wraparound services. And so that can include a food pantry, a clothing closet, additional tutoring. And while we know that those wraparound services, particularly in a district like San Antonio ISD or really any of your southern um districts, is incredibly important because of the working class communities of color we serve. When our union um and other organizations that are interested in transformational change talk about community schools, we uh include so much more. And so um I want to share kind of what we consider the pillars of the sustainable and transformational community school models to be. And these pillars draw from um both uh American Federation of Teachers, which is um one of our national unions, and the National Education Association, who have really led the way in introducing um this model throughout the country alongside the Institute for Educational Leadership. IEL is a nonprofit organization. Um their vision is an equitable society in which shared leadership effectively uses all available resources for the betterment of their community, and so I would say it's very telling that IEL is a big proponent of the community schools model. They hold a national conference every single year that uh brings together partners, school districts, um, unions from across the country to really talk about the benefits of the model and how we can ensure that the model is truly meeting the needs of our students and families. So I'm gonna just briefly go through these pillars. These this is they're very wordy on there. I know you're not supposed to include this much text, but I just there's so much good stuff here. Um, so the first two are a strong and proven curriculum. You know, in Texas, we do not take for granted uh what the impact of curriculum is every day in our classrooms.