South San Antonio ISD releases final 2025 accountability results; district stays at D rating with targeted school interventions

South San Antonio ISD officials presented the district's final 2025 accountability ratings at the board's Sept. 15 meeting, outlining campus-level gains, distinctions and campuses requiring improvement plans under Texas Education Agency (TEA) rules.

Deputy Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Gutierrez told the board the district's final overall score is 65, a D rating, with a domain 3 (closing the gaps) score of 54. The district's relative performance (domain 2B) represented the highest portion of the overall score.

"Our student achievement and growth measures indicate pockets of strong performance as well as areas that require focused improvement," Dr. Gutierrez said. She reviewed domain-by-domain scoring and explained how elementary, middle- and high-school weightings affect the district total.

Several campuses received distinctions: Shepherd Middle School earned a distinction for academic achievement in social studies; Armstrong Elementary was recognized for comparative academic growth and for closing gaps; Hutchins Elementary for comparative academic growth; Palo Alto Elementary for academic achievement in science; and Price Elementary received three distinctions, including comparative academic growth and postsecondary readiness.

Dr. Gutierrez said two campuses have been identified for federal support as being in the bottom 5 percent of their comparative groups and will be required to submit targeted improvement plans to TEA. Carrillo Elementary was also assigned a state-level identification (year 1) because it recorded a state unacceptable rating count across multiple years. The district will meet with TEA next week to discuss the plan requirements, she said.

She outlined improvement strategies the district has already implemented: aligning curriculum resources to TEKS rigor, weekly lesson internalization meetings, job-embedded coaching by master teachers, and use of common formative assessment data to drive instruction and small-group interventions.

Dr. Gutierrez also reported results for English-language learners on TELPAS: 39 percent of emergent bilingual students showed progress on the English-proficiency assessment in the spring; 1,337 students took the test. She described STAAR-ALT participation for students with significant cognitive disabilities and listed which subject area assessments apply by grade level.

Board members asked how targeted improvement plans will be structured and whether progress measures would differ from existing campus improvement plans. Dr. Gutierrez said campus needs assessments already inform the draft plans and that public hearings at campuses will be required to present plans and receive community feedback.

Trustees and the superintendent emphasized a renewed focus on early literacy and numeracy to improve long-term outcomes, and on teacher capacity-building through professional learning. The board instructed administration to bring monthly monitoring reports tied to unit and common formative assessments beginning next month.

The accountability presentation framed the board's priority-setting discussion; trustees said they want board-adopted goals to guide future monitoring and resource allocation.