SAN ANTONIO – Late in the evening on January 15, at the tail end of a three-day weekend to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, San Antonio Independent School District Chief of Staff Toni Thompson informed other district leaders via text message that minor problems had been mitigated and all campuses except one “should have heating tomorrow.”
What came in the following days were repeated complaints from SAISD staff and parents that a large number of schools were not properly heated as children sat in near-freezing classrooms. The list of school closures grew from 20 to 30, before SAISD leadership eventually decided to close all SAISD campuses for the rest of the week.
SAISD Superintendent Dr. Jaime Aquino, who was not made available for an interview for this story, blamed the heating woes on human error and widespread system failures.
He acknowledged during a press briefing that week that 70% of SAISD schools experienced heating system failures during the days-long cold snap.
“We expect 100-year-old buildings to be warm?”
Internal records released by SAISD following a request from KSAT detail why the district’s classroom operations were halted, and show there was significant criticism from staff directed at Aquino and SAISD leadership.
Ken Thompson, then-Deputy Superintendent of Operations, informed SAISD leadership on Jan. 16 that boilers had not been set to run around the clock and that they likely would have shut down automatically even if they had been set.
Thompson also stated the district did not anticipate that air handlers would go into alarm mode because of low temperatures and did not anticipate a gas supply shortage that impacted a number of its schools.
Thompson wrote that North East ISD “also experienced the same supply problems,” records show.
A North East ISD spokeswoman, however, disputed this claim, telling KSAT that NEISD did not experience any gas issues except for a frozen meter at an elementary school that was repaired the same day.
“Our Facility Maintenance team has no knowledge of sharing anything regarding gas issues with SAISD,” NEISD Executive Director of Communications Aubrey Chancellor told KSAT via email.
Thompson, who resigned while SAISD’s schools were still shut down, did not respond to a request from KSAT for comment for this story.
Aquino that week also accepted the resignation of Mike Eaton, SAISD’s Chief of Operations.
Eaton spearheaded the district’s efforts to open an emergency operations center at the district’s Summit Building on Jan. 17, records show.
Eaton declined to comment when reached by KSAT.
District officials reported how low the temperatures got at various SAISD campuses, text messages show.
Japhet Academy, which had its boiler go down, reached temperatures as low as 44 degrees, text message records show.
The library at Hirsch Elementary School had temperature readings as low as 42 degrees, the records show.
A teacher at Jefferson High School, who noted that she was nine months pregnant, emailed Aquino directly on Jan. 17 that she had waited in a freezing classroom for a repairman who never showed up.
“I have had to scramble the last two days, moving from room to room to find heat, which gets more difficult each day as more kids are showing up. I obviously can’t hold instruction for my students. I’m afraid I’ll get a cold but I can’t take any personal days because I need to save them for my maternity leave since we get zero paid leave. I’m sure you can imagine this is stressful,” the teacher wrote.
A second employee emailed Aquino and stated that she and other staff members were not surprised that campus buildings “would be sitting at 45 and 50 degrees all day.”
“Again, we knew what to expect so why is district leadership under a false impression and/or denial that our buildings were actually going to be warm today? I mean, Burbank, the district’s newest building, cancelled school today due to repairs, yet we expect 100-year-old buildings to be warm? Again, those of us that work in these campuses every day could have told you it was going to take all day to warm up and this is me speaking from the various campuses I’ve served over the past 12 years in SAISD. It’s the same at every campus, every year. Yet, we want to act surprised when this happens?” the staff member wrote.
“As far as ‘checking’ the campuses goes, I think some serious conversations need to be held with those individuals that checked the buildings and the procedures for evaluating building readiness need to be looked at closely,” her Jan. 16 email stated.
Transparency check
Aquino frequently used the word “transparency” in January when updating media, staff and parents about the district’s heating woes.
KSAT requested emails and text messages between Aquino, SAISD’s maintenance and facilities department, board members and district administrators over a nine-day period surrounding the January cold snap.
The request asked only for internal communications that discussed the district’s boilers, heating and HVAC systems and the forecasted cold weather in the San Antonio area.
SAISD officials last month informed KSAT that the district would require a full payment of $2,319.40 to begin processing the request.
The district took the unusual additional step of requesting full payment while maintaining the ability to ask the Texas Attorney General’s Office for a ruling that would allow it to potentially withhold all of the records.
Public entities routinely request full payment prior to fulfilling large records requests.
KSAT Investigates, however, could not recall a single instance in which a public entity asked for payment while stating it could send the records to the AG’s office for a ruling, a process that typically adds 2-3 months to the timeline of records being released.
The district eventually released records to KSAT last month without imposing a fee, after KSAT narrowed the request to just emails and text messages sent to and from Aquino.
“We are the owners of the schools at the end of the day. We’re the taxpayers, it’s our children, it’s our families, it’s our communities that are impacted,” said Neil Gabrielson, parent of two Lamar Elementary School students.
Gabrielson last year requested internal SAISD communications after Lamar was included on the district’s school closure list, as part of its “Rightsizing” initiative.
When KSAT spoke with Gabrielson, he had narrowed his request three times but was still being asked to pay more than $400 for the release of records.
“Overall, we just don’t feel like they’re really viewing us as a one to one partner and the owners of the schools,” said Gabrielson.
Asked about SAISD’s preparations for the cold weather in January, Gabrielson told KSAT, “It’s very unclear what they actually did prior to and over that Martin Luther King Jr. weekend leading back. Then it was like this kind of chaos of like ‘we’ll open tomorrow, no we won’t.’ It was just like this whole patchwork of what was going on. And the messaging was not good,” said Gabrielson.
Read more reporting on the KSAT Investigates page.