San Antonio Our Work

In 2010, thousands of people in San Antonio gathered around tables to discuss and determine the city’s top priorities and create a vision for what the San Antonio of 2020 could become. Together, our community identified 11 Cause Areas and created the SA2020 vision. The area that rose to the top over and over again was education.

In the same year the community came together around SA2020, Teach For America San Antonio launched. Over the last eight years, Teach For America has been a partner in advancing education in three key ways:

Accomplishing extraordinary results on alumni- and corps member-led campuses: KIPP U-Prep, led by alumni Abigail Morton Garland, is the only campus in central Texas providing an IB Diploma program for all students. The Advanced Learning Academy (SAISD in-district charter) is an unprecedented public-private partnership with a dramatically altered approach to student leadership. In it’s third year, KIPP Poder has a leadership staff filled with alumni and is one of the top performing middle schools in the KIPP TX Network. Only in San Antonio for four years, IDEA campuses at Monterey Park, South Flores and Carver each have a 100 percent college acceptance rate. In SAISD, our corps members and alumni are consistently recognized among the top preforming educators within the district. 

Providing bold leadership and driving critical reforms: Without question, a key driver of many education initiatives changing the status quo and galvanizing the city toward change has been the bold leadership of Teach For America corps members and alumni. You can find TFA fingerprints across all critical reform efforts in the city including: DoSeum, PK4SA, KIPP, IDEA, Leadership SAISD, SA Rise, Relay, The Holdsworth Center, and many more.

Providing thought leadership focused on equity: One of our proudest contributions has been the reframing of city discourse around the roots of educational inequity. We have seen our community’s dialogue turn away from a narrative that scapegoats parents and communities and instead seeks to understand and identify systemic racism as the root cause of educational inequity. Our partnership with top experts in the field has fueled how the region trains its corps members, positioning them to make the biggest impact in the classroom. Additionally, we have been able to lift the messages of our experts to decision-makers in the community. These efforts have shaped the turnaround efforts of the SAISD Superintendent and even shaped the way the city of San Antonio allocates funds.