Located on the East Side of San Antonio, Douglass Elementary School has been educating the children of the surrounding communities since 1868, when the school became San Antonio’s first free public school for Black students.
As part of the SAISD board's "rightsizing" decision, which was passed in the fall of 2023, the end of the 2023-2024 school year marked the final year of the Douglass campus in its current iteration.
Please join SAISD Communications below as we explore A Day in the Life at Douglass Elementary School.
As soon as he arrives at 6 every morning, Frederick Douglass Elementary School Head Custodian Alex Hernandez starts turning on lights. He’s usually the first one there, and it’s usually still dark. Plus, he’s heard the ghost stories before.
Hernandez tries not to believe the spooky stories, but still he doesn’t go anywhere in the school without first turning on the lights. He’s worked at the school for eight years, and some mornings he’s heard a door in the auditorium slam shut when no one else is in the building.
The end of the 2023-2024 school year marked the last year at the historic Douglass Elementary School campus due to the SAISD board of trustees approving a Rightsizing Recommendation in November. The recommendation allowed the school district to move forward with closing 15 campuses to address declining enrollment. Most Douglass students are moving to nearby Herff Elementary.
Head Custodian Hernandez has accepted a job at Briscoe Elementary School.
What will he miss the most? "The kids," he said. "Every day is something different."
Douglass traces its origins in San Antonio to 1869, when the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands built the first free public school for Black people at the northwest corner of Convent and St. Mary’s streets.
In the 1870s and early 1880s, it was called the Rincon Street School after the street it faced. In 1890, the school board officially changed its name to Riverside School and in 1904 to Frederick Douglass in honor of the anti-slavery orator and statesman.
In 1915, the district opened the new Douglass on Martin Luther King Drive. The new campus opened as Douglass High School and became Douglass Junior High School in 1932, when the upper grades moved to the then-new Phillis Wheatley High School. Douglass became an elementary school at the end of the 1969-70 school year, serving grades 3-5.
Above, Viola Gonzalez's pre-kindergarten classroom starts the day with breakfast followed by letter and sight word games on their classroom's colorful carpet. In the afternoons, the students take naps before working on "matematicas!" When Gonzalez asks if the students are "listos?," they respond resoundingly "listo!"
Like many Douglass staff members, Stella Tijerina first got to know the school as a parent of a student. She started volunteering there 16 years ago before becoming a substitute teacher. Then she moved up to instructional assistant, which was where she was when the pandemic happened.
Tijerina stepped up to the challenge of helping teach special education virtually and in person when classrooms closed in 2020. After witnessing Tijerina’s growth, Principal Stephanie Ratliff encouraged her to pursue a higher education, which is what Tijerina will be doing this summer. She’s beginning a bilingual education program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
As someone who grew up in foster care, Tijerina knows how the students must be feeling with their school closing. She said Douglass became a second home for her and the school closing almost makes her feel like a foster kid again, but this time she gets to start over with her family by her side. Next year, she will teach at Herff.
“I feel like this is where I was meant to be,” she said.
Cafeteria Manager Shelly Fernandez has been at Douglass for almost five years, since her eldest daughter was in kindergarten at the school. While Fernandez will miss the campus, she’s happy she gets to follow her kids to Cotton Academy next school year.
“I grew with this school,” she said of her duties. “I know I’m giving them a warm meal. That’s why I’m here – to make sure kids get fed.”
On this Monday afternoon, the kids ate chicken nuggets, empanadas, green beans and pineapple.
"God has a plan," Fernandez added. "There's a reason why this is happening."
Douglass Elementary School fourth grader Dominik Sally made San Antonio ISD headlines this spring for his advanced reading skills.
Sally had left Douglass to briefly attend a nearby charter school but came back to the SAISD campus after realizing he was getting more individualized support from Douglass staff. One of those individualized support is student home visits. For the past eight years, Douglass staff, led by Principal Stephanie Ratliff, have visited the homes of each and every Douglass student to build relationships and trust with the families.
“I started the home visits as a way for families, students included, to see and know I am there for them. I am going to always be there, judgment-free, for them and our kids. I didn't want families to feel like the only place they would see me was at school.”
- Douglass Principal Stephanie Ratliff
Since earlier this spring, Douglass staff members have been attending "Blending the Family" events with staff from Herff Elementary School. The goal of the events is to introduce each schools' staff and students to each other to ease the transition when the two school families merge in fall 2024.
In February, staff and families from the Douglass and Herff Elementary communities gathered at the Carver Community Cultural Center for a "Heart Healthy Night," the first family event for the merging schools.
Another one of the many blending events the two schools held was a joint Fiesta parade. Students gathered at the Douglass campus and, accompanied by many colorful shoebox floats, marched down Hackberry Street to the Herff Elementary School campus. Families, friends, and community members lined the parade route, cheering on the students as they made the symbolic journey.
Even though change can be difficult, rightsizing the district has advantages for both students and teachers. As demographers Van Schoales and Brian Eschbacher said in EdWeek,
“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, rightsizing will allow the district to reimagine the way students are supported so both children and educators benefit. Combining campuses will all in a more equitable resource division among students and teachers, allow for teacher collaboration across the same grade levels, and ensure thriving schools.
To learn more about rightsizing at SAISD, click here.