On the record.

Is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho San Antonio is a fast growing, fast moving city with something new happening every day.

That's why each week we go on the record with Randy Beamer and the newsmakers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the reporters roundtable to talk about the latest.

News stories with the journalist behind those stories.

Join us now as we go on the record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for On the Record this week.

I'm Randy Beamer, and this week we are starting with some reaction to some stories that have been really tough on the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District, that is Doctor Jamie Aquino.

Thank you very much for coming in.

First of all, you have seen these stories, on KSAT.

Yeah, very critical, from, a number of angles on the trips that you have taken.

On, personal the professional development coach that you have that has come here, as well as some people talk about transparency with the district.

But first of all, let's start with the issue.

The, the trips that you've taken, over the past couple of years, you've been here for two years, nearly 20, $2,000, according to their receipts on trips from Chicago, New York, Puerto Rico, Denver.

And this is more as they compare to other superintendents in the area who have traveled much less, spent much less.

What do you say?

Why do you need to spend that much on these trips?

So the first thing the 22,000, not all that money is from that taxpayer dollars.

So in some of these cases, I was invited by National organization to do keynote address to talk about the work that we were doing here in San Antonio.

And they pay.

And we made it very clear that those were.

You know, about how much people would want to know is a little bit of that 22,000 or most or.

Less, I would say probably a third or a third of that.

The other piece, too, we have a grant.

We were able to secure a grant of $8.1 million from the Wallace Foundation.

Part of the requirement from the Wallace is that the superintendent has to attend the four convening a year and and they pay for ed, and we also got 8.1 million.

The important thing like the trip to to Colorado and Cleveland, we took a team, our union leader, we took teachers, we took parents, grandparents to help us learn how they did the rye 16.

So sizing meaning cutting.

Closing schools.

Yeah.

So we learned a lot up on the lessons up of those trips that we it helped us guide us here.

In addition to that, we are the only San Antonio ISD is the only urban district in San Antonio.

So sometimes the challenges of the urban districts are are very, very different.

A lot of those trip also were to the Holdsworth Center in Austin, and I was invited to be part of that pro program at no cost to to to the district, and it help meet the requirement any new superintendent to the superintendency or new to Texas.

The Texas State Board of Education requires that in your first 18 months, you have to have a full year of a program with a coach and a mentor.

So I did a lot of those trips.

That brings us to the coach issue coach stories.

We're talking about three different trips of this professional or personal development coach to San Antonio.

There's criticism that the media wanted to release the great communications between you and that coach, and the you and the district say, no, that's not.

Going to happen.

So let me give you a first.

A little bit of the background.

When I was offered that job, I was in New York City.

I've lived my entire life on a un, a journey of continuous improvement.

I believe we need to get better at this work so we can better serve our student.

And the greatest athletes all have coaches.

So I've been in places in New York where I always had mentors, people I knew.

So I was coming here and what I said to the board, if I, if I go out there, I want to get a coach, it will be my first superintendency.

And since I don't know anybody in Texas, in the event that the coach needs to travel, will we be able to re reimburse the board supported that.

They actually said your sense of humility that you want to get to.

But we have actually not used that part of the contract.

So nobody has been paid no to reimburse.

Because when I got here, I was invited to participate in the superintendency program with the Holdsworth Center, which is completely free at no cost.

And they include a coach, which was great because then I was able to submit and get my certification as a superior superintendent because I met I met the the requirement.

Are you going to use the coach?

Are you going to have them come here?

No, it was just you.

Basically, I was trying to do this for my first year to help me navigate the system.

So I really believe, and it's hard for me to understand why it would have such a negative, perspective on having.

I'm having coaching.

Yesterday, I was meeting with the faculty.

I meet with every single faculty with two question what's working well and what's not working well?

The first comment was from a teacher and see that we saw the piece on your on your coach.

And we applaud you for having a coach.

Do you just telling everybody that you're a lifelong learner, you're modeling what we're telling, telling our kids.

So the coach was basically to help me continue to grow, but no taxpayer dollars happen, happened even.

Though that was part of the.

Contract, even though that was part of the contract, because I didn't know that hopes were was going to invite me to be part of this at this program.

I was coming here not knowing anyone in Texas, so I wanted to make sure I had some work, but they gave me an incredible, coach who who served as 26 year as a superintendent in the state of Texas.

And another part recently is another story recently is that the school board, went into executive session to amend your contract.

What what happened there?

So basically, and the contract we have not really said because that's still not been fully executed.

The board president has not has not sign it.

And then outside, it was just one clause that talk about my annuity and my retirement, which we needed to clarify.

So we ended up by putting an additional or an additional line that the board agreed to make it clear, because it wasn't clear, to, to, to me or to them.

And we and we learned more.

But the other thing I want to go back to, to, your earlier question about why have not we not released the communication between my coach?

So there was a request for text messages and emails.

And I have to tell you, Randy, there's nothing there.

Mostly is about the sume link for our our session, the reason why we feel we should not release them is because that the chilling effect that it will have in the field of education, our principals have coach coaches, our teachers do.

So they're going to feel if we're communicating with our coach that are helping us grow, then and this is going to be subject to open records, request, then don't get signed as a coach.

That's the that's the only reason.

Who knows?

I think I might release them myself voluntarily, but not as a part of an open record, because we're not hiding anything.

That's the that's the reason our teachers and our principal or any leader in my district or across the country will be afraid of having having a coach, because if that can become public.

Now, do you think there's some of the reason you're getting this criticism right now is because you are so called rightsizing, which is continuing across the country?

In terms of, closing schools, this happened before you got here in the district.

It's happening in other districts here.

Let's get to the reason of why, tell us why the you're having to cut the number of closed schools in the San Antonio Independent School District.

People might have the wrong idea as to why.

So when I got here, we had 52% excess capacity in our buildings.

Meaning technically, we could close half up of our our schools and our students who were fit.

This is mostly due to declining birth rate.

Demographer have cautioned us that we need to be concerned about the impact of declining birth rate to Medicare and Social Security.

And you say that's more than people might think.

It's people going to charter schools or private schools.

Yeah.

It's not as much that.

No, we had a demographer do it landscape analysis that said, of all the students that we had lost over the last 20 years, which is over 15,000 students, only 22% of them have left to other schools or charter school.

The majority are attributed to two reasons declining birth rate and the lack of affordable housing in the urban.

And what do you think is going to happen?

And are you planning for if the legislature, okays, as the governor wants school vouchers as a school choice, what kind of exodus do you think you would have and how do you plan for that in terms of closing schools in the San Antonio district?

Well, it would definitely have a significant impact to all districts across across the state in terms of potentially losing more than Ramon in terms of going to to private school.

I wonder what would be the impact for San Antonio and for my families, because we're not so sure with the amount of dollars that they would get, would that cover the total tuition, other PRI private schools?

So we don't know, but we anticipate that it could also, impact our public schools by parents choosing to go to a private school.

Thank you very much for coming in and for responding to the criticism.

Doctor Haney Aquino, the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Less than two weeks to go.

Now before the election, a lot of stories in the news are about polls, but not yet here in San Antonio, we have a new poll.

We have a new center for Public Opinion Research in San Antonio that is headquartered at UTSA.

Joining us to talk about that is Doctor Brian Gervais, who is UTSA center for Public Opinion Research director.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me back.

Yes, we talked before about a number of polls that you've done.

You did a early poll around the primary and you're done now.

Three yeah, the one just out today.

Yeah.

On everything from the presidential race, the Senate race, local races.

But also we'll start with the charter amendments in San Antonio.

And there's an interesting, reaction.

What kind of what are the reaction?

What's the polling in the charter amendment election?

So it's really interesting.

I think this is the most fascinating results that we received are with the charter amendment.

So in our September poll, we provided short descriptions of what the intent of the charter amendments would be, what sort of changes they would make.

And so in, in sort of a concise sort of way and engaged folks reactions, and we saw there's low support for a few of, of those amendments when we described it to people, including prop C, which would remove the caps on City Manager, and even on the.

On the pay and on the.

Internet right here.

Right.

And as well as, raising salary for mayor and city council as well.

That's.

The shorthand version.

Shorthand.

Version news and what you said in that poll.

But but in our October poll, we opted to use the actual ballot language that appears on, on voters ballots when they go into the voter box.

And we see much different reactions to this.

And so we do think that folks aren't quite interpreting the ballot language in the same way they interpret or understand or support, the propositions when we describe them.

For.

For example, prop C is the big one.

And tell us about that.

And so prop C again, that's the one that removed the caps on the city manager pay and the length of term or you know, the length they can serve in the office.

We saw very low support when we phrased it as removing these caps, which were put in place in 2018 through a different ballot measure.

I mean, barely, barely 17% supported.

We see much higher support when we use the actual ballot language, which doesn't mention removing the caps, but just as the city council will set the and limit that that the compensation and in term of length of of the city manager.

And we think people interpret that in a much different way.

Right.

It doesn't sound like removing the caps.

It seems like this is a limitation.

And we see, roughly 42% of, folks supported it when we, you see actual ballot language.

Good deal.

People still say they're unsure.

But I think it was only like 27% or something.

And there was a lot more publicity news coverage around that because the police union, it was right after Sheryl Scully, universal city manager.

Right.

They campaigned against her.

It didn't affect her.

But the eight year limit and the and the cap was about that.

So this time there hasn't been that publicity?

No, I mean, the fire union has been involved a little bit.

Again, I think, just this week, I think they've started releasing some campaign materials.

There's a separate campaign to try to get prop C passed.

I think they've gone into the field this week as well, during early voting to try to get folks to actually, support prop C, that's called the renew essay movement.

And so there are, two campaigns out there, you know, oppose stand.

And in trying to support this, it's not the same as in 2018, I think, when there was much more high profile.

And our data reflects this as well.

I mean, again, we conducted this on the eve of early voting.

Our poll closed before early voting began on Monday, but we actually asked people who said they are familiar with the charter amendments if they'd been contacted by any campaign urging them to support the charter amendment, and a minority of the minority of folks who had even heard of this said they'd actually been contacted.

So now, during early voting, we suspect that's probably going to increase.

More people will be contacted.

But as early voting was beginning, most people still were unaware of the charter amendments.

They hadn't heard much about them and they hadn't really been contacted, being, you know, pushed to.

Support and those charter amendments at the very bottom of the ballot, know I and above them, of course, from president on down you've got you asked for and got results in that and they have changed a little bit today, starting with the presidential race.

And this is, by the way, in Bexar County.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, and and just to clarify, our poll this time around was limited to San Antonio voters not voting outside of of Bexar County.

But yeah.

So, you know, we saw in June, you know, when Joe Biden was still the presumed nominee, low support for Democratic, the Democratic nominee increased dramatically in our September poll coming after the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

And then we seen Harris's, support had has come down a little bit again among San Antonio voters.

Similar to national gains.

Just like what we've seen in national polls, Donald Trump support hasn't changed all that much.

It's been hovering around 35, 36% or so.

It didn't change that much, but a few less folks are.

But she's still way ahead in this call.

She's still ahead in Barry County, right in Bexar County and in within San Antonio.

And we saw that also happening with what we call the generic ballot.

So between, Democratic House candidates and Republican House candidates, we asked folks, you know, who would who are they going to support in their House district, Democrat or Republican?

We see Democrats surging in September, along with Harris.

They've come back down to earth a little bit, in October poll, although they're still leading Republican candidates.

That's House candidates now.

Senate senators, the one exception, right.

We see that Colin already continues to be making inroads.

Growing support support for Ted Cruz hasn't changed all that much.

But already I mean, has he's steadily risen from June to September into October.

He started with low name recognition.

He is now drawing a significant amount of support.

Do you compare these two statewide polls and national polls and look at those and go, okay, well, statewide polls show us somewhat of a close race between red and Cruz.

Already made it a race.

I mean, the numbers don't look all that different than the final outcome we saw in 2018 versus when it was, you know, Beto O'Rourke versus Ted Cruz there.

Which which is really surprising, right?

Isn't a single digit race.

And so, yeah, our numbers sort of reflect what we've been seeing statewide, which is that all Red has been gaining and and it has momentum.

I think it's going to be a heavy lift for him to completely catch Cruz, but he has made it a somewhat competitive race.

Is there any way to tell about increased turnout or increased enthusiasm, or whether people will actually turnout or not compared to years in the past?

Or how do you tell that?

Yeah.

You know, I think the best metric we have right now are these early voting numbers, right, that we've seen more so than our numbers.

I mean, we certainly asked people how willing they are to support, you know, we don't really have numbers to compare to previous elections because it's our first election cycle in there.

But we haven't been, paying attention to the early voting numbers coming in.

And so far there's been some record record turnout here.

And also, question about margin of error and how you adjust the polls because there have been stories about 2016, 2020, especially presidential race.

They whether they're just polls for if they undercounted, they think with a certain demographic education level or whatever.

And then you have how do you account for that?

You know, the fundamental problem with election polling is that you are trying to sample from a population that does not yet exist, and we don't know what that population is going to look like.

We won't know what that population really looks like till after all the ballots have been counted.

It's kind of late, right?

And so you have to do your best to try to predict what you think that population of voters is going to look like.

Lots of pollsters have different techniques for doing so.

One thing that pollsters decided to do differently in 2020 than what they did in 2016 was to wait on education.

And what that means is that you adjust your sample after you collected it so that you, have people who have do not have a bachelor's degree, do not have any sort of college experience count for more in your polls because pollsters worried that they were undercounting.

These people didn't have enough of them in 2016 and been made.

So the polls wrong and Trump won, right?

Right.

And and that didn't seem to really help enough in 2020 to 2020.

Actually, national polls are off by a greater extent than they were in 2016.

So pollsters are doing different things in 2024 than they did in 2020.

Now, why were the polls off so much in 2020 2020 was a weird year.

Are you doing that in this?

Are you adjusting for things already?

We wait, we, do do an alternative version of our results where we wait by education, we wait by income, we wait by various demographics and other things to see how much it changes our results.

The results we present aren't weighted on education or income per se, but they are weighted on more or less propensity to vote based on prior analyzes of of of, voter history.

It's fascinating and I should say good luck, because this is your first real test with the election in November.

Yeah.

Doctor Brian Servais, director of the UTSA center for Public Opinion Research, thank you very much for coming in.

It's been a pleasure.

On Reporters roundtable this week, a couple of fascinating stories out of the San Antonio Current.

The first one all about, well, I guess you'd say bad news in San Antonio.

Mixed news reporter Michael Kalas.

Si, San Antonio, current staff writer.

You wrote about rents going up in San Antonio, which is sounds like bad news for a whole lot of people.

And a surprising increase.

Yeah.

So, the study came out this week.

It was by, Spare Room, which is, a website that connects people looking for for roommates.

And it found that the average price of to to split a, an apartment in San Antonio went up 26% in the first nine months of this year.

And what was interesting is there was actually a slight decline between quarter two and quarter three.

But overall, it's still a pretty significant increase.

We're talking about 725 was in the first quarter, average spare room rent to 946.

Yeah.

The split in apartment in San Antonio.

Are you surprised by that?

Were there any indications as to why.

A lot of demand, just combined with the ever rising cost of living?

Like I said, the rents did come down a little bit and inflation has declined a bit overall.

But there just seems to be a significant amount of demand.

Although San Antonio's rent did increase by more than a quarter in that time frame, though, the metro is still very much affordable compared to other metros.

If you just look at Austin's average rent, it was, over $1,200.

And that's the split in apartment.

That's not a one that kill us.

It's it's something.

It's it's San Antonio.

Yes.

Well, and another story, dude was on Texas ranking third most dangerous state and then not.

This is not just crime.

This is financial safety.

This is personal workplace safety.

Emergency emergency preparedness.

Yeah.

So this was an interesting study was from Wallet Hub, but it really made some interesting points.

We know how Governor Abbott is really, tough on crime type of governor.

He recently designated a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.

However, what WalletHub pointed out is general crime in Texas is about average for the country where Texas fails is, other sorts of danger.

So employment, place injuries, traffic fatalities was a big one, as well as emergency preparedness.

And how that was measured was how many billion dollar plus disasters as the state suffered.

And like the last 2 or 3 decades, I mean, we've lived through, Randy, between the, the winter storm and Hurricane Harvey and, and wildfires.

I mean, there just seems to be a lot of really costly, natural.

And then also a lack of, health care or health insurance.

Yeah.

I mean, I've been writing about this for three years.

This is the most uninsured state in the nation, and therefore, it's dangerous to a wide variety of people who do not have regular access to health care.

And you've been busy.

This is another story that you wrote that's been picked up on by national media.

And I've heard as well as, from here, there was an East Texas county where a committee put a Native American history book from the nonfiction into the fiction category.

What happened there?

Well, we don't really know what happened there.

I mean, it's this county north of Houston, Montgomery County, and the Commissioners Court had been receiving a lot of pressure from right leaning groups to review all of the books in the public library.

And so how they went about this is they created a.

Citizens.

Review board that did not include any librarians.

It was appointed by the county commissioners.

And how it works is anyone can make an anonymous complaint about a book or.

Challenge or.

Challenge.

Right.

And so someone in Montgomery County challenged this book, which is about, I mean, it's written by a Wampanoag, historian who was part of that tribe in New England.

And it's a history book.

I mean, it's it's labeled as a nonfiction historical book by the Fort Worth Public Library, Austin Public Library, and the Library of Congress.

And they moved this book from the nonfiction section to the fiction section.

And the committee didn't say why they you can't challenge them, and you couldn't.

And it's closed door.

Yeah, it's a closed.

Meeting and you can appeal the decision.

But they did get rid of the or they at least got rid of that review board.

Right.

I don't know the review board.

No.

It's still in existence.

If you want to go to Montgomery County and challenge, a book on any topic, you're more than welcome to.

Well, thanks for that.

Some fascinating stuff.

The overworked Michael Kalas, who is the San Antonio current staff writer.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much for coming on.

Great being here.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see this show again.

Tell your neighbors.

You can also download the podcast.

Just go to KLRN.org I'm Randy Palmer and we'll see you next time.

On the record.

Is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho