Ellie Perrier

At the end of the 2024 semester, 15 San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) schools — including one that Trinity students work with — will shut down, while others will be merging or setting a later date to close.
In Nov. 2023, SAISD announced its intended school closures and mergers. Lamar Elementary — a small neighborhood school less than a 10-minute drive from campus — was among the schools designated for closure following the 2024 spring semester. For the past two years, Lamar has collaborated with Trinity’s education department, bringing Trinity students onto the campus to assist the elementary school students in their reading and literacy.
Over the course of the collaboration, Trinity’s education department has taught a field seminar in elementary reading and literacy: the science of teaching reading. The majority of the course is field work, where students regularly travel to Lamar Elementary to teach phonics skills.
Students and faculty have established or continued their relationship with Lamar and SAISD through the course and beyond.
Heather Haynes Smith, associate professor of education at Trinity and parent of a current Lamar Elementary third grader, sits on the SAISD superintendent’s curriculum council. Smith became affiliated with Lamar Elementary as the school sought to become an in-district charter school within SAISD.
Status as an in-district charter allowed Lamar more space to expand techniques for curriculum and instruction, paving the way for the Trinity course to collaborate with the school and its classes. Following the closure of the school, and the transferring of books, materials, teachers and students, the course does not have a school to collaborate with when it is taught again in the fall semester.
“And we’re just at that point where … it’s hard, and I don’t know where I’m gonna send students and I want the experience to be as positive as it has been at Lamar and have that impact,” Smith said. “And that has a lot to do with … how that develops, working relationships, that partnership, and finding someone who was interesting and willing, and that was never a problem at Lamar. The teachers were always interested in trying new things, thinking and learning.”
Students have built connections to Lamar through the reading and literacy course and other courses within the education department. Kaleigh Cansino, sophomore sociology major, was one of the students who attended Lamar Elementary last semester under the field seminar in reading and literacy, as well as under a teaching science elementary class. Cansino is also an SAISD alumna and former participant of the SAISD student coalition.
“So I was … not living at Lamar, but … there are some weeks where I was there every single day … When the news came out, we were directly connected to the students it was impacting,” Cansino said.
This semester, the departments of education and urban studies are teaching the Oral History of Schooling in San Antonio, including an oral history project focused on capturing stories from Lamar Elementary. Students in the course will capture the oral histories of teachers, staff and community members surrounding Lamar Elementary, and will put these stories in the Trinity archive. M. Nayeli Aleman, sophomore global Latinx studies and sociology double-major, is participating in this semester’s oral history.
“I think collecting oral histories is such a powerful method of resistance. There’s so many times that stories go unheard. And I think, being trained and given space every week to work on collecting stories is just empowering on its own,” Aleman said.
Connections to Lamar Elementary through Trinity’s curricular programming will not continue following the school’s closure. Work done this semester by Trinity students to document the oral history of the school will be placed in the Trinity archives as a memento for Trinity students and the San Antonio community.
“So just seeing that change, and then seeing that Trinity isn’t going to be able to introduce their students to community schools like that is sad,” Cansino said. “I don’t know, I’m glad that I was able to be one of the last, really one of the last Trinity students to be able to tutor at that school.”