 My name is Beth Brady. I'm the principal of Rodriguez Elementary School. Today we're celebrating the school closure, essentially. It's our grand fiesta farewell. Every year at this time around Cinco de Mayo, we have a festival to celebrate, and it's all free and open to our families. Essentially, we do this because the community is probably seated in the lowest socioeconomic zip code in the entire Bear County. We probably ranked third in terms of, actually not third, but first in terms of child abuse for the last three years. So it's a very impoverished area. And so everything we do here is free for our families because we want them to have the same opportunity to celebrate as everybody else in the world at fiesta time. How we got here, essentially, is this is my fourth year as a principal starting. I came in when the school was IR year two. Improvement required is what IR stands for. Every year, since I've been here, the school has made huge gains. Last year in science, the children went from 23% to 64%. This year, we're already being moving in the right direction. We got our first round of fifth grade scores. And already, we've seen increases in achievement. We're already seated for reading with a progress score of an A. I know the district, excuse me, the district and the state are going through a new ABCDF accountability system. And so we're already sitting at an A right now in fifth grade in reading and also in mathematics. So it's looking really good this year that we are going to get out of improvement required. Unfortunately, the school is going to be closed and it will be repurposed and be used again by the school district. But it's very sad because generations of families have gone to this school. And so throughout the course of the year, we've tried to do a lot of activities to really get families, give them the opportunity and their children the opportunity to kind of grieve because in the beginning, there was a lot of sadness and everybody goes through those stages of grief and sorrow and all that. So today we're celebrating the happy end of it. We're looking at all the successes and the kids are here to have a good time. And that's kind of what the whole fiesta farewell is about. There's a lot of little ins and odds about the school but the biggest part is that when you walk into these doors, the data clerk and the assistant principal, the principal, even though they don't have your student in class, they know them by name. They know them by name, by grade, and they know even you walking in, like me walking into campus, they know, oh, you're Samantha's mom, you're Xavier's mom and there was no other questions about it. Like I never had to introduce myself. It's never like the first day of school. So it was really family oriented. When you walked in, everybody knew you. It was like at that moment when you walk in today, say cheers, when you walk in, everybody knows your name, everybody knows your name. The teachers here have worked extremely hard. There's not one teacher in this building that couldn't go to any other school and be a top teacher. Some of the teachers that I have here, I have the element, the district, San Antonio Independent School District, teacher of the year at my campus. We're so proud of our instructors here, our practitioners. Not only are they academically sound because of the professional development that we've gone through, but they're also extremely cooperative and collaborative. They stand on each other's shoulders to make things wonderful for the children in the community here. I also last year had the San Antonio Independent School District Rising Star. That's a first year teacher that rises through the ranks of every first year teacher in the district and is awarded the Rising Star teacher of the year. So we're hopeful, the Rising Star for this year is coming around, so we're hopeful that our Rising Star will get that as well. We have a wonderful partnership with Our Lady of the Lake University where teachers, academic interns are actually apprenticing here the entire school year from the beginning of the year to the end of the year with real master teachers so that they can really get the sense of what it is to be a teacher in inner city school. That's been a fantastic partnership that we've shared. We've also shared with Our Lady of the Lake's mother partnerships that have helped us dramatically as well, such as the speech and language pathology department they've come in and they've helped our students with oral language and they've assessed them and they're really helping us in the early childhood area. And also, we have a great social work partnership with Our Lady of the Lake because our area, we really do have a look for social work interaction here because of some of the deficits that our children have that they face with poverty and other things. Many of our families, many of them are immigrants. They just want what's best for their children and they have to overcome extreme obstacles just so that their children can be dreamers and reach out and have the American dream. So that's what we're really working on. I know that we're considered improvement-required but every school is improvement-required as far as that's concerned. We had a May meeting at our high school linear and he addressed our campus saying that we had a great partnership with Our Lady of the Lake so to him it didn't mean that we needed another partnership to keep the school open because he had all faith in us that the school would stay open. And he did tell a couple, a handful of our second graders that if they got their second grade class on board for third grade to pass the start test that there was no option to even close the school at all. Once Superintendent Martinez told him that him and his friends rallied all of their friends even his best friend which is a straight D student he's a straight A student this year. They gathered behind everybody and they ended up like right now they're blowing the practice test out of the water. So if he would keep his promise and let the third graders that were second graders last year beat the test they would blow it out of the water because we only missed it by 1.6 points but the point is that he told our second graders do your best and you won't close the school but he never gave them an option to even succeed. So a lot of our third graders are like we could opt out for this test but knowing that they have a choice to opt out and stay in the test they're choosing to stay in the test all of them because they want to prove a point to him and to everybody else that they could do it if they would have had the chance they would do it. And these are third graders, they're 8, 9, 10 year olds. They told us a week before school started when we got to meet the teacher on August 13th. So was that in a meeting here? No it wasn't even actually a meeting it was a flower they handed out to each parent while they brought their kids to meet the teacher. So us as walking in as oh our school's doing good you know we're not going to close even because that was the rumor last year we were going to close the meeting put that at ease that it wasn't going to close so the parents came in you know excited and to get handed a letter while you're meeting your teacher that was really disappointing because we didn't have our superintendent here we didn't have nobody here to actually tell us what was going on besides our staff and still at the end they were still up in the air of what's going on. Well what's happening with this school this year is that they have been notified that this school is going to close this is a mandate that came from the state of Texas it came from the state of Texas because there's a law that says if a school is an improvement required for five years in other words if they fail the star test five years that the state will close the school and you have to close it for a full year and then you can rebuild the school but they also have stipulations about what you can do when you try to reopen the school and we're hoping in the future in the year of 2021 that we will work with parents and community to see how the school would be reopened it might be a very different type of school but that's for a conversation with the parents the teachers here worked very hard and they were very confident that last year they would be able to get out of IR out of improvement required and not have to close down the school they were very confident the district was confident because they were confident and they had done so well the year before they made great progress but they missed it by a very small amount and our superintendent even appealed to the Education and Commission of Texas but you know no no waiver was granted and so we had to go ahead and close the school because of the mandate from the state now it's sad it's hard to take change of any kind is hard to take and here you are having your school closed down it's difficult one thing that's fortunate is that Carvajal Early Childhood Center and Rodriguez share the same geographic boundaries and so most of the students are going to go ahead and go to Carvajal where Sonia Cardenas is a wonderful principal also and it will be her first time doing the full elementary she is very experienced in early childhood now this will be an expansion for her but she is so wonderful so full of energy she is going to be fantastic and I think it might be a very surprising smooth transition smoother than people fear people have had all sorts of fears like well are we still going to get the bus service are we still going to have the computers that were supposed to come to Rodriguez we are taking care of all that and so that's what's happening at Rodriguez and then this festival today ensures like any festival has fun with it but it also has a sense of sadness because the school is closed schools are definitely about the community and that's why it hurts when a school closes that's why it's very painful that's why we all grieve because we become a family and a school closes and it shakes all that and it's very disturbing to all of us next year is going to be a hard year it's going to be a difficult year and we already kind of told the kids not a lot of our teachers are going and that's I think one of the main concerns that our students have is where are our teachers going as much as the teachers when they heard the news that the school was closing their main concern was it where is my job going to be at their main concern is where our baby is going to be at and it's neat to hear all the other grades be like where are our teachers going so it's a table turned and you can tell that the teachers care for the students so where are the teachers going they have to apply for different jobs so the district placing them finding a most certain place to place them they have to go through the whole hiring process they're still employed with the district but they have to go to the school and apply instead of just being automatically accepted so I mean that's heartbreaking because we had it for 25 years she's been here so imagine where is she going to go this is her second home they go from our small school Rodriguez to their middle school which is Rhodes and their high school in the air and they come back in full circle to our wonderful university they see everyday as they walk to school as their parents stop them off they know that they're going to end up going to the castle because we have three K to fifth graders