When a group of business and education leaders proposed the creation of CAST Schools in 2015, they recommended a network of 5-10 schools strategically located around San Antonio to provide access points for high-demand, high-wage careers.
We opened our sixth school, CAST Teach, in partnership with Northside ISD in 2022, and were so proud to make the case that the field of education is also a high-wage, high-demand career path.
We are a model implementer that partners with public schools to implement new, innovative schools and incubates ideas for our partners to scale. Our commitment is first to the students we serve and secondly to catalyze economic mobility in our region through educational change.
This last year we have celebrated so many milestones, including seeing our earliest students begin to graduate from college, many accelerating their journey due to college credits earned in high school. (See here for the story of Hezron Perez, who graduated from UTSA with a computer science degree in 2.5 years.) This year we cheer on the first graduating class from CAST Lead in East Central ISD, a school where students explore retail and hospitality management as well as e-commerce and user experience (UX). While with us, our students are achieving on so many levels, but our North Star remains how they fare after high school.
Our spirit of experimentation has led us to develop approaches that we have shared in San Antonio and beyond.
- Schools have limited college and career advising resources, so we built out a series of activities to ensure students came to those advising sessions highly prepared, and provided a shareable student-centered advising toolkit for other schools, with support from the Greater Texas Foundation.
- Even before COVID, we used technology to personalize learning and grant students more choices, a practice that will only become more powerful with AI. This blended learning work was funded by the Charles Butt Foundation.
- Partnering with Texas A&M-San Antonio, we developed a 2-year embedded teacher residency where teachers receive graduated, nurturing support as they begin their careers. We started at CAST STEM in Southwest ISD and have received support to deepen and expand this work from City Education Partners and Firstmark Foundation.
- Recognizing the challenges new teachers face, our teachers worked to design new supportive structures, and with the support of the Meadows Foundation, produced a shareable teacher induction toolkit.
We’ve said a fond farewell to founding CAST Tech Principal Dr. Melissa Alcala, and we’ve welcomed new school leaders and board members with new energy and ideas.
The second part of the CAST Schools mission is to catalyze positive change that transforms teaching and learning for all. Since we opened our first high school, San Antonio has increasingly embraced a focus on high-demand, high-wage careers, and applied learning where students have opportunities to experience real-world careers through job shadowing, internships and more.
We’ve seen more schools join the citywide Speak Up Speak Out civics fair, which we coordinate, and a growing interest in real-world contests such as the Mayor’s STEM ecosystem challenge, or participation in esports, Cyber Patriots, and similar skill-based competitions. (Our regional Speak Up Speak Out civics fair was such a success, it was replicated last year in Dallas, Houston and Austin.)
Coming out of the pandemic, it’s no secret that schools are struggling financially, there is a shortage of educators, and they must adapt to meet specific challenges of mental health and machine learning. The best cure to any pessimism is to spend time in our schools, with our students, who will convince you in no time that they are ready to meet this moment.
Jeanne Russell
Executive Director | CAST Schools
