Early on an overcast Friday morning, recent CAST Tech graduate Juan Paz told a roomful of business and civic leaders that that SUSO had changed his life.
One year earlier, he said, he would not have had the courage or the confidence to address this room full of prominent business and civic leaders who had come to Texas A&M-University San Antonio to listen to young people share ideas to strengthen their community.
Eric Falcon, CAST’s Student Experience Coordinator, joked that people talk about SUSO the same way they do the movie experience Wicked, in other words: “you just have to experience it.”
SUSO is short for Speak Up Speak Out. It is the 7th year that San Antonio has hosted this regional civics fair in partnership with the Annette Strauss Institute at the University of Texas, the host of the official state civics fair. Teams of students from different schools across the San Antonio region work together to identify problems they want to solve at their school or community, and pose solutions. Adults representing businesses, nonprofits, government, colleges and universities spend the morning listening to student teams present their ideas, scoring them and offering feedback as to how they can move their ideas to reality. Young people leave feeling validated, and adults leave inspired.
Less than an hour later, student Emcee Jazmin Whitley addressed students, teachers, and judges. Like Paz, she said the idea of spending months working on a project for a presentation did not initially appeal to her.
“However, I came to realize that SUSO provided a unique opportunity to further develop many valuable skills such as teamwork, perseverance, critical thinking, leadership, and initiative,” Whitley told the crowd. “From becoming socially conscious, to identifying issues within the community, to the exhilaration of competition, to the inspiration that comes from hearing others’ presentations, SUSO is truly a privilege and a breakthrough in igniting passion and activism within students.”
At CAST, one of our four core pillars is authentic learning, and SUSO is a powerful example of how young people can engage in learning that is meaningful to them, and can act as a catalyst for engagement as well as deeper learning.
We have been hosting this civics fair since CAST was started, and over the years, we have been joined by students from a variety of schools across our city, including a mix of traditional public schools, innovative public schools like CAST, charter schools and private schools. San Antonio was the first city to host a regional fair, but they have since spread to Dallas, Houston and Austin as well.
Despite the resources CAST and the Annette Strauss Institute have offered to schools, including curriculum and training, we have struggled to convince other schools to join an experience that young people describe as transformational. Typically, the reasons we hear that schools do not participate include interference with state testing, student grades, and discipline.
On face value, it may seem reasonable for a struggling school to hold back students from a challenging event like SUSO to focus on extra hours tutoring math, or not wanting to reward students who are failing classes.
In his book Learnership, author James Anderson lays out the reasons why it is imperative for schools to shift away from developing directed or even independent learners, to what he describes as agile learners. We intuitively understand that in our fast-changing world, we need young people to do more than master content; they must know how to direct their own learning, to make the most of working in teams, and to use feedback to improve. This is something business and civic leaders who make the time to come to Speak Up Speak Out every year also understand. (This year, in my judging room, I was joined by Jacob Cavazos of Broadway Bank, Ryan Howard of Potluck Ventures, and Nick St. Mary from the Annette Strauss Institute.)
This coming year, we’re very excited that a number of local superintendents have indicated a desire to involve more of their schools as part of San Antonio’s Future Ready plan, and UP Partnership is working with us to remove barriers at the school level so more students can benefit from what young people consistently describe as a transformational experience. A big thanks to all the community members who came out last week, and here’s to an even bigger and better Speak Up Speak Out in 2026!
Jeanne Russell
Executive Director
CAST Schools