Rijos was investigating preschools for Santiago when she noticed a Facebook post announcing a new San Antonio ISD public Montessori school. When she clicked on the link, she was amazed to learn that Steele Montessori Academy was opening just down the street and enrolling children as young as 3. Now the couple walk their son to school every morning and go back often at night for school-wide family activities.

One of the things the family appreciates is the fact that Steele intentionally recruits and enrolls students whose families come from a range of income levels, as well as children with disabilities. Montessori’s methods were originally created to help develop self-regulation skills in children with intellectual or developmental delays. In Santiago’s mixed-age classroom, it’s impossible for visitors to tell which students receive special education services.

Steele is one of 31 dynamic and diverse-by-design schools that anchor San Antonio ISD’s plan to use a carefully calibrated combination of socioeconomic integration and school choice to break up concentrations of poverty in the district’s schools and ensure that when students graduate they are ready to go to college and stay until they earn a degree. As they’ve watched Santiago become more confident and independent — taking charge of getting himself ready for school, for example — Rijos and Roadman have become Montessori ambassadors. To find out why, take a peek inside Santiago’s classroom. And then read more about the city, its schools, and the leaders behind a revolutionary integration experiment. (Click here to read the full 74 Special Report)

Choudhury, whose title is chief innovation officer, created an enrollment system that ensures that students from all of San Antonio ISD’s so-called income blocks, from those whose families are on the edges of the middle class to those living in extreme poverty, are guaranteed a percentage of the seats in these sought-after schools.

In this one-on-one interview, Choudhury explains the key factors needed to create diverse-by-design schools and how, once the schools are opened and the equity enrollment practices are in place, San Antonio ISD officials hit the pavement to make sure their impoverished families know to apply. “We are not playing around about how families access these schools and how families learn about these schools,” he said. Read more about Choudhury’s history and the results achieved through his San Antonio design. (Click here to read the full 74 Special Report)

— Video Produced by Heather Martino; Edited by James Fields

The 78207 is also the heart of the San Antonio Independent School District, whose 50,000 students and 90 schools Superintendent Pedro Martinez took charge of three years ago. A Mexican-American immigrant himself who grew up in Chicago, Martinez thought he knew poverty, both personally and professionally as an educator committed to eradicating it, but what he found in the 78207 was shocking. The poverty here was so pervasive, so dense, and so depriving of opportunities for kids and families that Martinez knew he had to do something different.

Here is the story of what he did and how it transformed San Antonio ISD: from creating one-of-a-kind maps that broke down the data behind each of his school’s poverty levels, to opening specialized schools of choice that attracted affluent families from outside the district for the first time, and designing a sophisticated enrollment system that made sure the district’s neediest students got their share of the seats.

First and foremost, Martinez fought to change the conversation around academic achievement and college graduation for the 78207 and all his students. Since then, the district had its highest high school graduation rate ever in 2017, more than 55 percent of those students attend college, the percentage attending top-tier colleges doubled, and the percentage of students who scored college-ready on the SAT soared by 150 percent.

“Our first goal,” Martinez said, “was to redefine excellence.” Read more about the city, its schools, and the leaders behind a revolutionary integration experiment. (Click here to read the full 74 Special Report)

— Video Produced by Heather Martino; Edited and Directed by James Fields

By virtually any statistical measure, San Antonio is the most economically segregated city in the United States. Its poorest neighborhood, the 78207, is located a scant few miles from the epicenter of the third-fastest-growing economy in the country. But as the city as a whole thrives, the residents on the West Side are all but locked out of the boom.

Into this divided landscape three years ago came a new schools chief, Pedro Martinez, with a mandate to break down the centuries-old economic isolation that has its heart in the 78207. In response, Beth Hawkins reports, Martinez launched one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments. He started with a novel approach that yielded eye-popping information: Using family income data, he created a map showing the depth of poverty on each city block and in every school in the San Antonio Independent School District — a color-coded street guide composed of granular details unheard of in education. And then he started integrating schools, not by race — 91 percent of his students are Latino and more than 6 percent are black — but by income, factoring in a spectrum of additional elements such as parents’ education levels and homelessness.

To achieve the kind of integration he was looking for, he would first have to better understand the gradations of poverty in each and every one of his schools, what kinds of supports those student populations required, and then find a way to woo affluent families from other parts of the city back into San Antonio ISD schools to disrupt these concentrations of unmet need. Martinez’s strategy: Open new “schools of choice” with sought-after curricular models, like Montessori and dual language, and set aside a share of seats for students from neighboring, more prosperous school districts, who would then sit next to a mix of students from San Antonio ISD, where 93 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

Only a few years into the experiment, the effort has reshaped the educational landscape and redefined the aspirations of its students and educators. The district’s diverse-by-design schools now have long lists of well-to-do families waiting for a seat to open up, alongside students from working-class households and destitute neighborhoods. Families from the affluent communities on the city’s north and northwest sides are indeed now eagerly applying to share classrooms with families from the 78207.

In this video explainer, Hawkins digs into Martinez’s integration maps and examines the diverse student bodies that have resulted in his district’s schools. (Read more about the maps, the broader San Antonio integration effort, and its architects in this 74 special report.)

Go Deeper: Click here to read our full special report on this Texas integration effort

— Text: Beth Hawkins / Video: Reporting by Beth Hawkins; Produced by James Fields and Ronni Thomas