By Louis Zylka
The 830 Times
The public school district’s board of trustees discussed details of a planned reconfiguration of three new middle school campuses for the 2025-2026 school year during their meeting in January.
The project involves the San Felipe Memorial Middle School campus on West Garza Street, the Garfield Elementary School campus on West Martin Street and the Del Rio Middle School campus on De La Rosa Street. Those three campuses are slated to be used as the district’s sixth, seventh and eighth grade campuses.
The San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees first approved the plan at its regular meeting on Oct. 8, 2024.
Dr. Carlos Rios, SFDR-CISD superintendent, talked about the status of the project during the meeting Jan. 21 and mentioned the initial steps of the reconfiguration are to ensure the project would “get off the ground.”
“Our priority was to understand the leadership of the campuses, rezoning and facility needs,” Rios said during his presentation to the board.
Rios said the district had hired the third principal for the middle schools. He also said the district has worked with the principals to develop the structure of the teaching and front desk staff.
Rios then mentioned the positive work being done by the demographer hired for the project. He also said the Garfield Elementary campus has been informed of the rezoning process. The next step of the project will be to send out letters to the parents of the students at Garfield, Rios said.
Rios said the district has made lists of the facility needs, conducted site visits at the campuses and listed costs for the project.
“After extensive study, we feel like we can continue with this improvement successfully. There are other things going on, like Cody Wardlaw Gym being under construction as a second gym for Garfield, and there’s fencing around the San Felipe area that we have to purchase there, and that is moving along nicely,” Rios said.
“The difficult part was asking if we could restructure (the project), and at this point we have done that. Moving forward we will provide updates on what has been accomplished,” Rios added.
The plans for January and February include notifying students which middle schools they will be rezoned to, starting recruitment efforts for New Tech Academy and notifying parents of the students who will be rezoned.
SFDR-CISD Board Secretary Jesus Galindo asked Rios what the criteria would be used to choose which staff members of DRMS will be moved to a specific campus. Rios answered saying the principals of the three campuses got together and made a list of which teachers are being rezoned based on which are more experienced.
“(The principals) made sure the experienced teachers were equally distributed among all three campuses, so they sat together and made those decisions,” Rios said.
“Probably in another two weeks we will be able to finalize (the list of teachers) and make it public. We obviously want to make sure that we get the numbers of students of each middle school to make sure we don’t give one teacher in one campus more students than in another,” Rios added.
