Education

San Antonio Representative Mike Villarreal has filed a bill to bring transparency to licensing procedures for school teachers.

Right now teachers take a composite exam with several different parts – including all the core subjects – but as long as their overall score is passing, the teachers don’t have to pass all of those subjects to be certified to teach them.

School safety may be at the heart of nearly every project District 1 Councilman Diego Bernal advocates, but he said the rules for how the city spends money delay improvement projects.

Now he’s on a mission to change that.

"We can all agree that pedestrian safety around schools is a priority. No one's going to argue with that," he said.

As a subcommittee of the Pre-K 4 SA board prepares to receive recommendations from city staffers on how kids will enroll for the program, the board has been busy adjusting the job descriptions of some key positions.

Deputy City Manager Peter Zanoni said the board wanted to include as many qualified candidates as possible, without ruling anyone out because they didn’t have the right credentials.

State Rep. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio wants the 17 public school districts in Bexar County like Northside, Northeast, SAISD, and Edgewood re-evaluated to see if consolidation would help make the adminstrative side more efficient.

"I’m not an expert in this field, but I would imagine that there are some inefficiencies when you have 17 different police departments, 17 cafeteria departments, 17 different IT departments, 17 sets of superintendents and executives," Gutierrez said.