San Marcos CISD superintendent talks hiring freeze, phone policy in the new school year

Austin (KXAN) — The superintendent for San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District said policies discussed in the last school year are carrying over into the 2024-25 school year.

The district returned to class last Tuesday and Superintendent Michael Cardona said there's plenty he's looking forward to this new school year.

Last school year, the district's board of trustees approved a hiring freeze for nonessential positions. Cardona said that freeze is still partly in effect, but it looks mostly like shifting responsibilities to existing positions.

"For example, we have an Executive Director of School Leadership. She became Superintendent and that is a position we did not fill. So we just shifted those positions, I took supervisory, ownership of the principals, and then we delegated some of her responsibilities as she left. You know, we're able to protect the campuses," Cardona said.

The freeze was implemented in part as a cost-saving measure for the district caused by low student enrollment.

This school year, Cardona said the district is steadily recovering to pre-pandemic numbers but is still lower than desired.

"Since COVID, I think we've seen kind of a decline in enrollment. Our demographers, you know, generally predict 1%, 2% or 3% growth, and we're always like right in the middle. But the last couple years, we've been about 1% so from last year's projections we're about 100 kids down," Cardona said.

Cardona said two special areas of focus for the district are building up in-person attendance and limiting distractions in the classroom.

"We're going to go cell phone free. We're not banning anything, but we're simply asking the kids to put their electronic devices away and then the teachers in the building will control when they need to use those devices. We kind of need to go back old school a little bit and get the kids reconnected with learning," Cardona said.