Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are happy to start out the week with a Contributor Column from Daiana Lambrecht, the founding Executive Director at Futuro in San Antonio, Texas.
We provide a bio for Daiana below.
Daiana Lambrecht is founding Executive Director of Futuro San Antonio, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for excellent public education and prosperity for all children in San Antonio. Simultaneously, Daiana serves as a dedicated board member for both Activate STL and the Freedom Coalition of Charter Schools, underlining her dedication to fostering positive change in education. Prior she served as Rocketship’s Senior Director of Parent Leadership and Advocacy focused on building grassroot power and championing change as a coalition. As Rocketship Senior Director, she led community engagement and advocacy nationally and supported regions to develop and execute strategies that align education equity values.
Daiana also served as coach for public narrative and assisted with organizing workshops with Marshall Ganz, a Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate, and the Leading Change Network, and is Leadership Coach & Strategist under her own LLC Comunidad Connects. She previously worked as a Coalition Organizer Lead with Achieve Hartford!, a program manager for Teach for China and bilingual 5th grade teacher in San Antonio Independent School District as a Teach for America Corps Member. Daiana earned her bachelor’s degree in History and Asian Studies from Penn State University.
Most importantly, she is the proud daughter of immigrant parents. Growing up in an undocumented family, the transition from Argentina to Venice, Florida created many barriers for Daiana and her family. These experiences and her social justice upbringing continue to inspire her fight for education and other opportunities for immigrants and other communities of color in the US. Currently, she lives in San Antonio, Texas with her husband and dog, where she enjoys evening walks, tubing in TX rivers, soccer and Argentine barbecues.
Long time CharterFolk readers will remember that Daiana penned a terrific Contributor Column during her days at Rocketship.
Daiana’s post today also builds upon one I wrote about SanAntonioFolk this spring where I was able to report on the ecosystem of support for charter schools – Futuro certainly an important part of it – that is resulting in San Antonio’s charter schools being on a roll.
But advocacy challenges remain, including the one that Daiana highlights today – charter schools accessing mental health funding – which I know is a problem that many charter school communities across the country are contending with.
Let’s get to Daiana’s latest thoughts now.
Elevating All Students in San Antonio
In 2012, I began my teaching journey on San Antonio’s Eastside as a Teach for America corps member. As a Latina in a majority-minority city, I immediately felt at home. San Antonio’s history of organizing for change … whether it was Emma Tenayuca’s fight for pecan workers …
…or the student walkouts in Edgewood ISD …
… reflects the strength and resilience of this community.
Today, our city faces significant educational challenges. Fewer than a third of our students are performing at grade level in math.
Unfortunately, San Antonio operates 17 uncoordinated school districts lacking the unified leadership necessary to address these issues. We founded Futuro San Antonio in 2023 in response to these challenges and aim to foster a collaborative ecosystem where students and families are active architects of education’s future.
Our mission centers on promoting civic engagement, cultivating leadership, and mobilizing a grassroots movement that ensures access to quality schools for every student.
San Antonio has witnessed an increase in charter schools.
For many families, this is a welcome opportunity to exercise agency in choosing the best educational environment for their children. Yet, charter schools often face undue blame for district challenges, and worse, they are frequently excluded from vital discussions and resources.
This exclusion was most evident recently in a critical area: student mental health funding.
At Futuro, our families identified mental health as a top priority through a citywide listening campaign. Despite this clear need, many students are being overlooked. Bexar County allocated over $20 million to Independent School Districts (ISDs) for mental health programming, yet public charter schools—serving 17% of the county’s students, including 25,000 secondary students—were entirely left out.
This exclusion runs counter to Futuro’s values of equity and inclusion, so we took action. Our families rallied to demand that mental health services be extended to all students. Families met with county commissioners, testified at commissioner’s court, and launched letter-writing campaigns.
Our efforts placed decision-makers in a difficult position—those who claim to support mental health services for all students were suddenly seen excluding charter school students.
Our campaign proved that there is bipartisan support for advancing education access and programs. From a conservative commissioner to a key Democratic leader, our cause has bridged political divides. While the final outcome remains uncertain, the lessons we’ve learned are already clear:
- Stay Vigilant. Charter schools are public schools. Our students deserve access to the same local initiatives as their peers in ISDs. However, if we aren’t at the table from the beginning, we risk missing out on critical resources—just as we did with mental health funding here in San Antonio.
- Organize at Every Opportunity. Local issues provide an ideal platform to unite grassroots and leadership figures. Whether or not your city has a formal charter sector, organizing around these issues strengthens alliances and amplifies our ability to enact change for all families.
- Push Back When You Have the Moral High Ground. Politicians often champion underserved students, but now is the time to hold them accountable. Is their opposition to charter schools greater than their commitment to students’ mental health? In San Antonio, we’re about to find out if they will support families and students equitably.
We remain hopeful that we can deliver a win for our community and share the valuable lessons we’ve learned along the way as we continue this fight for educational equity.