SAN ANTONIO – Low-attendance classes offered by the San Antonio Parks & Recreation Department are on the budget chopping block as the city tries to close a looming deficit.
The department offers a variety of classes at community centers, adult and senior centers and city parks.
The classes include everything from tai chi to making flowers out of pipe cleaners. On its website, the city advertises art, dance, fitness, martial arts, music, nature and science, sports, and aquatics programs and classes.
A review of the nearly 79,000 classes it offered in the 2024 fiscal year found 32% of the classes had no one participating in them.
Now, the department said it plans to save close to $624,000 by eliminating classes led by temporary staff members that have zero participants.
“I think one of the highest ones was art,“ Director of Parks and Recreation Homer Garcia III told KSAT. ”And so, of the total classes being reduced, the bulk of those are in the community centers, not ‘Fitness in the Park.’”
Garcia said the city would still have “a spectrum and a palette that the community wants to participate in, based on that data-driven approach to where are they interested in doing.”
What we will be eliminating is just the quantity of those offerings,” Garcia said.
KSAT attended an interval training class on Tuesday at the Enrique M. Barrera Community Fitness Center on the West Side.
One of the nine attendees, Bertha Sanchez, said between interval training, cardio fit, and Zumba, she goes to five or six Parks & Rec classes every week.
“I love the instructors,” Sanchez said. “They push you. You can go heavier. You can do this and that. The friends, the peers. They push you. They motivate you.”
Sanchez said she has also attended classes where she has been the only one there and heard from instructors about classes where nobody shows up.
“Classes far away, like yoga classes, where there’s nobody there,“ Sanchez said. ”Parks that are way out there in the North Side or somewhere.”
Though Garcia said there were some smaller fitness classes with no one in attendance, he said the bulk was at the community centers, where the model of “programming every available space, every hour.”
“So, when the community would come in — kids primarily — choosing which class they want to be in, a lot of them gravitated to some more than others,“ Garcia said. ”And so, we focused the reduction on where there was zero attendance.”
Though the cuts to class offerings comes during a budget crunch, with the city trying to cover a nearly $173 million shortfall in its primary operating fund over the next two years, Garcia said that’s not the only thing driving the change.
The issue was brought up during a comprehensive budget review process.
Garcia said he thinks “it’s more focused on just being innovative.”
“We’re still providing classes focused on quality, not quantity, while at the same time expanding access to our community centers,” Garcia said.
During a budget work session on Tuesday, Garcia told council members the department also plans to increase the 19 community centers’ hours.
The city council is scheduled to vote on a final city budget on Sept. 18.
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