Before walking into Tradition Elementary School, visitors are greeted with a huge banner informing them: “This is a ‘B’ rated campus.” Inside, colorful hallways broadcast student work and a constant buzz of movement blankets the campus.
Last year, Principal Karen Kopeck wouldn’t have celebrated her school’s F-rating, which is considered a failing grade by the state of Texas.
Tradition, located in a rural town called St. Hedwig on the far East Side, scored a 57 for the 2023-24 school year. For the 2024-25 school year, the campus scored an 85, doing what often takes others years to do.
“There were a lot of factors,” Kopeck said when asked why the school had previously struggled so much and what led to the growth.
Fast-growing enrollment strains system
Part of the East Central Independent School District, Tradition opened its doors in 2018, replacing John Glenn Elementary School, a space that now serves as an annex for East Central High School.
Unlike most San Antonio-are school districts, ECISD’s student population has been quickly outgrowing the district’s facilities, increasing demand for new school buildings and teachers.
The district had an enrollment of roughly 11,500 for the 2024-25 school year. In August, officials said it had 12,900 students for the current school cycle.
By the 2033-34 school year, ECISD expects enrollment to skyrocket to over 25,000 students. Several of its schools are facing overcrowding or will soon be over capacity, including Tradition.
Tradition’s current enrollment sits at about 700 students, and the school ended the 2024-25 school year with 600 students. Before that, the school’s enrollment had reached over 1,000. The building’s capacity sits at 901 students without using portable classrooms.
“I don’t like to make excuses,” Kopeck said, sitting in her office with the rest of Tradition’s administrative team one October morning. “But we were growing so fast we couldn’t get our bearings down… there hadn’t been a sense of normal.”
Tradition Elementary School Principal Karen Kopeck reads to students during an interactive story hour in the school’s library on Oct. 31, 2025. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report
Kopeck joined Tradition for the 2019-20 school year, starting the position just months before the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close and move learning online.
When students were allowed back in the classroom, Tradition’s administrative team went through turnover as teachers dealt with the fallout of COVID. All the while, student enrollment kept growing.
The state’s public school accountability system doesn’t kick in until the second year a school campus is open, meaning the public doesn’t know how well Tradition performed during the 2018-19 school year. Because of COVID, schools weren’t rated for 2019-20, and later ratings were caught up in lawsuits after the Texas Education Agency updated the accountability system in 2022.
Even though Tradition seemed to be steadily improving after COVID, earning a 72 for 2022-23, Kopeck’s team struggled to keep up with the growth.
From 2022-23 to 2023-24, Tradition went from having 993 students to 1,141. That’s when it got an F-rating.
“We were surviving, not thriving,” Kopeck recalled. “The teachers were tired. You could see it on their faces.”
Kopeck was also forced to regularly hire teachers mid-year to keep up with growing enrollment.
Tradition was using portable classrooms, and students spilled into administrative office spaces for additional instruction. Kopeck’s current office used to house five campus employees — others used broom closets as offices and some migrated from desk to desk wherever there was space.
Focusing on the data
By the end of 2023-24, Kopeck’s team decided it was time to reflect and make changes. They implemented more leadership and professional development for themselves and master teachers and pushed teachers to develop their “craft” instead of relying on reading from a script.
The building of Honor Elementary, a couple of miles away, opened in 2024, which helped with the overcrowding.
Kopeck’s team went through The Holdsworth Center, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public schools by improving campus leadership and administration.
“When we went to Holdsworth, that gave us the time to start to pause, but we realized at that time that we still had a lot of work to do,” Kopeck said.
The Holdsworth Center focuses on showing campus leaders how to use data and how to connect with students.
“We became very, very data minded, but not to the point where we were just looking at numbers. We really needed to see the faces within the numbers. And that was something that we carried away from our training at Holdsworth,” said Debra McMeans, an academic facilitator at Tradition.
East Central ISD teacher Darlene Embrey reviews plot elements in the novel “Don Quixote” with her fifth grade class at Tradition Elementary School on Oct. 31, 2025. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report
Tradition teachers and administrators now meet regularly to review student performance, noticing which students need extra support and in which subjects.
Kopeck, along with her assistant principal Erica Bratton and McMeans, regularly pull kids out of classrooms for additional instruction. Each student has a data “profile” that students are encouraged to review as well.
Doing this, helps implement a “culture of support,” McMeans said.
On top of focusing on overall achievement, Tradition staff also break down achievement by sub populations to get a better sense of who needs more help.
Tradition’s campus leadership have also implemented “on-the-spot” coaching, meaning they give each other feedback as soon as a situation calls for it and in front of other staff.
“If we’re doing on-the-spot coaching, we can fix it right then and there, and we’re giving staff development,” Kopeck said.
Doing this also empowers teachers to lead more instructional meetings and provide Kopeck with feedback, something she welcomes since it’s teachers who work “in the trenches” and primarily connect with students.
Recognizing students for achievement
Tradition implemented several systems to promote the school’s core values: being safe, respectful and responsible.
“Sometimes you can get caught up, and I think I got caught up to be honest, in the negative behaviors, or undesired behaviors,” said Bratton, who handles most disciplinary issues at Tradition in her role as assistant principal.
Bratton joined Tradition at the end of 2021 as a first-time assistant principal. Before that, she was a teacher.
“I had to change my frame my mind, which to say that I needed to also recognize the students that are doing good, because 90% of our kids are doing great things,” she said.
Now, Tradition focuses on recognizing students for all the small and big wins, whether they’re academic or behavioral.
Incentives to demonstrate the school’s “core values” range from small to campus-wide. Students can get put on “brag boards” around the school or earn “Titan tokens” to trade in for prizes. One teacher rewarded students with “stinky sock” time, meaning they’re allowed to take off their shoes for a few minutes.
The students notice when they’re being celebrated, Bratton said, no matter how small.
Bratton has also implemented “temperature checks” with students who may seem off as a proactive way of dealing with behavioral issues. For Bratton, it’s important to campus administrators and teachers to connect with students at every point of contact.
Fifth-grade students at East Central ISD’s Tradition Elementary School sit at their desks and listen to instruction from their teacher as they review chapters from the Spanish novel “Don Quixote.” Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report
“We started with the teachers, understanding that they had to start with knowing the kids’ names, greeting them at the door… not only reaching them, but also following up with them,” she said.
Future struggles
Tradition, like the rest of ECISD, is expected to keep growing, even with the opening of Honor nearby.
That’s why ECISD held a bond election in May, asking voters to approve $309 million for the construction of three new schools, including an elementary campus. More recently, however, voters said “no” to another tax rate increase that would’ve helped the district pay for teacher raises and student programs.
The district is also currently facing a budget deficit of $4.6 million and will need to reduce its budget by 10% this year for the second year in a row, Superintendent Roland Toscano said in October.
Compared to other local school districts, ECISD currently spends the least per pupil. Despite this, the district’s accountability ratings improved by nearly 10 points in one school year, following Tradition’s improvement trend and outpacing other San Antonio districts in academic progress after COVID.
Texas public schools are often grouped with other campuses they share demographics with and then compared to each other. At the end of 2023-24, Tradition was in the bottom 5% of their group, but now they’re in top 5%.
But a “B” is not good enough for Kopeck, who said she’d never stop from “doing the work” and continually improving. She wholeheartedly believes Tradition can be an “A” campus.
In fact, student assessments from this year show they’re improving at a faster rate than last year around this same time. Kopeck credits this to the tight systems her team has implemented at Tradition.
“We were an F, right? Yeah, so we didn’t like that. So we know that you have to go through adversity in order to be able to be where you need to be. So and sometimes you don’t have the same resources as other people, right?” Kopeck said. “It doesn’t matter you can still push forward and move forward.”