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After decades of purposefully avoiding being on the same ballot as the City of San Antonio, the board of trustee elections for the Southwest Independent School District will be on the general countywide ballot in May.
SWISD spokesperson Jenny Suniga Collier told TPR that SWISD voters will be able to vote at any polling place in Bexar County both during early voting and on Election Day May 2.
“This was not a change in SWISD policy but (a) change in our contract with the Bexar County Elections Office,” Collier said in an email.
“After meeting with the Bexar County Elections Office recently, we reached a mutual decision to conduct our elections through the countywide election process,” SWISD officials said in a statement. “We have full confidence in the Bexar County Elections Office and trust in the integrity and reliability of its procedures.”
The decision comes after the San Antonio City Council voted to move its elections to November.
Historically, Southwest ISD’s choice to hold separate elections forced some SWISD residents to visit multiple polling sites on the same day.
For instance, during San Antonio’s high-profile mayoral election last year, only a handful of polling sites overlapped as both SWISD and San Antonio polling places on Election Day. And, even then, voters had to access multiple ballots to vote for both the school board and the mayor. None of the polling places had both ballots during early voting.
With elections for San Antonio mayor and city council moved to November, May elections will be less likely to garner attention in the future. That, in turn, is likely to impact voter turnout for all May elections.
Every other school district in Bexar County has long held school board elections jointly with either Bexar County or the City of San Antonio, allowing residents to access their ballots at any polling place in Bexar County. Even school districts that are in multiple counties, like Medina Valley ISD, are on the general Bexar County ballot.
Southwest ISD is located entirely in Bexar County and has a sizeable student population within San Antonio city limits. But SWISD trustees made a deliberate choice in the mid-2000s to hold separate elections and, until this year, they haven’t wavered.
“About 15 years ago they tried to force us to go to November,” SWISD Board President Sylvester Vasquez Jr. told TPR in 2023. “They allowed us to stay in May if we teamed up with a municipality that ran elections in May, and that's how we started teaming up with Lytle. And it's worked just fine.”
Lytle is a small town on the outskirts of Southwest ISD. Trustees could have chosen to conduct joint elections with the City of San Antonio, like every other district in Bexar County. But in 2023 Vasquez said he didn’t want to do that.
“Then we would have to open it up like we did in 2020,” Vasquez said.
The May 2020 elections were canceled because of the pandemic. In November, all school board issues are automatically placed on the general county ballot. Thousands more people voted in Southwest ISD’s ballot that year, compared to a normal May election.
Two former SWISD board members, Pete Bernal and Yolanda Garza-Lopez, tried to convince their fellow board members to join the general May ballot in 2022 and 2023, but the board majority struck their motions down.
Bernal and Garza-Lopez are on the ballot again this May, competing against the trustees that took their place in 2023 after the board majority threw their support behind James Gonzales and Joe Diaz instead of Bernal and Garza-Lopez.
During the 2022 board discussion Board Vice President Ida Sudolcan said SWISD’s elections would get lost if it were on the same ballot as the City of San Antonio.
“Too many voters go uninformed and we get lost in that list," Sudolcan said. "To me, the school board election is important enough to make it a concerted effort to go vote."
Sudolcan said San Antonio's ballot was "too politically hot" and could lead to trustees being elected with the wrong intentions.
“They get elected because they have the right last name, they have the right gender," Sudolcan said. "I think it should be intentional to go vote for the school board. That's why I do not want to go with the city.”
Vasquez also said he wanted Southwest’s voters to be informed voters. But Joshua Blank with the Texas Politics Project told TPR that’s not their call to make.
“Ultimately, they don't get to choose the voters who vote in the election. The voters who are eligible get an opportunity to vote, and it’s up to election administrators in this state to make sure they have every opportunity to do so,” Blank said in 2023.
TPR emailed and texted Vasquez for comment on this story, but he did not respond.
Neither SWISD nor Bexar County Elections have confirmed that the school district’s decision to join the general May ballot is tied to San Antonio City Council’s decision to hold its elections in November. But SWISD trustees have previously told TPR they did not want to hold elections jointly with the city.
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones pushed to change the city’s elections to November in a bid to boost voter turnout. Voting rights groups also backed the measure.
Some city council members opposed the change out of concern it would affect school districts. But District 4 Councilman Edward Mungia, who represents Southwest ISD, urged school districts to move their elections to November too.
“I would strongly recommend the rest of the school districts that are not in November to consider (it),” Mungia said in December, noting that several school districts that he represents currently hold elections in May, including Southwest ISD.
“They have their own separate election issue, which I think also needs to be fixed over there as well,” Mungia noted.
Although May elections historically have low turnout, school districts on the countywide ballot usually have higher turnout than Southwest ISD. Just 625 people voted for SWISD's school board in 2025: less than 2% of the school district's registered voters. Roughly 9% of voters turned out for the countywide election in May 2025.
