$7 Million Goddard School Opens on Potranco Road, Targets Far West Side Child Care Gap

A new $7 million early childhood education center is set to open on San Antonio's Far West Side in the coming weeks, giving families near Potranco Road a long-awaited local option for infant and toddler care. The Goddard School of San Antonio - Potranco, located at 12759 Jeff Ranch, will hold up to 200 children ranging from six weeks to five years old once it opens in early to mid-September.

The school is the third Goddard location built by franchisees Akbar and Shermeen Bhaidani, who spent three years building and completing the project, according to KSAT. State filings from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation describe the facility as a ground-up, 10,858-square-foot, single-story wood-framed building on a 1.239-acre lot, developed under the ownership entity TGS03 - Potranco LLC.

The couple's first San Antonio-area venture, The Goddard School of Kyle, opened in April 2025 at 870 Veterans Drive and has already built a five-star rating across more than 50 reviews, per Community Impact. That location also earned a 100% state score in safety and education grading, the outlet reported. The Bhaidanis now own two other Goddard schools in Texas in addition to the new Potranco campus.

A Corridor Struggling to Keep Up With Its Own Growth

The new center arrives in a part of Bexar County that has outgrown its own infrastructure. Census tracts on the Far West Side, including areas around Culebra Road and Alamo Ranch, have ranked among the fastest-growing in the county, with one tract seeing a 468% population surge over ten years, as the San Antonio Express-News has reported. Local officials describe the Far West Side as having a growing population whose child care resources have not kept pace, leaving some early education programs too far away for families and saddled with long waitlists.

The strain isn't limited to classrooms. Bexar County Public Works advanced plans this month for an elevated roadway along Alamo Ranch Parkway, coordinating with Medina County to relieve traffic congestion tied to the corridor's rapid residential construction, according to the San Antonio Report. The same growth pressures fueling that roadway project have also driven demand for schools like Goddard's newest campus. Hoodline has previously chronicled the corridor's rapid commercial build-out, from a third retail strip to a planned 20-acre entertainment hub from Santikos.

Statewide Shortage Adds Pressure to Local Opening

The Potranco campus opens against a backdrop of a stubborn statewide child care shortage. An April 2025 report from advocacy group Children at Risk found that 88% of low-income working families in Texas live in a child care desert, following a net loss of nearly 75,000 child care seats statewide in a single year. That squeeze tightened further this month when the Texas Workforce Commission enacted a 9.5% cut to the state's Child Care Services subsidy program, eliminating roughly 14,000 subsidized slots statewide, a move Hoodline covered in its report on Tarrant County losing 354 seats to the same cuts.

Public programs have tried to fill some of the gap. San Antonio's Pre-K 4 SA opened a 53,000-square-foot South Education Center in October 2025 that, for the first time, accepted infants as young as six weeks old, explicitly targeting local shortages, per the San Antonio Report. But that facility sits on the city's Southside, leaving Far West Side families still reliant on new private options like the Goddard campus for close-to-home care.

Inside the New Campus

The Potranco school's curriculum is built around academic, social and emotional development, and the facility includes lock vestibules, hospital-grade equipment, and frequent sanitization protocols, according to KSAT's reporting. Franchisee Akbar Bhaidani told the outlet that national kindergarten-readiness figures he has heard range from 40% to two-thirds of children, while Goddard graduates are kindergarten-ready at a 97% rate. The Bhaidanis have held multiple community events, including family open houses, ahead of the school's official opening.

As a facility caring for more than seven children, the new Goddard campus falls under Texas Health and Human Services Commission rules governing Licensed Child Care Centers, which require staff background checks, routine state inspections, and strict staff-to-child ratios. Texas also runs a voluntary Texas Rising Star quality rating system through the Texas Workforce Commission, which grades licensed providers on a Two-Star to Four-Star scale for exceeding baseline licensing standards. Whether the new Potranco campus pursues that rating has not been reported.

Corporate franchisor Goddard Systems, LLC, headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, has been expanding quickly nationwide, signing 60 new franchise agreements in 2025 alone and now overseeing more than 660 schools across 37 states, according to franchise industry trade coverage. For Far West Side families who have spent years navigating long waitlists, the Potranco opening represents one more seat added to a supply line that, statewide, is still shrinking faster than it's growing.