AUSTIN — San Antonio legislators return to their neighborhoods this week cheerful about some improvements in the lives of Bexar County residents even as a long shadow hovers over the state's public schools.

Horrific child abuse cases in San Antonio last year inspired Texas legislators to reform the state's broken Child Protective Services and allocate money for new caseworkers in the 79th legislative session that ended Monday.

Successes such as reform at the children's agency allowed veteran Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, to spin the positive developments of the five-month session.

Others will remember the session for failing to solve public school funding after Gov. Rick Perry declared it an emergency issue in January.

"I don't think it was a lost effort," Corte said. "I am very optimistic. You have to be because this process was not made to be easy."

Several highlights for Bexar County include:

A bill allowing San Antonio hospitals to pool resources that could produce an extra $18 million in federal money for indigent health care.

Giving Texas voters a chance in the November election to amend the constitution authorizing state transportation officials to negotiate with railroad companies to remove train tracks from inner cities.

Increasing the budget of rapidly growing University of Texas at San Antonio by 19 percent.

But whatever accomplishments worth touting are undermined by the Legislature's colossal failure to fix the public education system, some San Antonio lawmakers said. A trial court last year declared that system unconstitutional and in dire need of additional money to adequately educate the state's growing population of bilingual and low-income students.

Legislators returned to the Capitol in January focused on saving public schools and giving property owners a hefty tax cut.

"It's hard to overcome the fact that those were the two biggest problems we came here to solve and they didn't get solved," Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said.

The House and Senate each passed separate school funding and property tax bills. But several San Antonio members said those plans fell far short because they did not sufficiently help school districts and because the tax reform package would have shifted taxes to middle and lower-income Texans.

"The system works. Good bills pass, bad bills get held up — and we live to see another day," House Natural Resources Chairman Robert Puente, D-San Antonio, said.

Rep. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, echoed the sentiments of other critics who opposed the failed school funding and tax bills: "No bill is better than a bad bill."

One failure of note was the lack of a bill to support construction at three Bexar County university sites. UTSA and the proposed South Side Texas A&M campus each lost $45 million and the UT Health Science Center lost $70 million when legislators couldn't agree on a package of tuition revenue bonds.

Counting their accomplishments, Menendez and several of his San Antonio colleagues also boasted about killing what they considered bad bills, such as education vouchers and a voter identification measure they said would suppress voter turnout in minority areas.

A personal highlight for Menendez involved his bill amendment "to make Texas safer" by banning new teenaged drivers from using cell phones.

Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, also cited a safety issue she hopes eventually would improve living conditions for Bexar County residents. Voters will decide a constitutional proposal this fall to give the Texas Department of Transportation authority to negotiate the removal of train tracks from inner cities.

"That's a major issue for us in Bexar County," she said, citing five train-related fatalities in a year.

Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, cited his legislation giving Bexar County hospitals the ability to team up to collect more federal funds for indigent health care as a benefit for San Antonio.

But, overall, he would give the Legislature a failing grade.

"We talk on the campaign about children and how they are our great priority, but we don't carry through," he said.

Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, believes that a public improvement district for northern Bexar County, including a PGA Tour resort, Marriott hotel and golf courses, will provide as much economic development as the Toyota plant will produce on the South Side.

And he's also enthused about legislation creating a non-voting student slot for university board of regents.

It's difficult for freshmen legislators to make a big splash in the 181-member Legislature, and Rep. David Leibowitz, D-San Antonio, is no exception.

"I was here every day. I represented the people on every vote," he said.

But he was not overly impressed by what he witnessed in his first legislative session.

"I'd be hard pressed to give the whole legislative session a real positive score," he said. "I couldn't do things this way in my law practice and maintain a practice or maintain my license."