City To Vote On Historic Overlay For Houston Elementary School

The El Paso Plan Commission is expected to vote Thursday afternoon on whether to protect the building that once housed Houston Elementary School.

This comes more than a year after the El Paso Independent School District had plans to shutter Houston due to low enrollment. The plan sparked an outcry in the community, causing many parents, residents and city Rep. Susie Byrd to band together and come up with a way to save the school from becoming an abandoned building.

Byrd said that back in July 2010 she planned to ask the City Council to protect Houston with a historical overlay.

“It’s right at the tip of the Manhattan Heights Historic District. I don’t know why it was left out in the beginning, and so we’d just like to include it in there,” Byrd said.

“It kind of sends the message to the (school) district and to the public that this is a valuable institution; we’d like to protect the building, if we couldn’t have protected the school,” added Byrd, whose district includes the Central El Paso school.

Byrd had previously said the motivation behind the historic overlay, which has already been approved by the Historic Landmark Commission, is to make sure the school doesn’t end up vacant or demolished.

EPISD decided last summer to move Sunset High School, “second chance” campus for older students and those with families or jobs, into the old elementary school to continue to use the building.

The commission is scheduled to vote on the issue at 1:30 p.m. Thursday.