ABC-7 Special Report: How El Paso, Ysleta ISD are facing declining enrollment

Last year both the Yselta and El Paso school districts began looking at their declining populations and aging buildings. While the districts are grappling with similar issues, the processes they’re using differ.

Both districts were once thriving, but now, their neighborhoods are filled with retirees and their students are now adults. Younger families are moving to cheaper housing in Canutillo ISD on the westside, and Socorro ISD on the eastside.

There’s no room for El Paso or Yselta to expand, so instead they’re shrinking. Both districts have tens of thousands of empty seats. EPISD is at 76 percent capacity, YISD is at 72 percent.

While they were flagship districts in the mid-90’s, their buildings are now crumbling, unable to provide necessary learning tools for the 21st century, such as Internet connectivity. Surrounding districts, such as Socorro offer state-of-the-art classrooms, while EPISD and YISD can barely keep kids cool in the summer.

“If people no longer have kids, you can’t have schools there,” said EPISD Superintendent Juan Cabrera. “If people are moving to other neighborhoods, you need to make sure those schools can support more kids.”

“We are facing a number of challenges, so it’s not enough to go out and paint — I think one of the politicians said, put lipstick on a pig,” said YISD Superintendent Dr. Xavier De La Torre. “We need to reinvent the school district.”

Ysleta, with 60 schools and 42,000 students, paid Jacobs about $500,000. It also paid the Templeton Group $70,000 for a demographics study.

“We have a lot of schools that were built in the 20s, 30s, 40s,” De La Torre said.

El Paso paid $1.3 million to Jacobs for everything. With 93 schools and 59,000 students, it paid nearly 135 percent more than YISD. Cabrera said that’s because he wanted an in-depth look at each school’s roof condition and HVAC cooling systems.

“We actually paid about $100,000 for them to manage the steering committee process,” Cabrera said.

The committee process came next for both districts. EPISD had the Jacobs group help form a group of 75 community representatives. This group would look at Jacob’s recommendations, adding changes that better reflected local inclinations.

YISD made up its committee by allowing every feeder school two representatives selected by the trustee, as well as active community members.

Then both districts took it to the community for feedback.

“Closing schools is difficult. Nobody ever wants to close their school,” Cabrera said.

“It was also important to have a two-way dialogue with them and not skirt away from any difficult questions,” De La Torre said.

A big difference between community outreach was two-fold. Superintendent De La Torre was at all seven community meetings, talking to parents and taking direct questions, with the goal of selling his vision.

Cabrera was not, but instead enlisted the help of technology to capture feedback through online surveys.

De La Torre will steer the final decisions. He said voters will tell him if they want upwards of $300 million in changes by voting in favor at the May bond election.

“Parents need to understand that I need to be held accountable,” De La Torre said.

Cabrera said he’d rather let the community lead the decision-making process, with him in the background.

“I think given the recent history of EPISD and some complaints about lack of transparency, we didn’t feel that it was good to go from Jacobs to the board,, but to go from Jacobs to the steering committee, then to the board to have another layer of community input,” Cabrera said.

At EPISD, the Board of Managers will approve the recommendations by the end of this month, sending the nearly $850 million bill to voters in three separate bond elections from now until 2021.