Socorro ISD approves balanced budget, state conservator delays departure over special education data reporting
The Socorro Independent District adopted a balanced budget for the second year in a row and is looking to start rebuilding its savings next year after a decade of spending more than it generated in revenue.
The SISD board voted unanimously Wednesday to adopt a $462.1 million general fund budget with a $550,000 surplus that will pay for the operating costs of the district’s aquatic center.
The budget is a nearly 2% increase over the previous year and does not include pay raises.
SISD Chief Financial Officer David Solis said that even though the district’s budget is balanced, it is still facing challenges, including declining enrollment and limits on payroll spending.
“While we’re proud of the work that we’ve been able to accomplish, we still know that there’s still so much more that we need to do,” Solis told El Paso Matters.
Solis said he expects to finish the fiscal year, which ends June 30, with a 1% to 2% surplus budget, which would come out to about $4 to $8 million.
Texas Education Agency conservator Michael Hinojosa, who has been overseeing SISD for the last two years, said he may delay his exit from the district by another month due to unspecified special education reporting issues he said were not part of the state’s original exit criteria.
“There is an opportunity that by the end of July, it could be removed. Part of this is that the special ed data lags, and until they have significant data to clear to you, it may not happen,” Hinojosa said, referring to the conservatorship.
Some board members, including trustees Ryan Woodcraft and Marivel Macias, expressed concern that the conservatorship would be extended over a metric they were unaware of.
“I feel last night that the rug was pulled out from underneath us. In the 13 months I’ve sat on this board, not one point was the criteria presented to us from TEA,” Woodcraft said. “Now, it’s almost like we’re being punished for something that wasn’t communicated properly to us from the state.”
Hinojosa said the district won’t face any repercussions after an El Paso Matters report prompted the discovery that Superintendent James Vasquez didn’t complete the legally required evaluations for his cabinet members in 2025, when the district laid off dozens of employees.
SISD acknowledged that Vasquez hadn’t evaluated his cabinet members in the past two years in response to questions from El Paso Matters. The news organization reported on an El Paso Independent School District audit that found that its two previous superintendents, Juan Cabrera and Diana Sayavedra, skipped legally required evaluations for their top cabinet members for more than a decade.
Hinojosa said Vasquez took accountability for failing to complete the evaluations and is confident he will complete them in the future. He was critical of EPISD’s failures, which included a request from Sayavedra after she left the district that her direct reports complete and sign evaluations for the three previous years.
“The difference with the two districts, one was egregious, and it went back and they asked people to falsify information. I think this one was just the fact that you had an inexperienced superintendent, there was a transition, they asked for a waiver, and they were so focused on getting the year done that it was just sloppy. And being sloppy is different than having people change documents,” Hinojosa told El Paso Matters.
Hinojosa was appointed to oversee the district, along with Andrew Kim, after a state investigation found the district was inundated with leadership issues and had improperly graduated students in 2019.
Kim attended his final board meeting in March, as he and Hinojosa prepared to recommend the end of their conservatorship in June, which would have needed to be approved by the state education commissioner.
Two years ago, SISD officials were concerned that operating on budget deficits for nearly a decade had almost depleted the district’s savings, which it uses to pay employees in between state funding disbursements. That has forced the district to take out short-term loans to make payroll.
Now, the district plans to start approving surplus budgets next year, under a multi-year plan to rebuild its savings.
SISD plans to adopt a budget with a $2 million surplus for the 2027-28 school year and a $3 million surplus for the following year.
SISD ended the 2024-24 school year with enough reserves to keep the district running for 29 days in an emergency. He said he is unsure how the current school year will end until he finds out if the district will have a surplus next month.
SISD policy requires the district to have enough savings to operate for 75 days. The highest score a school district can get under the state’s financial rating system is a B if it has less than 75 days’ worth of savings.
The district estimates it will have 800 fewer students compared to last year, which is nearly a 2% enrollment reduction.
Despite the anticipated decreases in enrollment, SISD expects to get a 5% increase in state funding compared to the budget adopted last year and plans to spend 5% more on instruction, which is primarily made up of teachers’ salaries.
Solis said this is because the board adopted a budget that did not include funding increases from the 2025 Texas Legislature.
SISD is also preparing to call for a voter-approval tax ratification election, or VATRE, that would bring in more funding to the district.
The board expects to vote on its tax rate in August and decide whether to call for a tax ratification election.
SISD voters narrowly rejected a VATRE proposal last year that would have shifted a portion of the tax rate used to pay its debt to pay for operations, known as a penny swap, which would have generated over $49 million in revenue.
