Concerns over proposed EPISD school closures intensify as vote nears

Five-year-old Lilleth took her grandmother's hand as her school day at Zavala Elementary came to an end, preparing to walk a few blocks to their home in South-Central El Paso.

Lilleth said goodbye to her classmates on the other side of the school playground chain-link fence while Maria Reyes, whom she calls "Tita," carried the kindergartner's pink princess backpack and led her down the sidewalk.

Every day, Reyes, 54, picks up Lilleth from school before preparing her dinner and changing her out of her maroon-and-beige uniform so she's ready for her mom when she gets home after work in the evening.

Their routine may end next school year if the El Paso Independent School District shuts down Zavala and other elementary schools that have been recommended for closure as the district faces declining birth rates and falling student enrollment.

So many of Reyes' family members attended Zavala over the years, including her three children, that it's hard for her to keep track of just how many. Lilleth is one of about 240 students – over 90% of them Hispanic and about 98% from low-income families – who attend the nearly 100-year-old school that sits near the Bridge of the Americas.

"No me parece bien que la cierren porque vivimos cerca y no tenemos transporte," Reyes told El Paso Matters in Spanish this week as she walked home with Lilleth. "It doesn't seem right to me that they are closing it because we live so close and we don't have transportation."

Other schools recommended for closure include Carlos Rivera, Lamar, Newman, Park, Putnam, Rusk, Stanton and Travis elementaries – most of them in Central and Northeast El Paso.

Read the most updated version of EPISD's school closure plan

Hillside Elementary was initially included on that list, but is no longer being recommended for closure, EPISD chief communications officer Liza Rodriguez said.

The district plans to keep Hillside open until it finishes rebuilding Bliss Elementary using U.S. Department of Defense funds and creates more space at Hartley Elementary, Rodriguez said.

"We want to do some boundary work before we do any kind of closure, especially with the building of Bliss," Rodriguez told El Paso Matters Saturday. "A lot of kids are in Hartley are going to move over to Bliss, and it's going to open up space at Hartley, which is the first choice for Hillside parents."

The district also pushed the proposed closures of Park, Stanton and Travis elementaries from the coming school year to the 2026-27 school year, Rodriguez said.

The schools recommended for closure scored low in an assessment conducted by the district that looked at enrollment, capacity, building conditions and other metrics.

The EPISD school board is scheduled to meet Tuesday, Nov. 19, to vote on the closures.

The district's plan to shut down nearly a fifth of its elementary schools and improve the ones that remain, which EPISD calls Destination District Redesign, has drawn mixed reactions from parents, teachers and students.

Some expressed grief over the potential loss of a neighborhood campus that offered families a sense of community.

"It just feels a lot like there's that bond that these students work hard to create, and it's just getting cut. It's not even guaranteed that, sometime soon, they're moving to a better place," Carmel Murillo, a mom to a Rusk Elementary second-grader, told El Paso Matters at a recent community meeting on the closures.

Others acknowledged why the closures are happening and hope the plan brings improvements to the district.

"I understand budgets and saving money. I understand it'll let us have better programs for the kids in the future. It's just a hard thing. Nobody wants to see a school close down. It's real sad that it's come to this," said Louie Sublaskly, a parent of two daughters at Newman Elementary.

His daughter Luvia said she was scared she wasn't going to see her classmates at her new school.

"I like my school and I don't want to leave my friends," the fourth-grader said.

El Paso Federation of Teachers President Ross Moore said the closures may be necessary to ensure the district has enough funding to keep its 72,000 employees as school districts all over Texas deal with budget shortfalls.

EPISD approved a $542 million budget with a $18.5 million deficit in June to operate its 75 schools, including 48 elementaries. District enrollment has declined by 20% the last decade, according to the Texas Education Agency. Last school year was the first time since the 1960s that EPISD had fewer than 50,000 students.

"I'm more worried about what happens to my members if they don't do the closures," Moore said. "I'm aware of the budget and if they don't do the closures, given the fact that the state isn't going to provide a lot of aid if any this year, I see 150 of my members, plus, being laid off."

El Paso County birth rates declined by 21% the past decade , data obtained by El Paso Matters shows, and without a trend reversal that means elementary school enrollment will continue to be affected.

El Paso Teachers Association President Norma De la Rosa doesn't think keeping schools open would cost employees their jobs, but acknowledged closures would likely be needed as enrollment declines.

"You keep things open so people do have a job," De la Rosa said. "We're not against the district rightsizing. What we are against is the manner in which this is being done, the rush to get it done, the lack of data to support why these 10 schools are destined to be closed."

The school board in December 2022 tied rightsizing the district to Superintendent Diana Sayavedra's annual evaluation, making it one of her goals.

Concerns rise as vote looms

Parents, EPISD employees and trustees have raised various concerns about the proposed plan, from the logistics of transferring roughly 2,000 students to nearby campuses to ensuring they can all get to their new schools.

EPISD plans to increase bus routes and separate the district into four transportation zones – West, Northeast, East Central and South Central, which the district calls Zones of Excellence.

Students will be able to attend any school within the district, but buses will only transport students to and from schools within their zone.

Zavala students like Lilleth with likely have to take the bus to Cooley Elementary, roughly two miles away from her house.

Rusk Elementary parent Maria Solomon said she is worried that closing schools would lead to larger class sizes, making it hard for the district to compete with charter schools.

"Mi preocupación es que se va a llenar la escuela, entonces dicen papás, 'Pues saco mi hijo de la escuela, ya no es la misma atención,'" Solomon said in Spanish. "My concern is that the school is going to get full, so parents will say, 'I might as well withdraw my child from the school, they aren't getting the same attention anymore.'"

Others said they are not comfortable with having their young students move to a combined elementary and middle school like Bobby Joe Hill Pre- K-8 School.

Trustee Leah Hanany, who represents the Bowie and El Paso high school feeder patterns, took issue with some of the language used by the district, including the term "rightsizing" to describe closures.

"Many of those campuses are majority English-language learners, which means their family's home language is Spanish. There's not even a Spanish translation for 'rightsizing.' As far as I know, my families have not even been told that their school is going to be closed in a way and in a language that they understand," Hanany said.

Though EPISD announced plans for potential school closures in May and held a series of informational community meetings over several months, some parents El Paso Matters spoke to said they only found out about the plan in recent weeks. Some said they heard their child's school may close on the news, while others only heard about it through word of mouth from other parents.

"A neighbor asked me if I knew that they were going to close the school, and I told her, 'No.' My granddaughter also told me, 'Hey, Tita, they are going to close the school,'" Reyes said in Spanish. "We were in shock."

Others like Park Elementary School parent Mindy Sutton feel the district has not provided enough information on the proposed plan.

"We're not necessarily against school closures, but we need to understand why there's 10 right now, and why there's not just two or three," Sutton said.

Coalition forms to stop closures

The pushback against the district's plan to close schools intensified as parents, elected officials, and community and civil rights organizations formed a coalition to try to put a pause on the proposal.

The group, known as the Save Our Schools Coalition, held a news conference Nov. 9 demanding that EPISD delay any closures until it completes an ongoing equity audit required under a court settlement after the district was sued for closing schools in South-Central El Paso in 2019.

The EPISD school board and administration are expected to hear the findings of the audit in April 2025 and a list of recommendations to create a more equitable district and address barriers in December 2025.

"We were all in disagreement around the school closures and we felt the presentations and information that EPISD was giving was not sufficient," Ana Fuentes, executive director of Amanecer People's Project, which helped form the coalition, told El Paso Matters ahead of the news conference.

"We were all tackling this issue separately and slowly. We started to make connections and realize that if we came together and had a cohesive message we could work better together," Fuentes said.

The coalition asked El Paso residents to sign a petition calling for the district to delay the closures. As of Nov. 14, the petition had nearly 900 signatures.

The coalition has also taken the lead on calls for Board President Israel Irrobali to recuse himself from voting on the proposed closures, citing his position as executive director of the El Paso Association of Contractors as a conflict of interest. The district is planning to send a bond issue to voters in November 2025 to make improvements to some schools and possibly build new campuses – including a replacement for Zavala.

Irrobali said he does not plan to recuse himself from voting on the school closures, citing opinions from two attorneys stating his job with EPAC is not a conflict of interest because the organization does not receive money directly from the district.

"I've yet to see anyone bring any information forward to me that says there is a conflict of interest," Irrobali said.

Since coalition members first called for Irrobali to recuse himself, the El Paso Teachers Association and local parent Getsemani Yanezeach filed a complaint to the Texas Education Agency.

A spokesperson for the TEA said the agency has received both complaints.

"The complaints are currently being reviewed to determine what next steps, if any, are necessary. This is the standard intake process for all complaints received by the agency," the TEA said in a statement.

Members of the coalition include EPISD Trustee Alex Cuellar, District 2 city Rep. Josh Acevedo, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Central Neighborhood Association, Ciudad Nueva and the El Paso branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Splitting the board vote

Some members of the coalition, including Cuellar, expect the school board to vote 4-3 in favor of closing schools.

Having Irrobali recuse himself could leave the vote at a 3-3 split, halting plans to close campuses.

Though he did not reveal how he plans to vote, Irrobali said he has generally been in favor of the DDR process.

"I'm focused on seeing what that final plan the superintendent is going to be bringing to us on the 19th so that we can vote on whether or not that plan is good enough for our community or if we need to kind of reevaluate," he told El Paso Matters.

Cuellar and Hanany did not say how they plan to vote but expressed discontent with the current proposal.

"It's difficult for me to be in favor of it because of the lack of transparency, because of the lack of information that we've been given," Cuellar said.

"I'm absolutely not OK with the plan as presented. I think that it targets very vulnerable families and does not provide viable alternatives," Hanany said.

Trustee Jack Loveridge said he plans to vote against the closures unless the administration could provide more in-depth information about the costs that would be saved by closing schools.

"I would like to see the administration seriously explore whether previous rounds of closures, which we've had at least two in the past 10 years, generated the savings that were projected," Loveridge told El Paso Matters. "Barring that, I'm going to have to go 'no' in the interest of my community."

Trustee Valerie Ganelon Beals said she is unsure how she is going to vote.

"I need to continue to do my homework, and then just make the best decision that I can make. Ask those important questions to the professionals who know more than me, and make my decision off that," Ganelon Beals told El Paso Matters.

Trustee Isabel Hernandez declined to comment and Trustee Daniel Call could not be reached.

Whatever the board decides, Reyes said it will affect many families in her neighborhood.

"Hay mucha gente que viene de tres a cuatro cuadras de Zavala," Reyes said. "Muchos traen carro y muchos no. La mayoría somos abuelos que recogemos a nuestros nietos."

"There are people from three, four blocks away from Zavala. Many have cars and many don't. The vast majority of us are grandparents picking up our grandchildren."