EL PASO, TEXAS (KFOX14/CBS4) — The El Paso Independent School District is restructuring its College, Career and Technology Academy program, shifting it from a single central El Paso campus to four comprehensive high school campuses in an effort that the district says will better support at-risk students closer to home.
District officials said the change is not a closure of the College, Career and Technology Academy, known as CCTA, but a transformation in how the program operates.
Julia Spencer reports on El Paso ISD to close College Career and Technology Academy, move program to four schools (Credit: KFOX14)
Mark Paz, EPISD’s assistant superintendent of secondary schools, said CCTA is “a stumbling drop-off prevention program” for students who “have fallen off cohort or lost credits and are struggling at their traditional campus” and choose to attend CCTA to recover credits.
Mark Paz, EPISD Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools. (Credit: KFOX14/CBS4)
The program currently operates at a central El Paso campus near Piedras and Grant.
Under the new plan, it will no longer be housed in one location. Instead, the program will be split across four campuses:
El Paso high schoolBurges high schoolChapin high schoolFranklin high school
Four high schools that CCTA will be divided into. (Credit: KFOX14/CBS4)
Paz said the district’s goal is to move services closer to students rather than having them travel to a centralized site.
“Instead of having a centralized location where the students would all funnel to,” Paz said, the district is “removing the program to where the students are.”
Teachers will also be relocated to those campuses, Paz said, so students can continue receiving individualized support from staff familiar with their needs.
“We are taking the teachers to those sites so the people who are already doing the program with them,” Paz said. “They’re familiar with the students that know how to serve as students that have those academic needs.”
READ MORE: El Paso ISD to close College Career and Technology Academy, move program to four schools
Administrative staff will also transition to support the four campuses.
The decision was approved unanimously by the school board in a vote on Tuesday.
No community meetings were held ahead of the decision.
KFOX14/CBS4 why no community meetings were held, Paz said, “It’s hard to elaborate on a community meeting when that community is such a small group of students. I mean they really really is a unique pocket and to have like other external peoples and stakeholders involved in that process.”
Reaction to the change has been mixed.
One student said the move will put him closer to home in Northeast El Paso.
But Susana Rosales, the grandmother of a CCTA student, said the current location has been convenient for her family and raised concerns about transportation and the shift from a smaller setting to larger campuses.
“And it’s a big change for, especially for me, because I dropped off kids and then my two grad kids, and then work is down the street,” Rosalez said. “So it is a big difference.”
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Rosales also said she worries about how students will adjust to a larger environment.
“This one’s very small. And mostly all the teachers, assistant principal, anybody here in OUG who you are,” she said. “So in the other ones, which is bigger, it’s going to be a lot, a lot different.”
EPISD said it has not determined how the soon-to-be vacant campus will be used.
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