Tornillo ISD braces for continued enrollment decline, superintendent says

TORNILLO, TEXAS (KFOX14/CBS4) — As school districts prepare for the upcoming school year, Tornillo Independent School District said it is continuing to brace for a drop in student enrollment.

Tornillo is a small border town along the Rio Grande, about 25 miles southeast of the El Paso city limits.

Speaking to KFOX14/CBS4 on Wednesday, Tornillo ISD Superintendent Rosa Vega-Barrio said the district expects enrollment to continue to fall, with 630 students enrolled for the 2026-27 school year, a drop of about 60 students compared to last year’s student enrollment.

According to Texas Education Agency data, enrollment declined by about 30% over the last eight years, to fewer than 700 in 2025-26.

For the upcoming 2026-2027 school year, Vega Barrio said the district expects 660 students, but is working on getting 30 more students enrolled.

According to Vega-Barrio, the district loses about 25 to 30 students every year, a point she attributes to declining birth rates in the area.

“For over nine years now, we have been strategically looking at student growth within our area, specifically our birth rate. That has been our greatest challenge, being that our district in our town mostly serves retirees. So more than half of our population are retired, therefore, children are not in those homes,” Vega-Barrio said.

She added that the decrease in students has created a “ripple effect” that led to consolidation plans including moving all its seventh-eighth graders to its high school and turning its former middle school into a pre-kindergarten through sixth grade campus.

“It has caught up with us where our pre-K to second grade classes are now ranging, on average, about 20 to 40 students. Therefore, causing a ripple effect now that those classes are moving up to the upper elementary and middle school, and high school. And so with that, we have had to consolidate schools,” Vega-Barrio said.

Additionally, the district faced recent layoffs when four teacher positions were cut under a reduction in force approved by the Tornillo ISD school board in February.

According to Vega-Barrio, the layoffs were not a financial need, but rather an adjustment in resources, to “make sure that we have not been hiring more staff members than what is needed to serve our students.”

“It was not until this year that we did have to go to the board and get approval to reduce four positions that we had to let go, not because of financial need, but because there’s literally no kids for them to have served. And so that’s what we’re dealing with now. It’s going to be a year-to-year basis, analyzing and looking at what our district needs,” Vega-Barrio said.

Meanwhile, the layoffs come as the district is expected to adopt a nearly $11 million budget next month.

According to Vega-Barrio, the district has about $5.6 million in its fund balance, an amount she said is “healthy” to keep the district moving.

I’m very pleased and proud of my administrative team and definitely our board members who have entrusted us to save money along the way through positive attrition and making necessary cuts in the use of funds throughout these last nine years, understanding that this is what we were going to be meeting and seeing these years. And so we do have a very healthy fund balance that is going to allow us to keep moving with student

Tornillo ISD is expected to adopt its budget in August.

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