The Great Schools of El Paso Texas [2020]

The Great Schools of El Paso Texas [2020]

Hi and welcome to living in El Paso, Texas. In this video we are going to talk all about education. With a lot of you moving here, you have children from young young to high school, and so of course you are going to be concerned about the schools here. And spoiler alert, they're awesome, and I'm going to show that to you right now.

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please reach out to me, and I would love to help you. And in this video, all about the El Paso school district. So a quick note, right now we are in October of 2020 and as you know the pandemic is still upon us so things aren't really normal here in El Paso just like they're not normal really anywhere else for the most part. Actually I talked to a friend of mine

just yesterday who would substitute teaching in the district. And she was saying that for the most part schools are happening, classroom instruction is happening virtually. There are some small groups of students that are required to come in but that's mostly because they weren't, you know, following the rules and showing up or, you know, there were some

issues with them or what have you, but for the most part distance learning because of COVID. But hopefully all of this will get turned around soon and things will go back to normal. So to start off with I'm going to tell you some of the some of the highlights of what I found when I was researching for this. In

2018 the US News and World Reports found that there were a number of high schools that made the best high schools national list. There are a lot of schools in El Paso and you're gonna see that, I'm gonna lay that out for you so you can understand that, but there were three high schools in El Paso Independent School District, five high schools in Socorro

Independent School District, six in Ysleta, two in Clint and three charter schools that made that rather fancy-dancy list of the best high schools. So I mentioned some words that you may not have heard yet. El Paso, we still haven't broken in that 1 million category of citizens

but we are a pretty big pretty sizable community. And so the school district is actually not just the El Paso School District. There are actually a couple of other school districts, and I'm going to show that information to you right here. Okay, so the Ysleta

Independent School District as you can see here covers a lot of East El Paso. So if you've been watching these videos, you know that there's the west side and then there's kind of the central downtown area and then there's the east side and the east side is our larger side of the city. It goes north

up to the northeast where Fort Bliss is around there, the airport, and then on the east side and then we expand eastward into what we call the Far East. And if you caught last week's video on Horizon City, that's over in the east. And Ysleta Independent School District, it's still the public school district, public school district just like El Paso is, but it covers mostly this area

kind of in the east. And so as you can see there's a number of high schools, middle schools, K to 8s, elementary schools and all of that, very nice. We actually when we first moved here, this is a school district that we lived in. Bel Air High School was over there. They did a beautiful renovation of a sports field house, I believe it was, so very nice.

Okay, and then when you continue to what's more of like the Far East, this is what's called Socorro Independent School District. Socorro is actually a little town there, you can see it in the red and the blue and it

also independent school district, public school district just like El Paso and Ysleta. And it covers basically this more Far East side. Now, there's a couple others, I'm not going to get into those, but Clint, you can see the city directly below there, they have their own independent school district, but I didn't include those just because those are a little bit smaller.

So for most of you when you move to El Paso you're gonna either be in the El Paso Independent School District, the Ysleta if you live on the east side or Socorro if you live on the Far East. Okay, so starting our tour here of the El Paso Independent School District as you can see,

54,000 students total, 8,000 employees total and 84 schools. Now mind you this does not even include Ysleta and Socorro. I'm just going to give you kind of the the real details of El Paso Independent School District because that's kind of the the main school district here.

But remember there are those other two very large school districts. So in El Paso, number of schools, 10 traditional high schools, 2 specialty high schools, 4 alternative high schools, 1 career and technical school. In

addition to those we've got the 15 middle schools, 1 K to 8 school, 1 6 to 12 and 50 elementary schools. So El Paso is identified three main focus areas, as you can see they are providing engaging challenging learning, building strong supports,

modernizing environments, which I love. I love this little video of somebody learning how to code, very forward-thinking, love that. And then finally, they're really on the ball as is Ysleta and Socorro, but they've developed a comprehensive strategic plan for 2020. I'm going to put the link to that below in case you really are interested and you want to get some more detailed information.

They've laid out pretty brilliantly how they plan to address the needs of a growing community here in El Paso. So next up, just still with El Paso, one website that kind of ranks schools is called great schools and as you can see they rank schools on a scale of 10, 1 to 10, 1 being poor 10 being good. As you can see El Paso has a pretty high,

pretty high numbers there. So that's fantastic news for those of you that are moving to our area. The great schools website though, they have a couple, we have a couple of schools that are rated a 10 out of 10. We've got Silva Health Magnet High School, which was awarded a college success award in 2019. A lot of these schools by the way are early college or really focus on the college bound students.

But some of our other schools in El Paso and the El Paso Independent School District, 10s out of 10s. We've got Green Elementary School, Polk Elementary, Tippin Elementary, Trans Mountain Early College High School, Loma Verde, which is an elementary, and Mission Early College High School. So great schools, they do their rankings based off of these criteria.

They're looking for above average year-over-year academic improvement by the students that attend. They're looking for above average college readiness measures, above average how well it's serving disadvantaged students and finally kind of above average state test scores. So I would suppose that the school districts here are feeling pretty darn good because

their rankings, their scores by these types of websites are consistently very high. And I was just actually responding to an individual who was talking about El Paso and the property taxes are just too high. This is no, this is nothing new to me.

I have heard this from a number of people. Generally the number now that I'm telling people is 2.8, 2.9 percent. So of the property's value is what you're going to pay in property taxes. But the point that I always make is that El Paso is a community of small,

growing young families and as you can imagine what's most important to young families are their children and what's most important to El Pasoans, I think kind of culturally is this idea of getting an education and kind of climbing that that ladder.

We all want our children to be more successful, to have more than we had, right? And the way that you do that is through education and education is not free. And of course, yes, the federal government and the state, they provide funds for education, but trust me, I was a teacher for over 15 years.

Education isn't cheap. What is these days? What is this? That's good these days, especially. Education is not cheap. So those property taxes, those are paying for these 10 out of 10 rated schools, right, all of those new buildings that you saw that were being constructed. That's property taxes, right? And extracurriculars are huge here. If you know anything about Texas, Texas loves football, right?

So like the Friday Night Lights kind of football game, high school football game, that's straight out of the Texas playbook. And extracurriculars are huge. Not only just sports but music, arts, now things like robotics and all of the stem education.

So all of this stuff requires money and a lot of that money comes from property taxes. So don't mean to rant on property taxes but chances are if you're watching this video because you have children, you're probably not so concerned about property taxes because essentially that money is an investment in the future.

It's an investment in your children and I mean I can't think of anything that would be more worth investing in. So there's my 10 cents on property taxes. Okay, so we also have what are called idea public schools. I did a little bit of research on these and I wanted to include them just so that you know

what your options are. These are tuition free public charter schools. They're in their third year of being here, these schools. They wear uniforms. They offer extracurriculars just like the other schools. There's only a limited number of students that they accept and so after they fill up they do a random lottery. So just so that you're aware of those, there are currently I believe four of those idea public charter schools in El Paso.

And also, additionally, we also have a pretty substantial number of private schools. These schools do have tuition. I'm in a ballpark,

5,000 to 10,000 dollars a year are some of the numbers that I saw and by niche.com. We have some of the highest ranked at least in our area and some of the highest ranked ones were there. As you can see, Radford, Loretto Academy, which is a Catholic one, Emanuel Christian, I believe it's a K to 12 Christian, and so Radford there was non-denominational.

So if you're looking to do more of the private school thing, we have plenty of options and I really mean that. I looked at the numbers, in a lot of times in cities where I've been they have private schools but, you know, there it feels like they're just kind of hanging on with 50 to 100 students.

Most of the ones that I saw in El Paso, they were 400 up to 5 to 600 students. So these are pretty sizable schools in addition to the already pretty sizable public schools and their student enrollments. Okay, so I hope that helps to give you kind of an idea of what the school, what the education system is like here.

I didn't even talk about higher education. We have an unbelievable community college situation. The El Paso Community Colleges have a number of campuses with a large number of offerings. We have UTEP is here, University of Texas El Paso

Southwest. We have a number of colleges and universities here, but I'll probably save that for a different video. But some of the other things though that I found as I was just kind of looking into the education thing here, but a lot of really cool articles about how we have the Fort Bliss, which is the army base here. Found a lot of great articles about how soldiers are volunteering within the schools and that there's kind of a

community connection I guess between the schools and the military, which I thought was interesting. Found a really cool article about some high school students that did a study involving the water quality of the Rio Grande and received some pretty significant recognition for their efforts.

And again sports huge here, music is huge and so again, pretty unique time right here for education. I can't imagine being a teacher right now, so I'm happy that I'm in this field, but my field's blown up a little bit, too. I guess everybody's field has has blown up because of coronavirus.

But anyway, I hope you found this information valuable. If you have more questions about the schools, is something that I forgot or left out, drop a comment. Give me a call. Shoot me a text. Send me an email and until next time, we'll see you later.