Luzea, 10, sat beside her sister Vega, 7, under a shady tree outside the Bobby Joe Hill PK-8 STEAM Academy on the last few days of their summer break.
On Monday, they will enter the unfamiliar halls of the combined elementary and middle school because their previous campus, Newman Elementary, was shuttered when the last school year ended.
Their father, Louie Sublasky, was distraught when he first found out the El Paso Independent School District planned to close the nearly 70-year-old Northeast school.
“My initial reaction was very emotional. Nobody likes displacement. It was really hard for me to understand why this school was getting shut down without looking at the economic climate of EPISD,” Sublasky said.
Most of his concerns were laid to rest after touring and meeting with staff at Bobby Joe Hill PK-8, one of EPISD’s newest campuses that opened in 2023 as part of a $668 million bond project.
“They showed me their commitment to helping the children and teaching them. At the end of the day, they were the ones I kind of felt the best about after talking to everybody,” Sublasky said.
“These kids were going to a school that barely had air conditioners,” he said about Newman Elementary. “Nobody wants to see a school close, but I guess the silver lining – they’re going to a bigger school with better stuff.”
Luzea and Vega are just two of about 1,400 EPISD students who attended classes at one of the five elementary schools that are now closed.
The change is part of a controversial plan, known as Destination District Redesign, or DDR, to close several elementary schools over two years in response to declining enrollment caused in part by falling birth rates. As part of DDR, schools that remain open would get upgrades and improvements.
Under the initial plan, approved by EPISD’s previous board of trustees in November, Carlos Rivera, Newman, Putnam, Rusk, Zavala and Lamar elementary schools were to close in the spring, and Stanton and Travis elementaries next year.
After the May 5 trustee election changed the board’s makeup, however, the new EPISD board voted to keep Lamar Elementary open and then-Superintendent Diana Sayavedra, who spearheaded DDR, suddenly resigned.
EPISD in a statement said the district has remained committed to ensuring a smooth transition for students and staff since the launch of the DDR initiative. The district didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview with administrators.
“In preparation for the 2025–26 school year, the district made intentional communications to inform and assist parents with the transition,” the statement read. “Campuses also hosted a variety of events in which they embraced the legacy of the closing schools while ushering in a promising new beginning.”
For months after the closures were announced, Sublasky was unsure where his daughters would attend school and even considered leaving EPISD. Now the girls are excited to start school at Bobby Joe Hill, where many of their friends from Newman enrolled.
While Sublasky and his family are hopeful about the coming changes, others like Jennifer Perez are still unsure how to feel.
Perez’s 8-year-old daughter, Aria, attended Rusk Elementary and will be moving to Crockett Elementary.
“I think we have to kind of experience it first. Get to know how the staff is and the actual physical school, and how safe the school is. We have to see all the aspects before we decide how to feel about it.”
Concerns over crowded schools
Families in South Central El Paso raised concerns about how the closures will affect the children who live in one of the lowest-income areas of the city and how Douglas Elementary, the last remaining elementary school in the Chamizal neighborhood, will handle an influx of new students.
Josephina Lerma, whose grandchildren attend Douglas, is worried the over 100-year-old school won’t have the staff and resources to accommodate students coming from Zavala and the nearby Ruben Salazar Apartments, the low-income public housing complex which has partially reopened after a major renovation.
“Tenemos temor ahora que entren a la escuela con tanto niño que se nos vienen a la escuela con el cierre de la Zavala y ahora abrir Salazar. No entendemos dónde los van a poner,” Lerma said in Spanish Wednesday during a forum hosted by Familias Unidas del Chamizal por la Educación.
“We are scared for them to go to school with so many kids who are coming with the closing of Zavala and now the opening of the Salazar (Apartments.) We don’t understand where they are going to put them all.”
Her grandson, Francisco Torres, said he believes there aren’t enough teachers at his school to keep students from fighting.
“En Douglas cuando estamos en P.E., hay niños que se agarran a golpes y no hay nadie que nos cuide,” Torres said in Spanish. “At Douglas, when we are in P.E., there are kids who hit each other and there’s no one to take care of us.”
Familias Unidas, a grassroots parental advocacy group based in the Chamizal neighborhood, protested to keep Beall Elementary open the last time EPISD closed schools in 2019. It sued the district in response to the closure.
Now, the group wants EPISD to reopen Beall and ensure Douglas has enough staff to handle a growing student body.
Douglas Elementary had close to 500 students during the 2023-24 school year and was at a 74% capacity, according to data published by the district.
Familias Unidas said the group believes Salazar complex, which has nearly 290 units with two to four bedrooms, will bring 500 to 800 children under the age of 18.
Housing Opportunities and Management Enterprises, or HOME, the city’s housing authority and the owner of the low-cost apartments, estimates the complex will have a population of about 800 residents of all ages.
“HOME envisions hundreds of children living with their families there,” director of operations Maria Flores said in a statement. “If, for instance, there is an average of over two children per unit, there could be several hundred children residing there, along with a parent or parents.”
Flores said HOME does not have any formal projections on the number of children who are expected to move into the Salazar apartments.
Familias Unidas organizers said the group knows residents in the apartments with more than two children, as well as pregnant mothers whose children will eventually attend nearby schools.
“Cuando decimos que esperamos 500 niños que entren a Salazar, no son números que nomas aventamos al aire. Es porque conocemos a nuestra comunidad y porque ya estamos viendo lo que está pasando,” Brittany Medellin, a member of Familias Unidas, said in Spanish during a July 16 demonstration outside the apartment complex.
“When we say that we expect 500 children to enroll at Salazar, those aren’t just numbers we’re throwing out randomly,” she said. “It’s because we know our community and because we’re already seeing what is happening.”
The effects of school closures
Nearly six years after Beall Elementary closed its doors, Maria Luisa de Amaya recalled how having to move to a new school affected her grandchildren.
“Primeramente estaban afectados psicológicamente porque ellos estaban emocionalmente bien situados en su escuela. … Bajó mucho de sus niveles académicos por el cambio de la Beall,” de Amaya said. “First of all, they were psychologically affected because they were emotionally well-settled at their school. … Their academic performance dropped significantly because of the move to Beall.”
Economics researchers, including Jeonghyeok Kim of the University of Houston, have found that some of the effects de Amaya’s grandchildren experienced may not be unique.
In a study of nearly 500 school closures in Texas from 1998 to 2015, “The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes,” Kim found that closures can lead to an increase in behavioral issues and decreases in test scores, high school completion, college attainment, employment and earnings. The impacts are even more significant for high school students, Hispanic students and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Kim said researchers and educators will now need to explore ways to mitigate the adverse effects of school closures as declining birthrates continue around the country.
“Even though I found that school closures have negative impacts on students, I don’t want to argue that we shouldn’t close schools. We need to be more careful when we close a school,” Kim said.
As EPISD prepared for the first round of school closures, district leaders took on initiatives to help ease the move from one campus to another, including adopting academy models that infuse specialized topics like science and art into their regular curriculum.
Some of the schools that adopted this model include the Crockett Elementary Fine Arts Academy, the Cooley Elementary STEM Academy, the Clendenin Elementary and the Bobby Joe Hill PK-8 STEAM Academy, and the Mesita Elementary Connecting Worlds/Mundos Unidos Academy.
The district also held activities to foster connections between the closing schools and their “sister schools” that will receive students, including hosting open houses, sending Christmas cookies to one another and filming video tours of some of the new schools.
“In a lot of events that we hosted in the spring semester, we included and invited the students coming from other campuses. I think just having that open door and having that opportunity to involve them before the first day of school has really helped with them being able to feel very welcome at our campus,” Crockett Elementary Principal Devin Acosta said during an open house at the school Thursday.
To provide continued support, EPISD also said it developed a system that monitors the academic progress of students from closed campuses.
Even with these initiatives, EPISD Board President Leah Hanany, who has been critical of DDR and the plan to close schools, said the district has not done enough to mitigate the potential harms that can come from the closures.
“There’s been little to no tracking of academic outcomes post closure, no equity impact analysis, and no real investment historically in making sure that displaced students land in better academic settings,” Hanany said. “The research does say, if you do close the school, do it with a deep understanding of the consequences and a comprehensive plan to reduce harm. And frankly, that was not in our model.”
The post ‘Nobody likes displacement’: EPISD elementary students to walk new hallways following school closures appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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