Socorro ISD plans up to 300 layoffs, increased class sizes to deal with budget shortfall

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Socorro ISD plans up to 300 layoffs, increased class sizes to deal with budget shortfall

The Socorro Independent School District is planning to lay off employees, increase class sizes and cut programs in an effort to save itself from financial ruin.

SISD employees late Friday received an email from Acting Superintendent James Vasquez informing them the district needs to reduce its budget by $38 million for the 2025-26 school year and will need to cut staff to do so.

“We are currently working to identify exactly how many employees will be impacted. Once this has been determined, employees will be notified, and we will do everything we can to help them through this painful process,” Vasquez said in an email.

More: Vasquez email

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A Socorro spokesperson said the district wouldn’t comment on the financial challenges beyond Vasquez’s email.

But multiple people familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified, said they were told the district could lay off up to 300 people ahead of the next school year. That includes eliminating dedicated fine arts teachers at elementary schools. An agenda for Wednesday’s Socorro school board meeting said the plan includes “elementary fine arts redesign.”

Two veteran teachers said the district’s elementary school fine arts teachers received an email Thursday night telling them to cancel Friday classes and attend a 1 p.m. Friday meeting at district headquarters. There, Vasquez and others delivered devastating news.

“As of 2025-2026, there will be no fine arts in the elementary schools. There will be no music, no art in any of the elementary schools,” one teacher said they were told, adding that Socorro’s two fine arts academies were exempted. “And then, in addition to that, they’ll be eliminating 300 jobs.”

The teacher said the reaction to the news was “absolute shock, absolute betrayal, absolute fear.”

“At a previous meeting when Jim Vasquez came to speak to us personally at our campus, he told us that there would be no eliminations, that they would do everything they can to make sure that students were not hurt, that we did nothing to hurt their education,” the teacher said. “And I fail to see how taking away fine arts is a part of that because it is just as an important part of their education as anything else. So this was a complete reversal of what we had been told before.”

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A second teacher said the cuts in fine arts will hurt students.

“Many things have happened over the years to where we’re finally having students from El Paso make it to all-state, and students from El Paso making it to the state mariachi contest. We just have the band from Socorro 

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. We’re seeing the benefits of starting elementary-level music and fine arts education bubble up through the high schools and it’s good for El Paso,” the teacher said.

Socorro ISD is El Paso County’s second largest school district, with about 47,000 students. It experienced decades of rapid growth, but has seen enrollment decline in recent years as El Paso’s birthrate plunges and it competes with charter schools and neighboring Ysleta ISD for a diminishing student population.

The SISD school board will discuss and potentially vote on layoff recommendations at its meeting Wednesday, Feb. 19.

Some of the recommendations include cutting administrative staff and Career and Technical Education program employees, redesigning its elementary fine arts program and restructuring staffing for academic programs with low student participation.

The district also plans to change its staffing formulas, increasing middle school class sizes from 24 to 26 students per teacher and submitting waivers to the Texas Education Agency to allow it to increase its elementary class sizes from 22 to 24 students per teacher.

A third teacher who was briefed on the elimination of dedicated elementary fine arts faculty said administrators at the Friday meeting discussed how quickly broader layoffs will take place.

Administrators at Friday’s meeting said that individual campuses will be given a number of positions to cut and have to identify staff members whose contracts won’t be renewed for next school year by the beginning of March, the third teacher said.

“The other thing that he said was that everyone’s supposed to be notified by April 1st,” this teacher said.

The Socorro district has been depleting its reserves in recent years as it struggles with declining enrollment, stagnant state funding and management issues that led the Texas Education Agency last year to appoint 

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.

Last year, the SISD school board adopted a $479.6 million budget with a 

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for the 2024-25 school year.

Since then, the district reduced its employee health plan contribution to cut costs and took out a 

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 to make payroll when its cash reserves were low.

James Vasquez, acting superintendent of Socorro ISD, listens to public comments at a Board of Trustees meeting, May 15, 2024.

In his email, Vasquez said the district has saved $25 million by eliminating vacant positions, cutting its operating budgets and reducing its workforce by 8% through attrition.

Student enrollment has decreased by 1,200 students in the last three years and daily attendance has decreased by more than 2%. Those developments have led to a $16 million reduction in state aid, Vasquez said in his email.

Most El Paso County school districts are facing significant financial struggles, though Socorro ISD is the first to announce plans for large-scale layoffs. The El Paso Independent School District is 

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to address declining enrollment and Ysleta ISD board members received a financial update Wednesday informing them the district may need to take out a loan to cover a cash shortage.

The third teacher from Friday’s meeting with SISD administrators who spoke to El Paso Matters said good teachers will lose their jobs, but the biggest impact will be on students.

“Look, we can get new jobs, we can look for other opportunities, but our children are looking to us for their education and for their well-being and a well-rounded education,” the teacher said.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times:

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