We are being told that the number of students enrolled in the EPISD will drop by about 5,000 in the next few years.
The chart below is what the Texas Education Agency (TEA) shows about the matter:
Is the TEA wrong? Where did they get their numbers? I don’t know, but I would think that the numbers would of have to been reported by EPISD to the TEA.
Maybe one of our readers can help us to understand this.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Very simple. Scam… El Chueco style.
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El Fuzzy mamath stikes again!
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Do you mean Ms. Fuzzy Math?
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Maybe it is because of the increase in tuition? Or, look at the numbers for the local school districts. Aren’t some of them declining?
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The TEA numbers don’t show the 5,000 student drop that the board of managers is telling us about.
Brutus
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Doesn’t TEA have control over EPISD budget? Their auditing department should certify that the demographic study does not show a drop of 5,000 students.
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EPISD did not open it’s doors 3 years ago. Look at population data from 2000 or mid 1990’s to the present. That shows a clear drop of population from a high of 65,000 students about 2004-5.
EPISD never received the 15,000+ students that the DOD promised would arrive when the Ft. Bliss realignment took place. In fact military families are actually leaving the city.
Come on Brutus, you know better than to look at small amounts of data.
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Actually I asked for an explanation.
You have done a fine job.
Brutus
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There are a lot of city spending numbers that are based on Fort Bliss’s growth and projections. If military families are already leaving the city, someone is going to have to make up the revenue shortfall in a lot of areas. We don’t hear much discussion about that in city council meetings.
What we did see last week was a bunch of El Pasoans begging the federal government to not make any cutbacks at Fort Bliss. They literally argued that the federal government should keep El Paso’s economy afloat as if the U.S. Department of Defense should care whether local restaurants open or close. The beggars are helping to prove the point that without all the government spending and jobs in El Paso, this would be a ghost town.
Much of the growth in recent years was non-sustainable growth. One minute we’re bragging about how smart we are. The next we’re begging for government money.
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I’ve never believed EPISD’s projected declines, especially considering all fo the growth in El Paso. Maybe EPISD has multiple sets of books. Maybe they pick the numbers to use based on how they want to spin a story and who they want to manipulate.
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There is always two sets of books. One to show others and the real one.
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El Paso is growing, but at the edges. Not in EPISD. In Clint, SISD, and Canutillo.
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Jacobs Study used non-EPISD data, City, ESRI, and US Census to come to conclusions. It is here on Page 13: http://www.episd.org/file_mgr/facilities/master_plan/Steering%20Committee%20Documents/1.01%20DRAFT_Facility_Master_Plan_Background_Report.pdf
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That chart clearly shows a decline of about 1000 students across a three year period (59K to 58K …). The district is saying that the decline is over a period of several years, a decade or so. Not all the decline will happen tomorrow. (BTW, TEA gets their numbers from the Local districts. They do not do their own projections.) Make yourselves a little excel spreadsheet and graph out what that population line would look like in 2020..2025…and so on. That is where the 5000 student decline comes from.
What you are not looking at Brutus, is population prior to those pieces of data. Five years ago, EPISD have 65,000 students. If you start at that point, and now look at the population rate, it clearly shows decline.
Data is nice to have, but if you only look at selected pieces of it, you only get a small look at the overall picture, which is what this chart is.
Yes, the El Paso area is growing, but at the edges. Canutillo, Socorro, Clint are the growth districts. EPISD and YISD and are gentrifying and are essentially landlocked as their populations are getting older.
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