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First IDEA Public Schools graduating class in El Paso loses over half its students since eighth grade [1]

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Date: 2025-07-22

As the first graduating class of IDEA Public Schools in El Paso donned caps and gowns mid-May, it was less than half the size that were in the school system in eighth grade four years earlier.

In 2021, IDEA’s first two El Paso campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined 256 eighth-graders, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Four years later, 124 seniors were enrolled in IDEA’s class of 2025 at graduation time, all set to continue their education in college.

That 52% shrinkage is cause for concern, said Manny Soto, the data director for the Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, or CREEED.

Soto, a longtime public school administrator in Texas and Oklahoma, said this data gives the public an idea of how well a district is preparing its students to pass their classes and graduate.

“They say kids go back (to traditional public schools) because the (IDEA) curriculum is too rigorous for them. But, it’s their responsibility to support the student in such a way that they can handle the curriculum,” Soto said about students who leave IDEA before graduation.

IDEA’s Regional Director of Operations Yanira Aguilar said all the students who left the charter school system continued their education in another district.

“All the students who left IDEA, for whatever reason, were not dropouts. They either transitioned to the schools or the districts that they came from, or they transitioned to other schools outside of the area,” Aguilar said. “In other words, they continued going to school and they were continuing on their path to graduate from high school.”

TEA data shows the El Paso and Socorro school districts had roughly the same number of graduates this year as the number of eighth graders they had in 2021. Meanwhile, the Ysleta Independent School District had 10% fewer graduates than eighth graders four years earlier.

The number of students at the Harmony School of Excellence, the second-largest charter school system in El Paso, dropped about 55% from eighth grade to graduation.

IDEA’s next two cohorts in El Paso show improvements, but follow a similar trend of students leaving before graduation, with a 40% enrollment decline since eighth grade for the class of 2026 and 45% for the class of 2027.

Why do charter school students leave or stay?

Aguilar said one of the reasons students leave is because the charter school system has more rigorous requirements for students to graduate, including starting French and Algebra 1 in eighth grade and taking Advanced Placement classes in high school.

“We know that IDEA is not for every student. So, the beauty of it is that, in El Paso, there are hundreds of schools where families truly do have choice, and they can go to the school that is a good match and fit for them. Those are the types of conversations that we do have with families. We don’t want to force you to stay here.” Aguilar told El Paso Matters.

Eighteen-year-old Santiago Esparza, who was among the first graduating class at IDEA Public schools in El Paso, said he stayed to take advantage of the advanced college-level curriculum.

“I have so much confidence in my ability to perform well academically in college, and I owe it all to IDEA,” Esparza said. “If it weren’t for the college resume, for the high expectations that they set for us, for this almost 24/7 assistance that they offered, if it weren’t for all the aid, I don’t think I would feel this confident going into my secondary education.”

Esparza was a founding student at IDEA Rio Vista in sixth grade and is now preparing to study kinesiology at Texas Tech University as a first-generation college student.

IDEA’s regional vice president of schools, Constantine Polites, said many students also leave IDEA after eighth grade in search of a traditional high school experience or to participate in sports such as tackle football, which the charter school system does not offer.

“For us, it is a dark day when we lose kids from IDEA. … We have systems in place where we meet with the counselors, we meet with the principal, we meet with our enrollment coordinators to ask those students, ‘what do you need?’” Polites said. “The main reasons that we’ve heard, especially from the eighth to ninth transition, is kids wanting a traditional high school experience. They want that ‘Friday Night Lights’ Texas experience, where they can go to football games with a band.”

Esparza said he and his classmates initially wanted that traditional high school experience, but decided to stay to get a leg up in college.

Santiago Esparza, 18, is among the first graduating class at IDEA Public schools in El Paso. He was a founding student at IDEA Rio Vista in sixth grade and is now preparing to study kinesiology at Texas Tech University as a first-generation college student. (Courtesy IDEA Public Schools)

“Almost every single one of my classmates wanted to go to a different school. Especially starting high school, all of our friends were going out, having open lunch and going wherever they wanted in the middle of the day. All the activities that other schools had were a real pull factor for us to want to move away from IDEA,” Esparza said.

“But the older we grew, and especially starting junior and senior year, we realized that it was a sort of delayed gratification. Maybe we wouldn’t have like a movie high school experience, but it would 100% be worth it in the end, and it was worth it,” he said.

Soto suggested that IDEA may not be doing enough to ensure all its students get the help they need to meet its higher graduation standards.

“Parents wouldn’t be putting them back in regular public schools if their kids are successful,” Soto said. “If they say that the curriculum was too rigorous for them, which is what the public schools tell us, whose fault is that? It’s not the kids’ fault. It’s (IDEA’s) obligation to build the support structures to make sure they pass a public school.”

Polites said the charter school system doesn’t put any sort of performance requirements on students to enroll in their schools and offers help for students to keep up with its higher-level classes.

“Do you have a pulse? You’re in the school, and it’s now our responsibility to make sure that you get interventions that are in place to make sure that you’re ready,” Polites said.

He said the charter school network provides tutoring after school and Saturdays, and has designated intervention blocks during the school day to help students who fall behind.

“We provide services for students on all levels of the educational spectrum. So, think through students who are struggling to read because they just got to the U.S. and have a language acquisition challenge, to students who are fully dependent on a provider, such as a nurse or a teacher or a personal aide,” Aguilar added.

The first cohort of IDEA Public School graduates in El Paso on May 6, 2025, revealed for the first time where they would go to college during their school’s College Signing Day. (Courtesy IDEA Public Schools)

While Esparza said his classes at IDEA were rigorous, he always got the help he needed from his teachers.

“Nobody went into the class cycle saying, ‘I don’t understand anything. I don’t know what to do, how am I going to pass this class?’” he said. “It was a huge workload, but it was never something we couldn’t handle or something we couldn’t answer because of how amazing our teacher was.”

Returning to traditional public schools

School and teachers’ union leaders who spoke to El Paso Matters said they are not surprised students left IDEA in large numbers after eighth grade.

“Anecdotally, school districts have noted that a lot of the students who choose to leave for charter school after enrolling first in traditional ISD’s tend to come back,” said Gustavo Reveles, the State Board of Education member representing El Paso and the Canutillo Independent School District’s communication director. “We chalk that up to different factors, including the availability of programming. … I’m confident that we will continue to see that trend in the future, that families that perhaps leave our traditional schools at the middle school level, return to us in particular at the high school level.”

YISD Superintendent Xavier De la Torre said parents often put their children back in traditional public schools after discovering charter schools do not offer adequate services to students with special needs.

“You see a lot of families who initially go to the charter school believing that the student is going to perform better, and they find out that charter schools are relatively limited in the support they provide students with special needs, because it is more expensive,” De La Torre said.

YISD said 248 of its students left to attend a charter school during the last school year, while 146 students returned to the district after attending a charter school.

The year prior, 239 students left YISD for a charter school, and 102 returned.

CREEED’s executive director, Eduardo “Eddie” Rodriguez, said it’s too early to evaluate IDEA’s performance.

“This is their first graduating class, and it’s taken essentially six years for that class to come through. So, I think we’re going to evaluate IDEA just like we would evaluate any other public school in terms of their performance, and we look at all the data points in that respect,” Rodriguez said.

“The fact that you have eighth graders who do not persist all the way through graduation in IDEA would be explained by several factors. I know that IDEA’s looking into it, and I think they want to make sure that they’ve addressed the underlying issues that perhaps cause students to decide not to complete once they get started,” he added.

Performance: Does IDEA stack up?

Over the last five years, IDEA students had lower performance in their Algebra 1 STAAR end-of-course exams than El Paso’s three largest traditional public school districts.

The first three years IDEA students took English 1 STAAR exams, they performed higher than El Paso’s large traditional schools. But in 2025, the number of students who reached the meets or master performance level dropped by 19%.

Since IDEA students first took the English 2 STAAR test in 2023, they have consistently outperformed EPISD, SISD and YISD.

IDEA’s biology and history STAAR test scores varied year after year.

All of IDEA’s graduating seniors are also exempt from taking remedial courses under the Texas Success Initiative, meaning they met certain benchmarks in the ACT, SAT or STAAR end-of-year exams.

Aguilar said IDEA’s main goal is to see its graduates complete college within four to six years of graduating.

In early May, the charter system celebrated its first college signing day in El Paso, where seniors announced where they plan to go to college.

All of IDEA’s graduating class got accepted into college and 62% received acceptances into “selective and highly selective” colleges and universities, including Louisiana State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Alabama and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Polites said IDEA will start focusing on preparing students for the ACT next school year, with the goal of having students score a 21 on the test.

“The reason why we want that magic number 21 is because we know it increases the acceptances to highly competitive universities for students, and also increases the amount of scholarships students get,” Polites said.

CREEED members disagree on future of charters

IDEA Public Schools opened its first two campuses in the county in 2018 after CREEED donated several million dollars to bring the charter school system to El Paso.

Since then, IDEA has become the largest charter school network in the region, with 10 campuses in El Paso, including five elementary school academies and five preparatory schools, with about 6,000 students.

In an agreement with CREEED, IDEA promised to open 14 schools throughout the county over an unspecified period.

Even as birth rates in El Paso are declining and traditional public schools prepare to continue losing students in the coming years, IDEA has not ruled out the possibility of opening new campuses.

“We do not currently own any land in El Paso scheduled for construction or launch, but we are reviewing market dynamics for our region and where, when and how future opportunities could be created. Providing every El Paso family a competitive choice remains our goal and mission in a sustainable way. We will have more to share as our regional growth planning matures in Fall 2025,” IDEA said in a statement.

While both traditional public schools and public charter schools receive funding from the state based on the number of students they have, charter schools are unable to collect property taxes. Instead, they can collect donations to supplement their school funding.

“We haven’t had major fundraising work in the El Paso area since our launch. The money that is designated for the campuses so that they can continue to serve the students is a combination of public and private funding,” Aguilar said when asked how enrollment affects the charter school system’s funding.

As data on IDEA’s first graduating class came out, CREEED members expressed diverging views on the charter school’s progress and its future with the organization.

Soto said CREEED was not aware that birth rates were declining until El Paso Matters began reporting on it, and suggested the organization may reconsider offering financial support to charter schools in the future.

“We’re going to live up to whatever our previous commitments were, but we’re not going to make new commitments,” Soto said.

Rodriguez said the organization has not ruled out the possibility of continuing to fund charter schools.

“In terms of specific programs, IDEA’s options, along with any other public school that we’ve supported, would be on the table at this point since we don’t know what the next two, three, four years will bring. What we do know is that the emphasis that we continue to make in terms of college readiness cuts across the board,” Rodriguez said.

When CREEED first started, one of the organization’s primary funders, Woody Hunt, said he hoped El Paso would adopt a model similar to what existed in Denver Public Schools, where one-third of students are enrolled in charter schools, one-third in traditional public schools and one-third in innovation schools, which can waive certain district policies.

Rodriguez said CREEED visited Denver to gain insight into the model.

“We looked at the model and we did not come back with a decision that said we wanted to replicate that model in any specific way. We just went up there as we’ve gone in other different locations, to get insight to what was being done in other markets,” Rodriguez said.

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[1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2025/07/22/idea-charter-school-enrollment-loss-el-paso-texas/

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