Breaking news: Socorro ISD plans layoffs, other major changes to cut $38 million
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.
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.”
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 march in the Rose Bowl parade. 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.