MARFA — Marfa ISD School Board trustees met this week to discuss a variety of district goings-on including a new regional Career Technical Education (CTE) program and the education of Redford students.
Board members Teresa Nuñez, Rene Gonzales, Stela Fuentez, Paul Hunt and Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez were present. The latest enrollment and attendance metrics are 195 students enrolled and a 93% attendance rate district wide. Marfa Elementary is averaging a 96.48% attendance rate to date, said Principal Rosie Martinez.
Alferez shared with the board that the district’s new early childhood education partnership program — which they hired Fort Davis ISD to help facilitate a month ago — is progressing, if slowly. He said he recently traveled to childcare centers in Houston and El Paso and is working on dual enrolling around 37 students but deals are not yet finalized.
CTE expansion update
Yvonne Realivasquez, director of the new Rural Pathway Excellence Program (RPEP) — an initiative in its planning year designed to increase career training opportunities for Marfa, Alpine and Marathon ISD high schoolers in the hopes they pursue local jobs — introduced the program to board members and provided a status update.
In addition to expanding CTE opportunities for students, like allowing Marfa High School students to participate in Alpine ISD’s certified nursing assistant (CNA) program, for example, participating districts will also be eligible for additional CTE state funding — $3,000 to $4,500 per student. Realivasquez said that could be a huge boost for districts considering schools in the Big Bend region are in the bottom 2% of state funding.
“Having the RPEP and really thinking about what this can do, it will increase funding for the school districts — that’s one of the goals of the RPEP from the state, and it’s a Texas Education Agency initiative — but it also gives students more opportunities to really grow into some careers and think about the workforce that we’re going to have,” Realivasquez said.
One of the RPEP requirements is that career training opportunities center around high demand, high wage professions. The RPEP steering committee, made up of district superintendents and other partners, reviewed a labor market analysis performed by outside entity CareerCraft this week. That study will help determine what jobs are in demand — law enforcement, education, healthcare, customer service, for example — that potential CTE programs might focus on. It is possible that no new programs will be created in the inaugural year which is set to take place during the 2025-26 school year.
While the results of the labor market study have yet to be shared publicly, Realivasquez said it may challenge preconceived notions about the local job market. She explained that $36,000 was initially benchmarked as a living wage for the study, but it was lowered due to the overall “contraction of salaries.” She relayed an anecdote which she said speaks to the situation in the area, where a special education teacher with a master’s degree who was offered $36,000 to work for Marathon ISD was making less than their partner who was working as a barista.
“You might not [typically] consider the service industry as high demand, high wage positions, but in our area, you might,” Realivasquez said.
Marfa Education Foundation Executive Director Abby Boyd, who is serving on the RPEP steering committee, told board members she is excited by the prospect of increasing CTE opportunities for students, but stressed that quality of life issues, like housing, also need to be addressed. “How do we use this information and this organization that we’re putting together to advocate for better living conditions for the people who do choose to stay here and work these jobs that we’re trying to train them up for?” Boyd said.
Redford students
Board members also renewed a longstanding agreement with Presidio ISD regarding the education of students in Redford, but not without much back and forth about potentially renegotiating the deal.
Children in Redford are technically zoned to go to Marfa ISD, even though they are much closer to Presidio schools. A similar issue exists in Brewster County, where Terlingua Ranch is technically zoned to go to Alpine ISD.
To avoid a 1.5 hour bus route, Marfa ISD instead pays Presidio ISD to educate students they are responsible for. The payment includes average daily attendance (ADA) for those students as well as transportation and insurance costs.
Last year Marfa ISD paid Presidio ISD $48,000 for taking on 12 of its students. This year there are a total of 10 students. Board member Rene Gonzales asked whether the deal was worth reconsidering due to the fact that the terms seemed to favor Presidio ISD considering they are a healthier district financially compared to Marfa.
Ideally, board members said, Redford students would be included in Presidio ISD’s jurisdiction instead of Marfa’s.
Board member Paul Hunt, who served as a trustee for a previous stint from 2004 to 2010, said the issue had a long, complicated history, involving an attempt at redrawing lines at the state level facilitated by then-U.S. Rep Pete Gallego. “I think it’s definitely worth it, it’s just been a sequence of fiascos about having that conversation,” Hunt said. “It’s not just the dollars and cents.”
It is likely that Marfa would have to give up some of its taxable value if lines were redrawn. But Hunt argued that because the district is currently paying $1.7 million in recapture payments to the state — annual payments MISD makes due to a combination of low enrollment and high property taxes — they didn’t need more taxable value. Money aside, Hunt said it was a systemic problem worth solving once and for all. “It’s very unlikely we will save money by doing this but we will resolve just a terrible fissure in the community if we do this,” Hunt said.