CHARTER SCHOOL INITIATIVES

​HELPING ACCELERATE THE NUMBER OF HIGH-PERFORMING SCHOOLS IN OUR REGION

Every student learns differently. Thus providing options to parents and families allows for more students to find the right learning environment that will help them succeed. CREEED works with local, state and national charter management organizations (CMOs); funders; community leaders and educators to identify and support adding more proven charter schools in our region to ensure students have high-performing options and are able to choose the right learning environment to succeed.   

Charter schools are free public schools that are open equally to all students in a community.  CREEED is supporting efforts to expand the number of proven, top-performing charter school networks in El Paso County.  These include:​

​IDEA Public Schools: IDEA has committed to open 20 schools in the region on 10 campuses, with the first two set to open in August 2018. IDEA was launched in 2000 by two Texas teachers in the Rio Grande Valley. As of the 2017-18 school year, it serves more than 36,000 K-12 students in 61 schools across Texas. For 10 straight years, every one of its graduating seniors has been accepted to college. IDEA Public Schools continually rank as top schools in the State of Texas and in the nation.
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Harmony Public Schools: Harmony Science Academy is the only high school in El Paso to have consistently received a “gold” rating by U.S. News & World Report’s Best High Schools in the Nation report, and it boasts a graduation rate of 100 percent. CREEED is working with Harmony to expand the number of campuses and seats they offer in the El Paso region.  ​

CREEED’s goal is to see quality free charter schools expand to accommodate at least 25 percent of El Paso’s student body. In an effort to cultivate interest, CREEED hosted a summit in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Foundation that brought many high-performing charter management organizations to the region so that we could introduce them to El Paso.   We continue to be in contact with several that have indicated they would like to open schools in our region, and are diligent in making sure they advance the standards of high performance for our student population and community.
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