El Paso ISD trustees hold team-building retreat, rank attendance and academic outcomes as top budget priorities

Trustees of the El Paso Independent School District met in a board-sponsored team-building and budget-development session where facilitators led exercises that produced a ranked set of short-term priorities and a simulated budget-balancing exercise.

The training, opened by President Itterbally and led by facilitators Dr. Michael Inahosa, Ben Mackey and Andrew Kim, asked trustees to name two top goals for the district and then to weight a longer list of potential budget priorities. Trustees collectively placed “improving enrollment and attendance” first, followed by “math and reading outcomes” and “reward and respect our educators” (compensation and workplace climate). “Increased quality seats” and supplemental special-education funding also ranked among the top five, according to the facilitators’ weighted scoring of trustees’ inputs.

Why it matters: Trustees and district leaders said the exercise was intended to produce a shared, short-term focus for the next 18 months and to inform the 2025–26 budget-development process. The district’s finance staff and facilitators used current district figures in a live budget simulation to show how changes in attendance, staffing and a potential tax ratification election (TRE) would affect the district’s bottom line.

At the session, Dr. Michael Inahosa, one of the facilitators, framed the exercise by saying trustees were…