Education - Education And Child Care

Education arrived in El Paso fairly late in its history. For decades after the area was founded, it was simply an outpost, an army base, the Wild West. Although a basic school system was instituted in 1803, when El Paso was still part of Mexico, the public school system as it exists today was not founded until 1883, exactly 80 years later. The coming of the railroad in 1881 brought with it a huge population surge and a connection between El Paso and the outside world to Texas and beyond. It was at that time that a school board was elected and, a year later in 1884, Central School, El Paso’s first educational institution, was finally opened in a small adobe building at the corner of Myrtle and Campbell streets. Interestingly, El Paso school district was the first in Texas to desegregate unconditionally, and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), then called Texas Western, admitted Thema White, its first black student, in 1955.

Today, El Paso has a string of excellent public schools and many options for higher education. The city has one of the most highly educated Hispanic populations in the United States, with UTEP being nearly 75 percent Hispanic and the only major doctoral research university in the U.S. with a predominantly Hispanic student body. In El Paso’s elementary and public schools, bilingual education is common and there are many opportunities for El Paso students to study and learn about the Borderlands’ unique cultural heritage. A wealth of private schools, many of them religious schools or strong scholastic institutions, support the excellent public school system, in case you would like to incorporate an element of faith or academic rigor into your child’s education. There is no shortage of higher education options in El Paso, either, from excellent four-year degree-granting universities to short-term training institutes where students can increase their computer and technical skills quickly. In this chapter, you will find information about all of these options to help you make the best choice about which school your child should attend. If you have young children, the end of the chapter presents a short sampling of the hundreds of daycare options available for busy parents in the Sun City.