The consensus is clear: If El Paso is to emerge from the deep cycle of poverty that affects nearly a third of the population, education must play a key role.

Local economists, elected officials, business leaders and educators said El Paso's full economic potential won't be reached until more people become better educated.

"The first step out of poverty is to graduate from high school. It's that simple," said Tom Fullerton, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at El Paso. "The one major factor keeping El Paso poor is our lack of education."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 66 percent of El Paso adults have high-school diplomas, and just 17 percent have bachelor's degrees or higher. Both figures are well below the national averages.

El Paso's educational attainment - coupled with a dropout rate that lingers close to 40 percent and a still-wide academic achievement gap between students here and in the rest of the state - is a source of headaches for the business development officials trying to attract and create jobs that could help the area emerge from poverty.

"The U.S. is going from a goods-producing economy to an information-producing economy," Fullerton said. "Because El Paso lags behind in high-school and college graduation rates, this is not a harbinger for success."

Fullerton, like other educators in the city, said solving poverty in El Paso should start with keeping students in school and making sure they perform at an acceptable level.

More than 200,000 El Pasoans live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The El Paso poverty rate is 29.2 percent, while the national poverty rate is 12.6 percent.

According to federal poverty guidelines, a poor family of four has $14.14 a day to spend per family member; single people living on the poverty line have $27.97 to spend a day.

An additional 100,000 El Pasoans are considered poor by federal standards because they make less than 150 percent of the poverty-level income. That would be $30,975 for a family of four.

The median household income in El Paso is $30,968. Nationally, the median household income is $46,242.

Dropouts

Although the Texas Education Agency says El Paso has a dropout rate of just less than 5 percent, that figure is widely believed by education leaders to be a gross misinterpretation of the true dropout picture in the city.

According to the Intercultural Development Research Association, a San Antonio-based think tank that looks at graduation levels throughout Texas every year, about 37 percent of the freshmen who first enrolled in El Paso high schools in 2001-02 did not graduate on time four years later.

"There were 5,696 students in El Paso that didn't graduate in 2006. If you factor in the cost each of these students will have on taxpayers - $350,000 a year over their lifetime - you will have $1.9 million," said Maria Robledo-Montecel, the association's executive director. "Over their lifetime, these students will cost us that much money in unemployment, crime and incarceration, lost wages and lost tax revenue."

Robledo-Montecel said the good news for El Paso is that in the past 10 years, the dropout rate for the county has gone down from 43 percent to 37 percent.

But a sharp decline in school absenteeism in El Paso has flattened in the past two years, and in last year absenteeism actually increased 2 percentage points.

Officials said that increase can be attributed to many factors, but agreed that more should be done to help students stay in school.

"That's a big concern for us and something we are constantly looking at," El Paso Independent School District Superintendent Lorenzo García said. "As we go about improving high school, we must find innovative ways to help children keep their focus and their drive throughout the four years they will be with us."

School districts in El Paso are creating small-school concepts within their high schools to help freshmen better adjust from middle schools. More magnet programs aimed at keeping students interested in school by providing them with a subject-specific curriculum are also being planned.

Robert Chavez, a dropout who often tries to finish his high-school credits in the Ysleta Independent School District's Plato Academy, said that although he takes responsibility for his actions, he wishes more had been done to help him stay in school.

"These programs (magnet schools) sound cool. I wish they were around when I was in school. Maybe I would have stuck around," said Chavez, who was supposed to graduate in 2005. "But school just got too hard, and there was some pressure at my house to bring in some money."

In El Paso, a person with a high-school diploma and no college on average earns about $9,000 more yearly than a high-school dropout, according to U.S. Census figures.

"If you look at savings, at 401K (retirement funds), property ownership and you compare dropouts to graduates, you will see that there is not only an income gap but also a wealth gap," Robledo-Montecel said. "This means that it will take at least two more generations for dropouts to break their cycle of poverty."

Robledo-Montecel lauded local school districts for their investments in some dropout prevention and dropout recovery programs.

Last week, Socorro Independent School District Superintendent Sylvia Perez Atkinson announced the opening of Options High, a campus aimed at preventing and catching dropouts through credit acceleration courses. EPISD and Ysleta already have similar programs.

Said Robledo-Montecel, "For every $1 invested in education, in dropout prevention, you will get $9 in return. This is a great investment happening in El Paso. Those $9, in return, will be seen in gains in safety, reduced need for public assistance, reduced criminal justice costs, increased tax revenues ... you name it."

Yet, she said, much more must be done.

"There isn't yet a public outcry against dropouts, and it's important for the community to renew its focus on what is important as it tries to improve its economic strength," Robledo-Montecel said. "It's time for El Paso to ask itself, in regard of educational attainment: 'Where have we been? Where are we now? And where are we going?' "

Robledo-Montecel said that until a united front that includes public school districts, higher education, legislators, the business community and the media comes to the table to work on of dropout prevention and educational attainment, any permanent solutions will be hard to come by.

"It's important to the community to keep its eye on the prize," she said. "El Paso is admired throughout the state for bringing people to the table and getting things done. That's something that needs to happen in regards to education."

Achievement gap

Once El Paso gets its students back into the classroom and keeps them there through graduation, local educators still have a long way to go to make sure the county's high-school graduates reach their full economic potential.

Figures from the Texas Education Agency show a wide gap in academic achievement between students in El Paso County and the rest of the state.

The agency's Academic Excellence Indicator System shows that:

The percentage rate of students passing all Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS tests, is 11 points higher for the state than for El Paso.

Although the percentage of students taking advanced-

placement tests for college credit is similar in El Paso County and the rest of the state, the percentage of students scoring well enough to earn credit is 14 percent higher outside the county.

While on average El Paso County sees more students take the SAT or ACT, the average mean score in El Paso is nearly 130 points below the mean in the rest of the state.

"This gap is telling of the work that needs to get done here in El Paso," EPISD's García said. "That's why it's eminent that the different entities in this community - from the school districts, to the community college and the university - work together to try and deal with the issue."

García said collaboration among the educational institutions in the county is already happening, and that El Paso has an edge over other poor communities throughout the state because of it.

Solutions

Susana Navarro, the executive director of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, said success in education should come in the form of a change in attitude among educators and public officials.

She said the "pobrecito notion" that El Pasoans are not good enough for a quality, college-bound academic program should eradicated.

"That pobrecito notion is something that is already changing, but it will take time to set," Navarro said. "There are programs that provide equal standards for our students, but the disparity is in the tools that we provide to them to make sure they get where they need to go."

The collaborative, at UTEP, aims to close the achievement gap between El Paso and the rest of the state. It has worked with school districts to develop an agenda with the same goal: higher academic attainment and college readiness for the children of El Paso.

School districts have followed through with more high-level instruction in the form of magnet schools and programs, more access to college-level courses during high school and an unprecedented amount of scholarship money for college-bound students.

But just as more and more El Paso students head to college, the factors in the continued lack of educational attainment continue to pile on.

Navarro listed the most important:

The continued influx of "severely" undereducated adult immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, along with their children.

The gradual increase of economically disadvantaged students being served in the county.

The increase in students with limited English proficiency.

"This is a problem that has to be tackled on so many fronts," she said. "It's not that the educational system is not doing enough, but rather that there is a lot to do and not many other entities are helping them do it."

Navarro said El Paso school districts - for the most part - are doing a good job of preparing all students for college or to enter the work force, but said elected officials need to work on the outside forces that sometimes contribute to a lack of proper academic attainment.

"We have seen some real improvements ... more than any community in our position, really," she said. "But it's hard for a family to fully participate in the education system when they don't have proper access to fair wages, housing and other social services."

This article was published in Week 5 of the El Paso Times Poverty Series.