Gov. Greg Abbott traveled to El Paso Monday to announce a new statewide public education initiative aimed at boosting reading and math performance in Texas schools, arriving in a city whose own school district just posted its best accountability marks in years. The visit folds El Paso into Abbott's broader tour promoting K-12 improvements ahead of the 2027 legislative session, even as the state simultaneously wages a separate, high-stakes fight against a spreading livestock parasite hundreds of miles away.
Abbott's centerpiece announcement, dubbed “Student Success Academies,” establishes targeted in-school reading and math interventions for struggling students, along with parent notification roadmaps and take-home learning toolkits, according to WTAW. The plan is the latest piece of a K-12 agenda Abbott has been assembling for months, and it lands in a city where the numbers already show movement. In the Texas Education Agency's accountability ratings for the 2024-2025 school year, the El Paso Independent School District earned an overall “B” rating of 80 out of 100 while increasing its “A”-rated campuses from four to 15, as reported by KFOX. The district also grew its “B”-rated campuses from 22 to 24 over the same period, per the same report.
A Teacher-Led Panel Behind the Push
The Student Success Academies proposal builds on groundwork Abbott laid in July, when he launched the Texas Classroom Commission, a 20-member teacher-led panel tasked with delivering K-12 recommendations to state leaders. The commission is chaired by State Board for Educator Certification Chair Courtney Boswell MacDonald and was designed to center classroom teachers in state policy decisions, according to the Office of the Texas Governor. Hoodline previously detailed the panel's formation in July.
Just days before the El Paso stop, Abbott used an August 13 appearance at Del Mar College to propose new legislative limits on classroom laptops and tablets, pushing for a return to physical textbooks and direct teacher instruction, the Texas Tribune reported. That proposal follows Texas's 2025 statewide ban on classroom cell phones and signals growing legislative scrutiny of K-12 device reliance in the years since the pandemic.
Local Grant Dollars Follow the Governor to El Paso
Abbott also awarded a $285,000 grant to the El Paso County Community College District as part of a $2 million statewide initiative to expand free, open-licensed digital textbooks in nursing and workforce training programs, according to the Office of the Texas Governor. The state's Open Educational Resource program has saved Texas students an estimated $3.5 million since 2018, per the same office. The grant announcement gives Abbott's statewide higher-education funding push a direct, tangible tie to El Paso.
The education tour also comes with financial backing for teachers already in classrooms. Abbott announced in June that the state distributed more than $750 million in Teacher Incentive Allotment awards, reaching more than 65,000 educators across 809 participating school systems statewide, with top-performing teachers in rural or high-need campuses eligible to earn up to $36,000 above base pay. Hoodline covered that merit pay rollout in June. That spending sits alongside a broader belt-tightening directive: in mid-July, Abbott joined Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dustin Burrows in ordering state agencies to cut 3% from their 2028-2029 base budget requests, while explicitly exempting public school funding programs like the Foundation School Program.
Screwworm Outbreak Grows Even as Abbott Focuses on Schools
While Abbott's El Paso stop centered on classrooms, the governor has spent much of the summer also confronting an agricultural emergency unfolding elsewhere in the state. Abbott appeared alongside U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, ranchers, and health officials after Rollins announced the detection of New World screwworm in a cow in Zavala County on June 3, marking the first confirmed U.S. case of the parasitic fly in over 20 years, KFOX reported. The screwworm is a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals.
By June 8, Abbott was speaking at the Knipling-Bushland U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, where Texas had confirmed four cases before adding two more the same day. The outbreak has since grown considerably: as of August 4, the Texas Animal Health Commission reported confirmed infestations across 34 premises in 15 Texas counties, with movement restrictions active in 23 counties; Hoodline reported in its coverage of the outbreak's spread to 15 counties.
Federal and state officials broke ground in April on a $750 million sterile-fly production plant at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, aiming to produce up to 300 million sterile flies weekly to interrupt the parasite's breeding cycle. The outbreak's economic backdrop is stark: USDA data from January 2026 showed the national cattle herd had contracted to 86.2 million head, the smallest total since 1951, as screwworm-related border restrictions on Mexican feeder cattle compounded the pressure. Shrinking herds have already driven major processing plant closures nationwide, according to Hoodline's reporting.
Taken together, Abbott's El Paso appearance reflects a governor managing two very different fronts at once — one focused on reading scores and classroom technology, the other on a spreading livestock parasite with statewide economic consequences. Both efforts are expected to feature prominently as lawmakers prepare for the 2027 legislative session.
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