By: Anne Bannister & Christine Lowak
Photography by: Joel Goudeau & Karen Wang
Our collection of Blended Learning Stories shines a light on the work of the second cohort of Raising Blended Learners® districts. Each district receives professional development, financial support, and tailored coaching to pilot and scale blended and personalized learning practices. From there, district journeys diverge based on their determination of their unique needs, opportunities, and goals. Just as a blended learning classroom is personalized, so too is a district’s vision and plan.
Socorro ISD represents an exemplary pilot program that embedded blended learning into its literacy framework and growth targets as a district. While the core tenets of change management may be familiar, this case study offers an in-depth look at the experiences of practitioners as they scale best teaching and learning practices.
I live by the word ‘believe.’ It’s believing that all means all. Believing that blended learning is possible at every campus. In every classroom. Because it benefits all kids. Jina Eksaengsri, School Improvement Officer
I live by the word ‘believe.’ It’s believing that all means all. Believing that blended learning is possible at every campus. In every classroom. Because it benefits all kids.
Three to five years from now, it should be common practice. It should be standard. Not standard because we’ve obligated people to do it, but rather standard practice because it’s a best practice. Miguel Moreno, Coordinator of Technology
Three to five years from now, it should be common practice. It should be standard. Not standard because we’ve obligated people to do it, but rather standard practice because it’s a best practice.
Socorro ISD is a large school district in the El Paso area, serving approximately 47,000 students, 91.6% identifying as Hispanic. The district is 100% Title 1, with 13.6% of students from military-connected families.
El Paso is part of a tri-city borderplex made up of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Together, these cities form the largest bilingual and binational workforce in the Western Hemisphere.
Despite the geographic size, when queried as to what makes Socorro and El Paso stand out, the universal response is, “family” and “culture.”
“It’s not two countries, three states, three cities. It’s one community,” Miguel Moreno, Coordinator of Technology explains of the culture in Socorro ISD. “Whether it’s the farming community, whether it’s the military presence, whether it’s both affluent and less affluent parts of our district, it’s all consistently brought back to what we are doing that’s good for the community as a whole, and not just for a specific population. The diversity that exists is the same diversity that we have in our classrooms.”
This familial culture and community pride result in a highly dedicated and motivated team of educators who strive for continuous improvement, innovation, and equitable opportunity for all learners.
It’s with this mentality that district leadership sought out the Raising Blended Learners (RBL) demonstration initiative. In 2019, district leaders identified a significant gap in student mastery of early literacy concepts. In their RBL application, they detailed the following problem of practice:
“The power of literacy lies in the ability to read, write, and apply skills throughout life. Our state assessment data shows only 49% of our third-grade students passed the reading assessment at grade-level standards, therefore proving the need to modify and refine our early literacy practices.”
Buoyed by successes seen in blended learning pilot classrooms over the last four years – including substantial gains in literacy skills, and increased student agency and engagement – the district team is committed to scaling these best practices system-wide.
To do this, the district leadership team deliberately cultivated a shared vision, skills, resources, and action plan to support the sustainability and scale of a complex change management initiative.
These are the key lessons they learned.
Anytime we can make connections for teachers we strive to help them see that it’s not an initiative. It’s just what we do. Jina Eksaengsri, School Improvement Officer
Anytime we can make connections for teachers we strive to help them see that it’s not an initiative. It’s just what we do.
Jina Eksaengsri, School Improvement Officer, says successful change management starts with a shared vision and reflective strategic planning. This intentional approach is baked into the district culture such that, “Socorroizing” an initiative is a way of life. This is the process by which the district ensures new undertakings align with their established values and vision. For example, the pillars of the Raising Blended Learners Implementation Continuum (RBL-IC) are focus areas that the district already values but they took the time to reflect on the language and goals of various educational initiatives such as the Effective Schools Framework (ESF), HB3 Reading Academies, and Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (T-TESS). This reflection resulted in Socorro’s Teaching and Learning Framework.
“Teachers are bombarded with initiatives, and we don’t want initiative fatigue here in Socorro ISD,” Eksaengsri continues. “Personalized learning is just best practice for student achievement. Data-driven instruction is just what should be happening in order to make sure instruction is at the level that students need it. Anytime we can make connections for teachers we strive to help them see that it’s not an initiative. It’s just what we do.”
Moreno adds, “To personalize the work that we do at the district level is always with the consideration of what the impact is going to be at the campus level, and in the classroom … Our constant filter is, ‘How does this impact our classroom teachers? How are they going to be able to put it into practice while still aligning to the district goals?”
As a long-standing practice, district leadership encourages strong partnerships and communication across departments. In supporting the RBL grant initiative, the Academic Services and Instructional Technology teams work side-by-side.
“I sit on the technology side of the house. Jina is leading the academics,” Moreno says. “The conversation is always centered around what gains are we making for our students instructional-wise, and what tools do we incorporate to make those outcomes be the best possible.” He adds that his team comprises former classroom teachers with experience implementing instructional technology, analyzing data, and coaching. He says the marriage of academics and technology is invaluable for supporting and scaling blended learning practices.
Eksaengsri adds that this culture of collaboration and trust creates shared accountability.
‘We also have each other’s blind spots,” she shares. “If Miguel needs to call me behind the scenes and say, “Hey, I need to challenge you on this,” or vice versa, we’re willing to do that, and we need to do that, because at the end of the day, we’re making district-level decisions for 47,000 students. We need to have those side conversations to challenge each other to continue moving forward.”
Successful classroom innovation requires strong support for teachers. Instructional specialists, instructional officers and campus leaders collaborated frequently, resulting in a unified approach that encouraged the sharing of resources and ideas while enhancing instructional quality.
Erica Sustaita, RBL Project Manager and Socorro ISD Instructional Technology Specialist, notes that the “personalized practice to mastery” concept, a hallmark of blended learning, applies not just for students, but also to how the team approaches teacher development. She explains that implementation, “is more of a marathon, not a race,” and it’s important to allow for “ah-ha” moments to happen organically as teachers dig deeper into instructional rigor.
For instance, in the beginning, she and the team asked pilot teachers to start with one activity per reading station and gradually build tiered activities over the course of a year. They gave the teachers time to connect theory to practice and to implement and iterate without fear of failure.
Monica Hernandez, PK-2 Math & Science Instructional Officer, works closely with Sustaita and began this work within Reading & Language Arts (RLA). She, too, noticed how this approach supported teacher internalization of the work. “It was a great experience for us to bring in the Science of Teaching Reading (STR), and dive into the content and have purposeful conversations about tiering activities for students and stations. I thought that was powerful. Just hearing them [the teachers] talk about the content now versus where they started is amazing.”
The team also makes shared planning time non-negotiable.
Going into the first year of blended learning implementation, the campus principals and instructional coaches at the two pilot schools developed master schedules, allowing for extended grade level and vertical planning meetings for pilot teachers. This includes extended data digs with the instructional coaches every three weeks.
Mark Rodriguez, James P. Butler Elementary State Compensatory Education Intervention (SCEI) coach, explains. “[As a campus] we take the opportunity to look at our data as a grade level, identify the ‘glows and the grows’. Then from there, we take an opportunity to identify those ‘glows’ from the particular teacher in a subset area.” This provides the opportunity for teachers to share impactful instructional approaches with one another.
“In the blended learning model, the teachers are digging deeper in the data to the point that now the stations the students are working on are differentiated,” adds Emilio Estrada SCEI Coach from H.D. Hilley Elementary. “Students might be working on something – let’s say a vocabulary station – they have different learning objectives because students are at different levels. I want to make sure that when we look at the diagnostic tool that we use that we see gains.”
And the results speak for themselves. The first cohort to undertake the work saw a 24% gain in proficiency from the beginning to the end of the school year on that state assessment. In the second year, despite teacher movement to different grade levels, the cohort saw a 48% gain. Based on 2024 STAAR scores, 79% of third-grade students in Socorro ISD passed the state exam at grade level standards. This shows a substantial 30% increase across the three-year grant cycle.
Blended learning is not a one-size-fits-all, it’s about personalization. It’s not for a certain group of students, it’s for all learners. Erica Sustaita, RBL Project Manager and Instructional Technology Specialist
Blended learning is not a one-size-fits-all, it’s about personalization. It’s not for a certain group of students, it’s for all learners.
Socorro’s culture of shared learning extends beyond an individual campus — it encompasses the entire ecosystem of the district.
Socorro purposely selected two demographically different campuses for more diverse proof points when they began to scale. Rosa Chavez, principal at James P. Butler Elementary, and Darlene Hernandez, principal at H.D. Hilley Elementary, are in different stages in their leadership careers and have leveraged their individual assets – enriching and supporting the work, and each other. This relationship, as well as working collaboratively with district leadership, resulted in the “reflective transformation” that Chavez notes was critical to their success.
“Our two [pilot] principals have been amazing about opening their doors, allowing teachers to learn from each other,” Moreno says. “There’s a lot of treasure within our own walls.”
The district practices internal showcase visits, inviting teachers and leaders from other campuses to observe classroom protocols and learn from each other. This practice supports and nurtures buy-in, trust, and motivation that will scale and sustain the work post-grant.
“We are onboarding other schools and the principals are contacting me and asking these difficult questions, ‘Was it hard?’ ‘Yes, It wasn’t easy,’’ says Chavez, “There is a lot of work that we’ve got to do, but when you’ve got district support – for us, it was rolled out beautifully.”
“Yes, colleagues have reached out to me, very much so,” shares Hernandez. “The visit they had when we had our showcase, they were wowed by the flow of the classroom when they went and observed the classrooms.”
“Fortune 500 and Forbes companies, the reason they’re successful is because they have the consistency, and they have the support. I will tell you, here in Socorro, we have both. It’s not just in words, but it’s in the action that we take.” Chavez says. “For example, on Monday, the entire academic services and instructional technology team of officers that lead our district are coming to visit our school. The reason they’re coming is to learn from the teachers.”
Chavez continued, “For the summer learning series, which is the PD (professional development) that we’re going to roll out for our teachers, the expectation is district-wide that these strategies are going to be embedded. When you keep the main thing the main thing, it starts unfolding. That’s what’s happening, and it starts at the very top.”
While the Raising Blended Learners grant came to a close at the end of the 2023-24 school year, Socorro ISD continues to scale blended and personalized learning instruction throughout the district. The next wave of targeted implementation includes scaling into the upper grades at the pilot elementaries, adding two additional elementary sites, expanding into the feeder middle schools for math and reading.
”It’s been both organic and intentional in our scale and sustainability,” Eksaengsri says. “We are scaling at our two middle school campuses that our elementary blended learning sites feed into, so that’s going to be a natural scale process. As part of showcasing what blended learning is as a best practice that supports student achievement, we have so many principals across the district as well as district leadership at a cabinet-level who believe in the work, and they want to see it continue to spread.”
Campuses yet to be selected as formal pilot sites are already receiving training in blended learning instruction as part of the district’s literacy framework going forward. This means all teachers, instructional coaches, and campus leaders will receive baseline training in assessment and data-driven instruction, personalized instruction, student agency, and rigor.
“I think what’s imperative that we understand here at Socorro ISD is that our frameworks that we have for all contents have those practices already embedded within the framework from pre-K all the way to 12,” Sustaita explains. “You don’t have to be a blended learning campus or showcase campus. It’s already infused within our district resources … blended learning is not a one-size-fits-all, it’s about personalization. It’s not for a certain group of students, it’s for all learners. Managing that is going to be incredible and impactful because we want to make sure that everyone understands what blended learning is, but also how it connects to what we do here at Socorro.”
The intentionality around scale extends to how district leadership thinks about preparing future teachers. The district has partnered with the University of Texas at El Paso since 2019 to create a strong teacher residency program.
“As we’ve talked about Socorro ISD making natural connections with everything that we do, we feel there’s a natural pipeline here.” Eksaengsri shares. “What that would mean for the future of Socorro is looking at our blended learning campuses that have strategic focus on blended learning, and also creating residency sites at those campuses so those residents are also getting blended learning training from the first day they step in into their residency, and we’re creating this pipeline of natural sustainability for our district.”
Witnessing positive transformations in students and in teachers, the team believes blended learning is the way forward for Socorro ISD.
“For me, three to five years from now, I live by the word ‘believe’. It’s believing that all means all, believing that blended learning is possible at every campus, in every classroom, because it benefits all kids.”
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