In a joint news conference, Grow Odessa and Ector County ISD announced the donation of 37.9 acres of land near the corner of Murphy Street and South Meadow Avenue for a new career and technical education facility that is part of the district’s $436,109,000 three-proposition bond.
The announcement was made at the Odessa Chamber of Commerce. Election Day is Nov. 7 and early voting runs from Oct. 23-Nov. 3.
“We’ve promoted industrial and oilfield development, new technologies … and it’s been our passion to try to bring those things to the community and what better way to do that than help with the new CTE (facility). Our board of directors met last week and voted unanimously” to donate the acreage to ECISD, Grow Odessa board member John Landgraf said.
“We paid $1.45 million that in 2019. We’ve had it on our books. We thought we were going to develop it as part of one of our industrial parks, but when it became obvious that it was a great thing for the school district, for education, we voted unanimously … for this to come to ECISD. We couldn’t be happier for it,” he added.
ECISD Superintendent Scott Muri said he got a call about the land a little more than a week ago and couldn’t wait to tell the board members.
“We had been searching for a piece of property for our career and technical education center, just as we were searching for a property for our middle school that’s a part of the bond package. In that search, there was a particular piece of property that was of interest to us. It made sense from a location perspective. Little did we know that that property was owned by Grow Odessa, and then Grow Odessa heard that we were interested in that piece of property and it just made sense to them,” Muri said.
Muri said this is an investment in students and the industrial corridor of the community. ECISD offers 27 CTE pathways and is adding an energy pathway.
“We will educate 2,400 students in that facility every single day. They will participate in about 20 different career and technical education pathways. One of those is welding. Today, in ECISD we say ‘no’ to 600 students every year. We tell them, ‘no,’ you cannot take the welding pathway because there is no room at the inn. We do not currently have the capacity to educate that many students for this industry that is alive and well in our community. This new facility at this location will give us the capacity to say ‘yes’ to not only those 600 students, but many more that desire the various programming that will take place in that career and technical education facility,” Muri said.
Chris Stanley, president of the ECISD Board of Trustees, expressed gratitude for the donation. He was joined by board Vice President Delma Abalos and trustee Steve Brown in the audience.
“You guys have given a gift that’s going to be generational. It’s a sea change for our area to embrace the training of our children,” Stanley said.
Muri said 400 students will attend the CTE facility full time. They will take their career and technical education classes there, as well as English, math, science and social studies.
“We’ll have another 2,000 students every day that will be transported in and out of this facility that will be Permian High School students, Odessa High School students and students from New Tech Odessa that will utilize the CTE programming. We are currently bussing to seven different locations. We will now provide transportation to this one location for those 2,000 students,” Muri said.
“Every day 2,400 students will occupy this building to have their career and technical education courses. That’s what will happen from about 8 in the morning to about 3:30 in the afternoon. But the doors don’t close at 3:30, Monday through Friday. They actually remain open not only at night, but also on the weekends because a partner doing this work with us is Odessa College. At night and weekends, this facility will be used by adults in our community to be upskilled or re-skilled, as the case may be. … They will partner with the business community to build courses, build programming which will occupy this particular facility,” Muri said.
“During the day, Odessa College will also be a part of this experience for us. Their coursework allows our students to have what are called dual enrollment courses … Our kids get high school credit and college credit for a single course that they take. The students in this building will graduate not only with a high school diploma, but they’ll graduate with an associate degree as well … It’s more than just an ECISD space. Our entire community wins because of this donation and because of the facility that will be built on this property. We’re incredibly excited,” Muri said.
Muri added that this is something that couldn’t happen without entities working together.
“We did not anticipate this at all and so we’re very grateful to Grow Odessa. They saw the value in this type of facility. They see the need, especially as a business community, they understand the business needs that we have. They experience their own challenges when it comes to finding qualified staff … They see this as a way to increase the capacity of our own community and create better employees for the business community. For them, it is a win. It is an investment in business and industry in Ector County. For us, this is what we needed, a piece of property and today we received it free,” Muri said.
He added that not having to buy the land will free up funding that can be invested in the CTE facility.
“We’ll use those dollars that are remaining, that we had anticipated for property, to actually put back into the facility to make sure that we have state-of-the-art equipment for kids to use, that they have every advantage. … We want our students to have that because they deserve that. This will just free up more dollars for us to invest in kids,” Muri said.
Landgraf said Grow Odessa has given to Odessa College, University of Texas Permian Basin and Texas Tech and has helped fund the football program at UTPB, the nursing program at Texas Tech and some labs, for example.
“This is just another step of our commitment to education here in the Permian Basin,” he added.
Landgraf said he doesn’t know of a business that isn’t trying to hire trained and qualified people and the CTE facility is a step in that direction.
On a non-bond related item, Muri said starting Wednesday the district began issuing “Golden Tickets” to people 65 and older so they can attend sporting events for free. This includes every athletic event hosted at any school or at Ratliff Stadium.
“Those golden tickets are now available. Individuals in our community simply need to show a driver’s license or other form of ID that they live in Ector County and then we will provide to them the golden ticket and they can enter any school’s athletic event — middle school or high school — free of charge, 365 days a year. We’re excited to be able to do that. We know that many in our 65 and over crowd live on a fixed income. This is one more way that they can be engaged. The piece that it does for us is our students love to have people in the audience when they are performing, whether it’s a Friday night football game, or the volleyball game on Tuesday night, or a swimming tournament, or whatever the event happens to be. Our kids like to have people celebrating them. This will give them another opportunity to have folks in the stands. For our over 65 crowd, it brings them into our environment. It gives them a chance to see our kids in action,” Muri said.
You can contact ECISD on the website, ectorcountyisd.org or the athletic office at 432-456-9059 to learn more.
Over time, Muri said, the district hopes to expand opportunities for the golden ticket.
He said it will cut into athletic revenue, but it’s the right thing to do.
“We’re excited to be able to do this. I think from the kid perspective, we’re going to see more people attending events and so I think that that’ll be good for the kids. They’ll enjoy that,” Muri added.
