$4 Million Is Why El Paso ISD Substitute Duty Reaches the Top

El Paso ISD substitute rosters will carry some unfamiliar names this school year, including the person who runs the district. Every salaried employee at the central office — Superintendent Brian Lusk included — is expected to cover a classroom for eight days, four per semester, KFOX14 reported. Hourly staff are not required to take part, and some positions are exempt depending on how they're funded.

The reason is written into the budget. At a June 4 presentation to trustees, interim chief financial officer David Bates told the board the plan would wipe out roughly $4 million the district sets aside every year to pay substitutes. That is not a rounding error for a district that had just declared a financial emergency and moved to cut hundreds of jobs to stay solvent.

Put two numbers next to each other and the logic sharpens. EPISD adopted a $534.8 million budget for 2026-27 that still runs a $4.3 million shortfall. The substitute line is about $4 million. On paper, sending administrators into classrooms erases almost exactly what's left of the gap — which is a tidy piece of arithmetic, and also a lot of pressure to put on a sign-up sheet.

How El Paso ISD Substitute Days Actually Work

The structure is simple enough to explain in a sentence, but the details decide who actually shows up. Eight days a year, split four and four across the fall and spring semesters, assigned to salaried central office employees rather than campus staff. Micaela Varela, the district's director of elementary personnel, took a morning in a fourth-grade classroom at Polk Elementary.

Who Has to Report to a Classroom

Salaried means salaried: directors, coordinators, executive-level staff and the superintendent. Hourly workers are excluded, which matters because they're often the lowest-paid people in the building. The funding exemption is the part employees should read carefully — a position paid out of a federal or categorical grant may be legally restricted from spending its hours in a classroom that the grant doesn't cover.

What Eight Days Buys the District

Each covered day is a day EPISD doesn't pay an outside substitute. The district hasn't published how many central office employees fall under the rule, so the total number of days generated is not public. That's the load-bearing figure. If the headcount is smaller than the $4 million line assumes, the savings shrink and the difference lands somewhere else in the budget.

The $4 Million That Started This

Bates was blunt with trustees about what he wanted off his ledger.

eliminate my $4 million in substitute line codes that you approve each year

Context is worth having here: $4 million is roughly three-quarters of one percent of the district's total budget. It is real money, but it is nowhere near the main event. The heavy lifting came from payroll — trustees approved a plan to cut jobs by 8% or more and strip about $40 million from staffing costs, El Paso Matters reported.

How a $534.8 Million Budget Got Away From Them

EPISD's board voted 5-1 in June to declare financial exigency, a Texas designation that lets a district break employment contracts and shed positions mid-cycle. It followed a review that found the district on pace to outspend its revenue by $52.8 million, including payroll running about $22 million over budget and another $11.2 million in spending that hadn't been properly tracked.

Underneath the accounting problem sits a slower one. Enrollment has been falling for years across El Paso, and buildings have emptied faster than the district closed them. The cuts hit hard: Lusk recommended eliminating more than 400 positions, including roughly 250 probationary teachers in subjects like English, math, science and PE.

Has Any Other District Tried This?

Yes, and Lusk knows it firsthand. He came to El Paso from Dallas ISD, where he was deputy superintendent of academics and transformation before trustees hired him in December 2025. Both he and Bates brought the substitute idea from that district. Denver Public Schools' superintendent also worked shifts as a substitute during a staffing crunch, as CBS News Colorado reported at the time.

The difference is scale and duration. Those were gestures measured in days by one or two leaders. El Paso is making it a standing obligation for an entire administrative layer, with a dollar figure attached and a board expecting the line item to disappear. That converts a symbolic act into a budget assumption, and budget assumptions get audited.

What Parents and Teachers Should Watch

Parents, the practical question is continuity, not credentials. Ask your campus whether coverage on a given absence came from a trained substitute or a rotating administrator, and whether the teacher left plans. A director covering fourth grade once a semester is fine; the same class cycling through four unfamiliar adults in a month is not.

District employees should confirm in writing whether their funding source exempts them before they're scheduled, since that determination sits with HR and payroll, not their supervisor. And everyone should watch the midyear budget amendment. If the substitute line reappears even partly, the $4 million assumption didn't hold — and with a $4.3 million deficit already on the books, the district will need to find that money somewhere less visible.