Two more La Joya schools undergo academic intervention

Following consistently low or unstable state accountability scores, La Joya ISD placed Corina Peña Elementary and Dr. Javier Saenz Middle School in an academic program designed to accelerate student success.

The Texas Education Agency released the 2025 district and campus accountability ratings last month. For the third consecutive year, Peña Elementary earned a D rating, falling from a score of 69 to 63. Due to the repeated low ratings, LJISD implemented a strategic academic intervention. The decision to intervene follows the district’s first superintendent constraint — not allowing conditions that decrease student achievement.

Saenz Middle School’s recent track record, however, is a little different than Peña’s. In 2023 and 2024, the campus earned a D and B rating, respectively, but fell back to a D for 2025. Chief of Academics and School Leadership Dr. Derek Little described the outcomes as volatile. Although the district protocol is to initiate academic intervention if a campus has a D or F rating for two consecutive years, Superintendent Dr. Marcey Sorensen felt it was necessary to intervene at Saenz now.

“We didn’t want to wait,” the superintendent said. “When we talk about student outcomes and when we talk about student achievement, we did not feel it was appropriate for us as district leaders to wait for us to see [if] Saenz [will] have the outcome again. It was D, B, D, and we said, ‘Let’s act and let’s act now,’ and put the strategic intervention into place.”

The two schools will operate under the Breakthrough Results (BTR) program, which focuses on targeted professional development to achieve rapid results. The program boasts a 75% increase in reading fluency in a 10-week span for participating third graders, and a 56% reduction in absenteeism among targeted middle school students in the same time frame.

Peña and Saenz will have dedicated performance coaches from the District Management Group (DMG) advising them throughout the yearlong process. The coaches will lead weekly virtual meetings with teachers, focusing on specific academic areas with identified growth targets. Additionally, BTR provides campus-level data tracking to measure progress. DMG designed the program to see improvement from one week to the next.

“We’re not saying, ‘Here’s where we’re going to be by May.’ It’s ‘Here’s where I’m going to be by the end of October, and what it’s going to take for me to get there,’” Little explained.

LJISD’s two Accelerated Campus Excellence (ACE) schools — Evangelina Garza and Juan Seguin elementaries — will also go through the yearlong Breakthrough Results program. With a high concentration of Teacher Incentive Allotment teachers at these campuses, Little said the district expects great things.

The ACE program is an aggressive intervention strategy in which La Joya ISD hired entirely new staff, leadership and extended the school day to take Garza and Seguin from F-rated campuses to A or B-rated campuses over the next three years. BTR is not as aggressive as intervention strategy, so Peña and Saenz will not undergo the same structural changes. However, the district expects all four schools to improve their accountability scores to at least a C for the 2026 results.

The district launched the Breakthrough Results program with orientation this week. Administration will provide campus progress updates at the monthly board meetings, with the first ACE campus report Sept. 24.