Texas Border Business
Sometimes a story unfolding close to home becomes important enough that people across Texas begin paying attention.
That is what is happening at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District.
From three neighboring communities along the Texas-Mexico border, PSJA ISD has emerged in a statewide conversation about teachers, student achievement, and what public schools can accomplish when educators and administrators work toward clearly defined goals.
The attention became unmistakable when Gov. Greg Abbott spoke about PSJA during a statewide televised message.
For a governor discussing the future of Texas education to single out a Rio Grande Valley school district by name was significant. Abbott did not simply mention PSJA. He used the district to illustrate his argument about investing in effective teachers and improving educational outcomes.
That moment presented Texas Border Business with a question worth pursuing.
What is happening inside PSJA?
The answer isn’t in one statistic, one program, or one person.
A school district is a complicated organization. Every morning, thousands of students enter classrooms carrying different abilities, ambitions, challenges, and circumstances. Teachers must reach them. Principals must lead campuses. Administrators must provide the academic, financial, technological, and operational systems that allow those classrooms to function.
At PSJA, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Alejandro Elias brings those pieces together.
But leadership at this scale is never the work of one individual.
Working alongside Elias is a team whose responsibilities reach virtually every part of the district: Dr. Rebeca Garza, Dr. Ranulfo Márquez, Rebecca Gonzales, Dr. Orlando Noyola, Dr. Virna M. Bazán, Dr. Iris Guajardo, Rafael González, Dr. Lauro Dávalos, Dr. Nora Rivas-Garza, Alfredo Carrillo, Dr. Claudia Bracamontes, Dr. Linda Uribe, Dr. Yolanda Gómez and Dr. Susana Arredondo.
Their titles span academics, finance, and human resources, as well as operations, technology, student services, college and career readiness, and oversight of elementary and secondary schools.
The photograph accompanying this introduction captures that leadership team together. What a photograph cannot show is the enormous responsibility behind those titles—or the thousands of daily decisions required to run a school district serving three communities.
That is where our cover story begins.
Texas Border Business went directly to Elias after Abbott’s remarks. Rather than simply reporting what the governor said about PSJA, we wanted to hear from the superintendent himself.
We wanted to know what PSJA has been doing differently.
How do you build a school system where teachers want to stay? How do you recognize effective educators while keeping them in classrooms? How does district leadership turn goals established in administrative offices into results across dozens of campuses? And perhaps most importantly, how do you create opportunities for children regardless of the economic circumstances into which they were born?
Elias answered those questions directly.
His responses reveal a philosophy centered on people — teachers, administrators and students — but also on expectations, accountability and opportunity.
This story deserves attention beyond the Rio Grande Valley for another reason.
Texas has more than 1,000 public school districts, each facing its own mix of staffing, funding, academic, and community challenges. No two districts are identical, and what works in one community cannot automatically be assumed to work in another.
But when one district produces results significant enough to enter a governor’s statewide discussion about education, examining how it operates becomes worthwhile.
That is why PSJA is our October 2026 cover story.
The pages ahead are not an argument that one district has discovered a universal formula for public education. They examine a South Texas school system whose work has attracted statewide attention — told through the numbers, the policies, and the words of the superintendent leading it.
What did Gov. Abbott see in PSJA?
What does Elias believe is driving the district forward?
And could lessons emerging from Pharr, San Juan, and Alamo matter elsewhere?
Open our cover story below and discover the answers.
