Superintendent Martha Salazar-Zamora’s unlikely vision for a career and technical education utopia here emerged back in 2021, as she toured the site of a bankrupt oil field-services company.
A wall of windows in the former executive conference room and a private patio yielded a perfect view of the company’s one-time fiefdom: 70 acres and 11 buildings.
Karla Sandoval, the Tomball Independent School District’s head of career and technical education, who joined her boss and a real estate agent on the visit, recalled Salazar-Zamora explaining her plan to buy the property, and move some personnel into its deserted office buildings.
Then the superintendent gestured to a sea of abandoned warehouses and outbuildings.
“That is CTE,” Sandoval recalled Salazar-Zamora saying to her. “Are you ready for the challenge?”
Sandoval laughed as she replayed the exchange more than four years later.
“I was like ‘yes,’” she said. “And in my head, I’m going, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope I can deliver.’”
And deliver, Salazar-Zamora and her team have done.
From warehouses to classrooms
On an early December day this school year, inside a warehouse building converted into classrooms, graphic design students in the fabrication lab press “Hope Squad” decals onto shirts for a districtwide mental health initiative.
In another classroom, students in the aviation program practice takeoffs and landings on desktop plane simulators.
Inside former office buildings, students in the legal-studies pathway enact a mock trial in a room refurbished as a courtroom. A couple of doors down, students in the district’s law-enforcement pathway practice pulling over a driver in a 360-degree virtual simulation.
On the back of the property in what was once a shell of a building without walls, now stands a 45,000-square-foot agricultural arena that hosts robotics competitions and livestock shows.
This is how a handful of the district’s 28 career pathways make use of a property that many would have written off as a sad casualty of the pandemic four years ago.
“Purchasing the oil and gas company site, which is now the Tomball Innovation Center, it was a dream in my head that grew and grew and grew,” said Salazar-Zamora, known informally in this district of more than 23,000 students as Dr. Z.
That purchase has been instrumental in the expansion of Tomball’s CTE program.
CTE enrollment has risen from 6,520 students in the 2019-20 school year to 9,415 this year, fueled in part by rising enrollment districtwide.
Last year, Tomball students earned a total of 1,250 industry-based certifications, up from 572 in the 2020-21 school year. The number of students participating in work-based learning has nearly tripled since the 2020-21 school year, to 318 this year.
The district has added two CTE coordinators, one of whom is dedicated to agriculture, two CTE counselors, and a CTE work-based learning specialist since the 2020-21 school year. That brought Tomball’s total team of CTE educators to 115 teachers and administrators.
Salazar-Zamora is the type of leader higher-flyers are drawn to work for
Originally, Tomball and the company that once owned the property, BJ Services, planned to create an academy of energy and international business. But then the pandemic hit, delivering an economic blow that BJ Services couldn’t survive and scuttling the district’s hopes for the specialized academy.
From the ashes of that plan rose another, when Salazar-Zamora happened to drive by the empty building one day and see a for sale sign. Tomball bought the land for $39.5 million in 2021, a fraction of the $115 million the property was valued at, according to district officials.
The site now houses district administrative offices, CTE classrooms, and Tomball Star Academy, the district’s early-college high school. Because the site was bought in bankruptcy, the district got everything on the property, from coffee cups to large, built-in cranes.
Michael Pratt, a member of the district’s board of trustees, recalled his first reaction to Salazar-Zamora’s pitch to purchase the oil company’s property: “OK, that’s big. It’s a great deal, but tell me the vision.”
Salazar-Zamora had a strong track record when it came to delivering on her plans, Pratt said. Both she and several board members—including Pratt— had relatively long tenures in their positions in the district, which had allowed them to forge a trusting relationship and shared vision for CTE, he said.
Pratt knew Salazar-Zamora could leverage the property to meet her vision in large part because she has always been a magnet for talent.
“She leads with her heart. Somebody who handles her business and leads with her heart is rare,” Pratt said. That’s typically the type of person hard-working and visionary people are drawn to work for, he added.
On a recent December morning, Salazar-Zamora stood inside a cavernous warehouse on the Tomball Innovation Center site, surveying the space that holds a crane and two small, gutted planes propped up on wood pallets and jacks.
She was dressed in a festive red skirt with matching purse, necklace, and Christmas bauble earrings. Her high-heeled, snake-skin boots—also bright red—lent a few additional inches to her five foot, nine inch frame. The outfit made her both imposing and cheery, a pairing of traits that likely helps Salazar-Zamora get a lot of what she wants for her district.
With a sweep of her hand, Salazar-Zamora described how the hanger would soon be filled with students working on planes as part of the district’s new aviation-maintenance program.
Not everyone in the community has been thrilled with the district’s plans for the purchase. Some parents questioned whether the old industrial site was safe for students, according to local news stories at the time. The district worked with environmental experts to ensure the site’s safety.
Tomball ISD could not have afforded the purchase if it hadn’t been for the bankruptcy sale, Salazar-Zamora conceded. Which is why she was so keen to jump at the rare opportunity.
“There are moments in a career when you know in your heart this is right,” Salazar-Zamora said. “I call this a legacy purchase.”
The move exemplifies her approach to leadership. She thinks big, colleagues say, and she doesn’t take no for an answer.
Salazar-Zamora’s leadership was shaped by childhood challenges
Those are attributes forged during Salazar-Zamora’s childhood as she navigated the world as a child with profound hearing loss. Her mother insisted she never let her disability stop her.
“I was raised with a very simple mantra, and that was to never let my disability be an inability,” said Salazar-Zamora, who had an operation at age 17 to repair her hearing.
Her mother “reminded me [of that] when I thought something was too hard. When I didn’t think I could be in band,” said Salazar-Zamora, 59. “And then I fought hard and made it into the band.”
Salazar-Zamora went on to start her education career as a teacher and speech and language pathologist.
Her upbringing also influenced her focus on CTE. Salazar-Zamora was raised in a poor, rural community, she said, where trade skills were as much a pathway to the American dream as a college degree. Since then, three decades in education has crystalized Salazar-Zamora’s belief that CTE is necessary to help every child to find a sense of belonging and motivation.
It was that belief that led Salazar-Zamora to invest so heavily in Tomball’s CTE facilities, after being promoted from the district’s chief academic officer to its superintendent in 2017.
Top-notch facilities can help recruit top-notch CTE teachers
The land purchase has helped Tomball tackle some of the biggest challenges facing CTE programs nationwide.
According to an October EdWeek Research Center survey of educators whose jobs are connected to CTE, a lack of facilities, funding, and teachers are among the most-cited factors holding their programs back.
“I hear principals and district administrators say over and over again that ‘we would love to offer this program. We just don’t have the space,’” said Walter Ecton, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary Education at the University of Michigan.
And when it comes to hiring teachers, schools end up in an often unwinnable competition with the private sector. Many of the industries that fall under the CTE umbrella pay their employees more than public schools can, Ecton said.
(Ecton spoke with Education Week as a general expert on CTE—he is not familiar with Tomball ISD’s program specifically.)
Even after successfully hiring teachers, districts struggle to retain them, said Mark Bosher, the senior director of technical assistance and training for the Career and Technical Association of Texas.
Teachers coming straight from industry face a steep learning curve in mastering the instructional side of the job.
Tomball ISD’s investments in professional development for its CTE teachers have been important to retention and program growth, said Bosher whose organization has recognized the district for its CTE work.
“Too many times we hire teachers and tell them, here’s your chalk, I’ll see you in December,” Bosher said. “That’s not what Tomball ISD does. They are constantly training their [teachers] and helping them to grow as professionals. That leadership comes from the top. A superintendent has to be invested in that or it doesn’t happen.”
The Tomball Innovation Center itself is also a powerful draw for new teachers, said Lee Wright, the assistant superintendent of human talent for the district.
“Nobody else has the headquarters of a former oil company,” said Wright. “Just having this site, we can recruit—and not just recruit but retain.”
That was certainly the case with aviation instructor Justin Morrison, who started teaching at the district three years ago.
Shortly before winter break, Morrison watched over a pair of students’ shoulders as they practiced landing in a large flight simulator that looks like a futuristic stagecoach. The contraption, manufactured by Redbird Flight Simulators—an industry leader— is made up of a white metal box, its interior is outfitted with two seats, an instrument panel, and several screens positioned to look like cockpit windows. Its body rests on a red metal base that mimics the movements of a plane.
The screens showed mountain peaks in the distance poking out of cloud tops as the students—one acting as a pilot and the other as the co-pilot—descended into the clouds, losing all visibility. With a beeping sound, the red base shook, simulating light turbulence.
Eventually, a runway lined with lights materialized on the screen. “You just have to work on the outer line …” Morrison said as the plane touched down, “and staying on the runway,” he added, as the students veered off it into the grass.
“And that’s why we have simulators,” Morrison concluded.
Morrison moved from Oklahoma, and he said he turned down other job offers to take the position in Tomball.
Tomball, he said, “really wanted to invest in this program, whereas other districts didn’t have that same vision, didn’t seem like they had that passion for growing this aviation pathway. And that drew me in immediately.”
Tomball is located in a rapidly expanding community outside Houston, near two major commercial airports and several smaller ones, so there is a demand for pilots and mechanics, said Salazar-Zamora. She meets quarterly with community leaders, including the mayor, the city manager, and the local chamber of commerce to keep a finger on the pulse of the area’s employment needs.
It’s important for CTE programs to offer pathways that have clear connections to careers after high school, said the University of Michigan’s Ecton. High-quality programs also have strong relationships with local industry and employers, he said, and evolve to stay aligned with workforce needs as the economy changes.
CTE facilities can double as a revenue source for cash-strapped districts
While research on the long-term benefits of CTE programs on students’ future earnings is still emerging, CTE programs can help keep students engaged in their schooling, Ecton said.
“Students do better when they know what outcome they’re working toward,” he said. “I think especially for students who are struggling to figure out where they see themselves in the future, CTE can be really useful.”
For Kaighly Davis, a junior in Tomball ISD, enrolling in the legal-studies pathway has eased her stress over her postsecondary plans.
The future beyond high school can be overwhelming. Getting to experiment and learn about potential careers in high school makes her next step feel less inscrutable, she said.
“In this program, you’re able to figure out if this is really what you want to do for the rest of your life, because that’s something that’s very scary for high schoolers,” said Kaighly, who plans to become a lawyer.
The Tomball Innovation Center has also become a source of income for the district. The district rents out the agriculture arena and the former executive conference room for events.
Law-enforcement agencies have paid to train with the district’s virtual simulators used by students in that pathway. And an energy-technology company, Backer Hughes, now leases office space in one of the buildings, which generates around $1.3 million a year for Tomball ISD.
The district still relies on federal dollars from the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education grant program and its own general fund to support CTE, but those additional dollars help.
Salazar-Zamora acknowledges that most districts won’t have the opportunity to purchase an oil-services company property in bankruptcy.
But she doesn’t see that as the takeaway here.
Instead, Salazar-Zamora urges district leaders in these tight budgetary times to think like entrepreneurs.
Invest in your students, your people, and your community relationships, and the work will pay dividends, Salazar-Zamora said.
“We want for every child to find a place to belong, a passion to pursue, and a love for learning that serves them well beyond the years they are with us,” she said. “No superintendent could ever accomplish this kind of work without an incredible team. And my school board has been supportive of any and every crazy idea I’ve ever come up with, which yes, did include, ‘I really think we need to buy an oil and gas company.’”
