The Tomball Independent school district in Texas has invested significantly in its career and technical education programming in recent years.
This included buying the property of a bankrupt oil-services company and building an expansive career-and-technical campus on it.
With that growth has come challenges, said the district’s superintendent, Martha Salazar-Zamora, who has been recognized as an EdWeek 2026 Leader To Learn From.
Salazar-Zamora spoke with Education Week about common obstacles schools face in building strong CTE programs and how she has approached them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What has been the main challenge to building out your district’s CTE program?
The biggest challenge has been deciding which CTE pathways we want to create or make more robust. There are so many avenues and opportunities and interests, and we really pride ourselves as a district, and myself as superintendent, in being able to provide A to Z choice and opportunities for Texas public schoolchildren. You [can] leave us to become a commercial pilot or you can leave us and shortly after sit for a master electrician test.
One of the biggest challenges is being forward thinking and analyzing what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing through technology, through AI, through our local economic development, the state economic development, I would even say national, and decide what opportunities do we want to create for children that will be best for them in their future. Because we are educating children and preparing them for positions that may not exist today.
Our next opportunity for secondary schools will be cybersecurity—this will be a main focus.
How have you solidified community partnerships to support this work?
I have quarterly meetings with our community leaders: the mayor, the city manager, our chamber of commerce. We are a team. It’s really about ensuring that we collaborate, whether it’s [the local community college system] Lone Star College, or the [local] hospitals.
You purchased 70 acres and 11 buildings for $39.5 million to build the CTE campus. How do you maintain community buy-in for CTE investments on that scale?
Ensuring that we were involving everybody in our story—I call it the Tomball story—and what this entire CTE complex means to the district and the community. [We create] opportunities for [people] to come in and view it. I’ve held my state of the district in a warehouse [on the CTE campus]. We’ve provided tours [in] golf carts so that they could see their [public] dollars at work.
CTE is sometimes viewed as less rigorous than a college-preparatory focus. Have you encountered that perception?
The pendulum has gone from one side to the other in education. I’ve been doing this long enough where we’ve seen, “yes, CTE is the way to go,” and then we’ve seen a time where people felt like it may be inferior to a focus on [a four-year university] education.
I’ve always felt like CTE is valuable because when any student leaves with an additional skill and can go on and become a productive citizen, then we’ve done something good for them and perhaps changed the [economic] trajectory of their families.
I think now people truly see the beauty of CTE and the fact that pursuing a trade can be equivalent to getting a four-year degree, depending on what you major in.
How have you approached the challenge of people perceiving CTE as lesser?
We’ve done a lot of CTE education. We have a parent university where we will highlight CTE programs and bring in the community to feature and highlight and share the great things that are happening [through the district’s CTE offerings].
We also bring in industry leaders that come and talk to our students, that talk to our parents. … We want to make sure that people understand that CTE is just the beginning. [Students’] future can only continue to grow based on the strong skill set that they leave us with. We want the community to understand and see the value of all the different opportunities that their students are getting.
