IDEA Schools will have two new sites in the Rio Grande Valley in 2010

IDEA Schools will have two new sites in 2010

November 20, 2009 8:43 PM

Martha L. Hernández

The Monitor

MORE INFO
>> Visit http://www.ideapublicschools.org/ or call (956) 377-8000.

PHARR — Pharr and Alamo will have each an IDEA school open in time for next school year, officials announced Friday.

Both campuses will open in August 2010 starting with kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades. Additional grade levels will be added each year.

In 2006, IDEA Public Schools began an ambitious expansion plan to open 22 new schools across the Rio Grande Valley by 2012. Today, the school system has 12 campuses from Mission to Brownsville, not including the two announced Friday.

IDEA schools are tuition-free and open to all students. All schools are accepting applications for the 2010-11 academic year. Existing campuses are located in the cities of Donna, Brownsville, McAllen/Edinburg, Mission, San Benito and San Juan.

IDEA Public Schools operates a system of public charter schools that focus on college readiness.

In 2009, IDEA College Preparatory in Donna was named the...
Click Here for Full Article

In Case You Missed It…

In Case You Missed It…
The Westside Story
Published 10/17/2009 - 12:23 a.m.

CST AUSTIN – MSNBC.com and Moody’s Economy have announced that the Austin-Round Rock, Brownsville-Harlingen, Dallas-Plano-Irving, El Paso, Lubbock, McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr and San Antonio areas are among the first in the nation to move from recession into recovery, indicating that their economies have grown over the past six months.


The announcement is based on MSNBC and Moody’s Adversity Index, which uses data on employment, industrial production, housing starts and home prices to place each state or metro area in one of four categories: expanding, at risk of recession, in recession or recovering. This is the first month this year that any U.S. metro area has moved from in recession into recovery.

Additionally, CNN Money has ranked Texas as one of the Top Five Best States to Launch a Business thanks to our reasonable tax structure and incentive funds such as the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. The article also credited the franchise tax exemption, passed at Gov. Perry’s direction during the 81st Legislative Session, with fostering growth in small businesses in the state. Texas is the only large state to be ranked.

To view the MSNBC and Moody’s ranking, please visit

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33312701/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/.

To view CNN Money’s ranking, please visit

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0910/gallery.best_places_tax_havens.smb/2.html

Pharr, TX to Benefit from BBVA Compass Shifting Jobs to Texas

BBVA Compass shifts jobs to Texas
San Antonio Business Journal - by Greg Barr
Thursday, September 24, 2009




Fast-growing regional bank BBVA Compass plans to shift 200 jobs from its call center in Birmingham, Ala., to Texas.


The bank plans to phase out call center operations in Alabama and transition the jobs to Pharr, near McAllen, and also to a new call center to be located in San Antonio, according to BBVA spokesman Ed Bilek.

The jobs will be outsourced to call center operator Atento, effective Oct.1.

BBVA Compass, based in Birmingham, is the U.S. banking arm of Spanish financial services giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. The holding company for BBVA’s U.S. operations is based in Houston.


Barr writes for the Houston Business Journal, an affiliated publication to the San Antonio Business Journal.