Original Research by School Decision on Pcjted - Cholla High School
PCJTED – Cholla High School is a career and technical school serving grades nine through twelve in Tucson, Arizona. It operates as part of the Pima County Joint Technical Education District (JTED), a regional system that provides career and technical education programs across multiple high school campuses in the county. The school is located on West Starr Pass Boulevard in Tucson, a major desert city that is the second largest in Arizona and home to the University of Arizona, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, and a mix of tech and tourism industries.
What stands out most immediately is the school’s enrollment. The total student body is very small. The available data shows students in two grade levels only, with the other two grade levels reporting a count of zero. All students whose race or ethnicity is reported are Hispanic. Information on whether students qualify for free or reduced-price meals was not available, nor was data on students with disabilities or English learners. Because the school is so small, many of the standard measures one might look for are absent. There are no state assessment results to report, no four-year graduation rate, and no chronic absenteeism data either. The comparison that would place this school’s performance relative to other districts in Pima County could not be run because the underlying values were missing.
This is not a typical comprehensive high school. As a career and technical school, its purpose is to offer specialized vocational and technical programs that students from other high schools may attend for part of their day or as their primary school. The extreme small size suggests that this particular site may operate as a program within a larger host school or serve a very narrow set of students in specific course offerings. A parent should confirm with the Pima County JTED district how this school functions: whether students enroll here full time or attend for a portion of the day, what programs are offered, and how the school interfaces with the student’s home high school.
Tucson itself provides the broader context. The city has a large geographic footprint and is largely automobile-dependent outside the downtown and university core. Housing in the relevant ZIP code has a typical home value that is below the state average and close to the national median, and rents have been climbing modestly in the most recent period. The Pima County JTED district appears to have no major recent changes that would directly affect families, based on publicly available information.
For a parent considering this school, the core takeaway is that it is a very small CTE-focused program with almost no publicly reported academic performance data or outcome measures. That absence does not necessarily indicate a problem—this kind of school often falls outside the standard testing and graduation metrics because of its nature or because the data is suppressed for privacy—but it does mean a family would need to get information directly from the school or district to understand what students experience and what results they achieve. The school serves a specific niche in Tucson’s educational landscape. Whether it fits a particular student depends entirely on the match between the student’s career interests and the specific programs offered, about which the available data says nothing.
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