LEWISVILLE, Texas — Lewisville ISD is next, but certainly not the first or last school district, to grapple with declining enrollment, static state funding and prospective homeowners making the economic choice to live somewhere else.
Earlier this week, the newly-formed Community Efficiency Committee, a group of parents, staff, and community members, presented their findings to the LISD Board of Trustees. After an analysis of every campus in LISD, they identified 20 campuses for potential boundary adjustments or facility retirement: essentially combining students at a smaller number of campuses.
"As you look at districts all around us, lower enrollment in public schools coupled with the lack of action to increase the Basic Allotment by the Legislature is resulting in challenging financial constraints for our district and public schools statewide," LISD Superintendent Lori Rapp said in a letter to families.
A decade or two ago, Lewisville was the Frisco, the Prosper or the Melissa of its day. Population was on the rise and school district expansion kept up with that growth. But from a peak student enrollment of more than 52,000 in 2019, enrollment has dropped to 48,356 now and is projected to drop to 45,905 in the next decade. Demographers hired by the school district also indicate the average home price in Lewisville is $492,716. Combined with the effect of a lower nationwide birth rate, young populations are increasingly taking their families elsewhere.
"We are all in the same lifecycle together," Rapp said of suburban districts like Lewisville. "Just like we were in the same lifecycle of fast growth, we are all in the lifecycle of our school district where it's more stabilization of enrollment."
Faced with its current lifecycle, Lewisville ISD is considering closing some schools and changing to boundary enrollment of several others. The preliminary assessment identified 10 schools for facility retirement or boundary adjustments: B.B. Owen Elementary, Creekside Elementary, Ethridge Elementary, Garden Ridge Elementary, Heritage Elementary, Highland Village Elementary, Polser Elementary, DeLay Middle School, Downing Middle School, and Lakeview Middle School. Boundary adjustments, i.e. rezoning which children go to which schools, is being considered for Bluebonnet Elementary, Camey Elementary, Degan Elementary, Hebron Valley Elementary, Memorial Elementary, Morningside Elementary, Old Settlers Elementary, Rockbrook Elementary, Creek Valley Middle School and Shadow Ridge Middle School.
"It just may be the correct answer to painful reality," said SMU Economics professor J.H. Cullum Clark. His responses were initially for the same process underway in Plano and Richardson schools: areas experiencing the same economic and population changes.
"It is a demographic reality that the number of kids who are in schools is trending down in the United States, not up," Clark said. "That's a difficult reality."
Also difficult, Rapp says, is when school funding per student hasn't changed since 2019.
"So you have this perfect storm of your enrollment stabilizing and no longer being fast grown along with it being more expensive now to run school buildings. People understand that this is not unique to our school district. But to your point, that doesn't make it any less difficult."
They are difficult decisions the school district expects to make for the next school year by this December.