Despite a public school funding bill that sent $8.5 billion to Texas school districts, the bill requires the money be spent largely on teacher salary raises, school safety mandates and special education allotments.

“House Bill 2 just passed, and that money, as great as it was ... it was money that we had to spend in certain areas,” Chief Financial Officer Pete Pape said. “It wasn’t money to help with the deficit; it wasn’t money to help in any other areas.”

Grassroots efforts such as Save Cypress Elementary, Fight for Faubion and Speak Up for Steiner Ranch have formed in light of the potential closures, and LISD students and parents have packed school board meetings over the last several months in an effort to keep their schools open.

“My concern is that there are families who are going to evaluate [the optimization actions] and say, ‘I don’t trust this because of the lack of transparency, and I’m going to look at alternative forms of education for my children,’” Cypress Elementary parent Nicole Krauss said.

Current situation

Cypress, Faubion and Steiner Ranch are among several LISD campuses that the district demographer reports will be under 60% utilization—or a campus’ capacity compared to its enrollment—over the next five years.

LISD used to be a fast-growth district and could assume 100-200 students would be added each year, Pape said.

“That was revenue, and that’s no longer happening,” Pape said.

The latest 2024 demographic report projects some southern LISD schools will experience continued enrollment declines as the “demographic cycle adjusts,” Chief Operations Officer Jeremy Trimble said.

Some northern LISD schools could continue to grow with new housing construction, and projects such as the Early Childhood Center are underway in this area.

“[Southern] schools were packed full of kids at one time,” Trimble said. “We didn’t overbuild; it’s just now, the conditions have changed, and so we need to make some decisions strategically for the district.”

Sorting out the details

Last August, LISD’s Long-Range Planning Committee was charged with looking into open enrollment, facility optimization and specialized programs in the face of declining enrollment, Trimble said. The committee was then phased out earlier this year as administration used its framework to develop the three optimization actions presented during the May 29 board meeting.

Path 1 would close Faubion, Cypress and Steiner Ranch elementary schools and repurpose the campuses. According to district documents, Faubion was identified for alternative high school program New Hope High School; Cypress for the district police department, administrative services and professional development; and Steiner Ranch for a tuition-based pre-K.

Path 2 would update staffing guidelines, or the number of staff needed to serve a campus, across the district. This could reduce roles including assistant principals, counselors, instructional coaches and librarians as well as dyslexia, English as a second language and special education coordinators to one or part-time.

Path 3 proposes implementing parts of paths 1 and 2.

Parents have been critical about some of the plans laid out by the district.

“I think there’s some things everybody can universally say are [low-hanging] fruit that have not been looked at,” Krauss said.

Assessing the need

LISD parent Heather Tankersley was part of the LRPC subcommittee charged with developing the matrix used to determine campus utilization, which considered a campus’s enrollment, age, most recent renovations and other factors.

Trimble said administration utilized the tool with updated enrollment numbers to form the actions, but Tankersley said this is “not reflected” in the original LRPC suggestions from 2024, such as converting Laura Bush Elementary into a fifth and sixth grade center, and keeping nearby schools as K-4.

Administration also developed a more consistent way to generate a campus’s functional capacity in early 2024, Trimble said, but some community members have questioned how the district has used this data and demographic projections for long-term planning.

“I feel like there’s a lot more at play there than just saying that our neighborhood is not regenerating,” Faubion Elementary parent Anne Bloodgood said.

The impact

Members of the grassroots groups have suggested alternative cost-saving solutions to closing schools, such as implementing an open enrollment policy and adding a paid pre-K option at underenrolled campuses.

One overarching theme is the potential loss of neighborhood schools, which members say could interrupt the community’s social infrastructure.

“Several apartment buildings with low-income students are zoned to that school, so a lot of them walk,” Steiner Ranch Elementary parent Rachel Lilla said.

Megan Dudo, a parent at Cypress Elementary, stressed the need for clear communication between the district and its parents.

“We realize the district is going to have to make hard decisions,” Dudo said. “What we want is transparency, accountability [and] data-driven decisions.”

What to expect

District administration hosted community conversation events in late August with the elementary communities that could be impacted, and further clarification on the long-range planning process and budget was slated to take place during the Sept. 9 board workshop after press time.

The district could also hold a bond election next year, but some community members have voiced concerns that commitments made during LISD’s last bond in 2023 have not been followed through.

An April 2023 district announcement stated that passage of Proposition A in the bond would not result in the closing of any schools.

“A lot of the gaps in what they have said through board meetings have either been contradicted completely or not followed through on,” Cypress Elementary parent Erin Osmond said. “There were promises made about the 2023 bond that no school would be closed.”

Still, a charter for the Citizens’ Facility Advisory Committee—which makes bond package recommendations—was set to be on a future board agenda for approval as several campuses approach 20 years old, Trimble said. The board is set to vote on optimization actions Oct. 9.