Conroe ISD will ask district voters to approve $487 million in bonds Nov. 3 to build five new schools, four of which would be located in the Oak Ridge High School feeder zone. A district demographic study, ordered by CISD and released in January, indicated the district’s student population will increase by 30 percent over the next 10 years, CISD Superintendent Don Stockton said. “The Oak Ridge feeder was shown to be the area impacted the greatest by this growth,” he said. CISD ranked as the sixth-fastest growing large school district in Texas in fall 2014, according to the study. A large school district is defined as one with more than 20,000 students. The bond proposal includes one high school, one intermediate school and two elementary schools in the Oak Ridge High School feeder zone and one junior high school in the Conroe High School feeder zone.

Bond details

CISD’s Facility Planning Committee, a 23-person group charged with determining the district’s needs, made recommendations in June that were designed to serve the entire school district and all of the schools in a period of tremendous population growth, Stockton said. “We have averaged over 1,500 students a year for the last 20 years, and even when the economy is in a downturn, we have continued to grow,” he said. Stockton said the bond proposal includes no tax increase because of an increase in property values within CISD boundaries. In addition to the five new schools, the bond will fund projects such as land purchases for future school sites as well as 10 new science classrooms at Knox Junior High School. Stockton said the original bond proposal was for $511 million, but the district was able to scale down that amount as a result of using available cash from previous budgets—nearly $25 million—for smaller projects instead of bonded debt.

Development drives need

Jim Holcomb, president of Holcomb Properties—which owns Imperial Oaks and Meadows at Imperial Oaks master-planned communities—said his properties are tipping the scale of population growth in the ORHS area and creating the need for more schools. “What’s happened over there is that we have experienced over the last  10 years a big surge of residential growth,” Holcomb said. “And it’s actually going to get bigger.” According to the demographic study, ORHS will experience the most capacity overages of any high school in the district by 2024. The district’s other four high schools are Caney Creek, Conroe, The Woodlands and The Woodlands College Park. The district expects ORHS will exceed its capacity by 1,500 students in 2024, with a projected enrollment of more than 5,300 students. “Birnham Woods [Elementary School] is getting loaded because of [the Holcomb Properties developments], and [CISD] realizes that they need some more capacity,” Holcomb said. “All of those schools are experiencing a need for more capacity.” Holcomb said road projects like the Grand Parkway will allow for more accessibility to the area while new employment centers like the ExxonMobil campus are creating the need for more schools as well. He said Holcomb Properties would continue to build in the area. “We’re expanding—we still have probably 1,000 more homes and additional lots to bring on there,” he said. Penny Benbow lives in the ORHS feeder zone and is co-founder of the Spring Creek Homeowners Coalition, a group organized with the objective of improving the east side of I-45, along the Rayford Road corridor. “We have about five new whole neighborhood communities being developed over here, and that’s going to add thousands of new residents,” she said. “Our area is growing tremendously even with the housing market slowing down.” The increases in resident population in some areas of CISD are resulting in larger student-teacher ratios than is preferred by the state. The state of Texas standard student-teacher ratio is 22-to-1 while Cox Intermediate School has a ratio of 26 students to one teacher, according to CISD. “Snyder Elementary [School] opened two years ago, and they had to open a new second-grade class,” Benbow said. “They’re adding classrooms and hiring teachers. That says that those [ratios] are too big, and that there are one or two classes that are too big.”

District needs

In addition to proposing five new schools, the committee recommended the bond proposal include replacing items throughout the district, such as boilers, heating, venting and air conditioning systems as well as roofing at some schools. The initial bond proposal totaled $511 million. However, those infrastructure projects will not funded with bond referendum money. “We pulled all [those] items out of the bond and are electing to pay for those with cash that have a life cycle of less than our bond,” CISD board President John Husbands said. “A lot of the technology that we are buying— and buses—are shorter life span items we pulled out, and that’s why we went [down to] $487 million.” Husbands said the priority with the new funding efforts is to enhance the learning environment for the district’s students. “We’re not just building things so we can admire pretty buildings,” he said. “We’re building things so kids can get a great education. We can be conservative all we want, but if we’re not getting the academics done, then we’re not achieving our mission.” The growth in CISD and its needs are driven by the residential draw to the area, Stockton said. “Historically, we have grown in all types of [economic] situations year after year,” Stockton said. “We continue to see incredible growth, especially in the near future when the availability of homes will increase.”