Growth in Leander ISD slows

LISD staff and school board members are annually updated by PASA about changes in enrollment, land ownership, housing, employment and other trends. The information in the 306-page demography report can guide the district in planning for the future, including where and when new schools are opened.

Attendance zones

Though growth has slowed, the district's newest campus, Camacho Elementary School, is set to open in fall 2015 on Municipal Drive in Leander. Considering the fast-pace growth in prior years, the board asked staff to wait for the demographer's report to be released before making final recommendations about new attendance boundaries for Camacho.

The release of PASA's previous demography report in October 2013 influenced the board's decision to build Camacho ahead of schedule.

"The demography report is so important to how we do things," said Jeremy Trimble, LISD executive director of support services. "We need that data for projections."

The district is taking a new approach this fall in establishing attendance boundaries around Camacho. In previous years LISD recruited a consortium of parents and residents who met regularly to provide input about how the attendance boundaries should be drawn around a new campus. Staff finalized the options and brought them to the school board for approval.

However, for the most recent elementary school rezoning, the board asked staff to develop attendance zone scenarios internally and then seek input from the public.

"We didn't develop a community committee this time," Trimble said. "We discussed it with the board and administration, and with the [demographic] data we developed different types of scenarios and then vetted those out through a number of board meetings—four in a row this year."

The district then held two attendance zone meetings in October to get feedback from the community, Trimble said, but only about 30 residents participated. Ellen Skoviera, LISD assistant superintendent of business and operations, said the proposed attendance zone scenario projects about 50 percent of the Camacho student population will be economically disadvantaged, which concerned some parents.

"We tried to keep children as close to their school as they could be," Skoviera said, adding that to get an even distribution of economically disadvantaged students among elementary schools, "We would literally be busing students across town and that's not a practice we have here. We do the best we can to balance where it's reasonable for children, but it's not going to be perfectly balanced."

Attendance zone maps for Camacho are set to go before the school board for final approval Nov. 20.

Future construction

In early spring LISD will again discuss attendance boundaries to determine how to populate Tom Glenn High School, which is under construction near the Benbrook Ranch subdivision in Leander and expected to open in fall 2016. The district also has funds remaining from the 2007 bond election to build Elementary School No. 26, though they have not been officially allocated for the project.

PASA projects a 26th elementary school will be needed on the east side of Leander, where hundreds of homes are in various stages of development.

Tepera said data shows almost 24,000 new single-family homes, 11,000 new apartments and almost 4,000 new condominiums in LISD will be occupied in the next 10 years.

"Our projection for the next 10 years is 38,000 new homes to be occupied," she said. "Last year our projection for the next 10 years was about 31,000. It was a 22 percent increase."