For 20 years, the largest group of students within FISD has been elementary school students, but in the last two years the demographics have changed.
“It use to be that our kindergarten incoming class was the biggest, and the smallest was the senior class, and it was linear,” Lyon said. “Well this year, the eighth grade class is the largest class, and it’s more of a bell shape curve where the kindergarten and senior classes are about the same size.”
This school year, Lyon said FISD expected to increase by 3,500 students, however the school district only had 2,500 new students.
“We hit the mark for middle school students [and] we hit the mark for high school students [but] where we missed by 1,000 students was elementary school students,” Lyon said. “That’s a radical, new data set for Frisco ISD. That has not been the profile of growth of this district over the last 20 years.”
Projections for next year show that elementary school students will only increase by 600 students whereas projections show that there will be an increase of 1,100 high school students and 600 middle school students, Lyon said.
“You can hypothesize as to why that flip has occurred and the most consistent one we hear, and we get a lot of nods from realtors, is that Frisco is no longer a place where young families with elementary age kids can afford such a thing as a starter home,” Lyon said. “There is no starter home in Frisco anymore.”
FISD and city of Frisco partnership
During the development update portion of the meeting, Frisco Development Services Director John Lettelleir said the city and the school district work together on a monthly basis to determine what incoming developments would bring more students into the district.
Lettelleir said over the years the single-family homes are the most widely available living units within the city. The number of urban living apartments will also increase in the years to come, while the number of garden-style apartments has remained steady, he said.
Lettelleir said garden-style apartments are more likely to bring in more new children to the district compared to urban living apartments.
“The difference between urban living and garden style has to do with the type of units and the size of the units,” Lettelleir said. “In the urban living, you have more studios and one or two bedrooms. They’re not geared toward families.”
Lettelleir said the city has done research and spoken to school districts whose cities have seen an increase in urban living units to see if there was an increase in children from those developments.
Lettelleir said those school districts had seen no increase of students from those developments, and therefore he does not expect there to be an increase of students because there is an increase in Frisco urban living developments.
