FISD Chief Operations Officer Scott Warstler said rezoning is never an easy feat, but changing attendance zones with new schools offers the path of least resistance for the district. Looking ahead, however, the rezoning process will probably be more difficult.
"The majority of any rezoning we have to do moving forward will not be because of new schools. It’ll be because of shifts in how our city’s developing and how neighborhoods develop,” Warstler said.
FISD has seven campuses at capacity. These include four elementary schools and three middle schools. All new students who move to one of these at-capacity school attendance zones are being enrolled at neighboring schools.
During an Oct. 17 board meeting, FISD trustees received an update from the district’s longtime demographer Population and Survey Analysts about expected growth in the district. PASA Director of Planning Kris Pool said the district is continuing to grow, though not at the high rate the district experienced in the mid-2000s, she said.
Using a moderate-growth scenario, Pool’s projections show the district would sit at 70,434 students in five years and 72,872 students in 10 years. The district’s current enrollment is 67,027 students and expects to have 67,757 students next year.
Even though the new campuses that will relieve the overcrowding at certain schools will not open until next year, the district said finalizing rezoning plans now helps put processes in place to help “seamlessly” open two new campuses. These include campus transfer requests, which will open in January, and staff hiring, which will also start in early 2023.FISD Deputy Superintendent Todd Fouche said at a Nov. 7 meeting that attendance zone changes are “the hardest thing our staff does every year.”
“We have been the fastest-growing school district in the United States, and ... it’s hard to have stability for students when 3,500 students a year are moving in our district,” Fouche said. “I think over the next five years we see our growth starting to stabilize. And I think we can have longer-term projections as we go forward. But as we’re still building schools because people are moving in, we have to have somewhere to put them, and that puts us in a tough situation.”
Challenges of growth
FISD and the city have a “tremendous relationship,” Warstler said. The partnership between the city and school district even extends to new projects and master-planned communities. When developers come to the city with project plans, the city points them to the school district to ensure both entities are on the same page. The district learns from the developer about whether the project will likely bring more students to the district and then gives that information to PASA. During the October meeting, Pool also showed key areas of growth in FISD. They include Brinkmann Ranch off Coit Road and Main Street, the upcoming Fields mixed-use community near Legacy Drive, and the Grove off Custer and Stacy roads. These developments will add an estimated 13,000 total new homes in the district by 2032.
While single-family homes give the district a higher yield of students, more than 21,000 apartment units are projected to open in the coming decade, projections show. This volume will also mean a significant number of students for the district to accommodate in the future as these developments are realized, Warstler said. The district has a number of sites in Frisco it has purchased over the years that are available to build on should funds be released in future bond packages. These include sites in some of the major development areas in the northwest portion of the city.
However, the district is limited in where it can find new land. Developers are usually eager to add an elementary school in a community. But if the need for the area is a middle or high school, developers are less willing to come to the table, Fouche said.
Additionally, while the land is available to the district, it might choose not to do anything with it, Warstler said.
“While it may be beneficial [to have a new school] for a year or two right now, but five to six years out you don’t want to get into a situation where you have four elementaries in a very close proximity that are all sitting at 350 [students],” he said. “We have to balance current versus future a lot when we look at where we’re placing schools.”
PASA also drives upcoming communities to gauge the timeline for when families will begin moving into new developments, Warstler said. In addition, the demographer looks at older neighborhoods and the ages of the students in those neighborhoods.
This is key because a shift for FISD is that the students making up the biggest classes in the district are generally older children, Warstler said.
“Every year for a lot of years, kindergartners were always our biggest class. And about five years ago, we started to see this shift in that our highest grade level was pushing late middle school or high school. That’s still where we are today,” he said.Warstler noted even though the district’s growth rate is slowing, adding 10,000 more students in the next 10 to 15 years, as projections show, still gives the district a higher enrollment than others in Texas.
“We still have a lot of growth coming, so as we look at this big plan, there will be more schools, and there will be some additional rezoning that will have to happen to accommodate that growth,” he said.
Opening new schools
FISD trustees adopted the new attendance zones for the 2023-24 school year during a Nov. 14 board meeting. It marks the 19th time in 22 years FISD has rezoned part of its school district.Rezoning this year affects 2,787 students. Of those, 1,354 students will go to one of the new campuses.
The district implements enrollment changes to keep high schools under 2,100 students, middle schools under 1,000 students and elementary schools under 760 students. This model helps give students access to more opportunities in what is called the student opportunity model, officials said.
Wortham will be the first intermediate school in FISD and will open in McKinney’s city limits next year, serving fifth- and sixth-grade students on the east side of the district. It will open with 935 students.
And while Wilkinson is the district’s 18th middle school, in the fall it will be the first new middle school for FISD in five years. Functioning as a traditional middle school, it will serve students in sixth through eighth grades and will open with 573 students. Having an intermediate school at the district was discussed for years and planned before the pandemic, said Christy Fiori, the executive director of teaching and learning at FISD.
“The way that that feeder pattern is stacked, it really works very nicely within that side of town, whereas it may not fit that structure in other places,” she said.
While several elementary schools will feed into Wortham, the goal is to have peers at the intermediate school graduate together, Warstler said.
“The beauty of this is once you hit Wortham, that fifth-grade class is your graduating class, and every kid that is in that fifth-grade class, minus move-ins and those kinds of things, that’ll be your graduating class,” Warstler said. “Nowhere else in our district can we look at any fifth-grade class and say, ‘That is your graduating class.’”
Wortham’s design features collaborative spaces and opportunities for outdoor learning. The goal is to “bridge an elementary mindset” between fifth- and sixth-grade students, incoming Wortham Principal Michael Thomas said.
“We think that those two age groups together pair really nicely as far as the level of maturity and how we can connect curriculum between the two grade levels,” Thomas said. “We feel like it would be a great mesh, and it’s going to relieve a lot of the pressure of attendance and enrollment on that side of the district.”
Jamie Wisneski opened Pearson Middle School as its principal and was named the new principal for Wilkinson Middle School in November. She said she plans to bring some best practices she learned from her previous new-campus experiences to this latest opening, namely by having a relationship-based campus.
“Middle school can be an awkward time for kids,” Wisneski said. “So we try to really focus on teachers who take those awkward ages and have fun with them and enjoy them ... and give every kid a sense of belonging.”
Despite navigating the challenges of growth, increasing enrollment signals to the district that it is doing something right, Warstler said.
“People are still looking at Frisco ISD as the place to put their students,” he said. “I think our student opportunity model has a lot to do with that.”
