With 5,000 vacant lots expected for new residential units within McKinney ISD by the summer, district officials are working toward future planning to accommodate the district’s growth.

There are currently 2,500 vacant lots and over 3,000 lots undergoing work in the district, said Rocky Gardner of Zonda Education, the district’s demography consultant, during a Dec. 18 board meeting. Based on the data received from the district’s demographer, MISD Assistant Superintendent Dennis Womack said the district will work to place students wherever it has space.

“We’ll need to look at different strategies on how to best redistribute some of our [zones] and which school [students] attend,” Womack said.

The details

Enrollment in McKinney ISD is forecast to reach almost 26,000 students in the next 10 years, according to Zonda’s data.
With existing zoning boundaries, Frazier Elementary School could reach over 2,000 students by 2033—about 1,200 students over its functional capacity—based on projections. The elementary zone has over 700 vacant developed lots and space for 4,700 future lots.


Press Elementary School and Webb Elementary School are also expected to exceed their capacity levels within the next 10 years, according to enrollment forecasts.

Diving in deeper

Growth within MISD is following the trend of suburb growth in Dallas-Fort Worth.

In the third quarter of 2023, MISD had 1,704 annual closings and ranked sixth among Dallas-Fort Worth school districts, according to the meeting’s presentation. The districts outpacing MISD are:
  • Northwest ISD: 3,396 closings
  • Denton ISD: 3,323 closings
  • Prosper ISD: 2,781 closings
  • Princeton ISD: 2,631 closings
  • Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD: 1,823 closings
“Growth is pushing to the suburbs everywhere,” Gardner said. “It’s a product of both where there’s available land and affordability.”


The district has 34 subdivisions being actively built while there are 27 future subdivisions within the district, according to the presentation. Nearly 3,300 multifamily units and about 1,000 single family rental units are under construction across the district.

There are also about 3,500 future multifamily units in the planning stages, according to the presentation.

“Developers are obviously finding some momentum in McKinney ISD again, and I think that’s going to continue,” Gardner said.

Why it matters


In the next few months, district officials will work to plan for growth based on where the growth is occurring in the district, Womack said. The district will take into consideration the programmatic use of classrooms in the district to determine how many students a campus can handle, he said.

“We [will] have a plan to take care of every kid and make sure every kid has a seat,” Womack said.