White said that even with that rate, the district is still adding about 1,000 students per year.
“Growth is still happening. Tomball’s still growing. But growth is not even when we look at the parts of our school district, the different campuses and the different grade levels,” White said.
On Oct. 31—the snapshot date for the Public Education Information Management System, or PEIMS—TISD’s enrollment reached 23,256 students, according to White’s presentation.
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White said a housing slump is contributing to the low growth rate. According to an analysis by Redfin, a real estate brokerage, national housing turnover is at its lowest rate in decades, with just 28 out of every 1,000 homes changing hands in 2025. In Houston, according to the analysis, there were 23.3 sales per 1,000 homes in 2025, a 13% decrease compared to the 26.7 sales per 1,000 homes in 2024.
“That [housing slump] is going to be reflected inside of not only our school’s data but all of the Houston-area districts as well,” White said.
White also said TISD continues to see students enrolling for the first time at all grade levels.
“Our big grade that we first see a student is going to be in kindergarten,” White said. “We do see that that number has decreased a little bit, although we still have growth over time.”
White said the number of students who speak a language other than English at home is growing. According to district data, one-quarter of students come from homes where one of over 70 languages other than English is spoken.
Spanish and Vietnamese are the two largest languages spoken at home by students, White said.
As new schools have opened, TISD has maintained an average campus size of around 1,000 students, White said. The district’s new high school, Tomball West High School, is scheduled to open in August 2026.
“Right now, we don’t have another school planned to open after we’re done with our next year opening and our reconfiguration with Creekside Park Junior High School,” White said. “As we have plans in the future, we’ll of course revisit with the demographic information and try to figure out where we are. Those decisions, of course, will be made a little bit more microscopically when we’re looking at where inside of the district growth is happening and what types of needs we need to meet.”
