Lewisville ISD will decide the fate of elementary schools Monday night – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

The Lewisville Board The Board of Trustees voted Monday to close five elementary schools that are on the list of the school retirement and boundary adjustment proposal.

The five schools closing are feeder schools for five Lewisville ISD high schools, including:

• Garden Ridge Elementary School
• Polser Elementary STEM Academy
• Creekside Elementary School
• Highland Village Elementary School
• BB Owen Elementary School

It was a tough crowd for the Hebron High School students. They tried to add some holiday cheer to Monday night’s Lewisville ISD board meeting by singing Christmas carols. But the audience sat with a straight face, knowing that the gift they were receiving was a closed school.

“The school board doesn’t care about children, it’s about money,” said Alex Mitchell, a parent at one of the affected schools.

Parents wearing school colors filled every seat at Monday’s assembly. They attempted to express to the board their grave concerns about the plan to close five schools in the district.

The board blamed low enrollment and, more importantly, state lawmakers providing less money to operate schools.

“This was an incredibly difficult decision that none of us ever wanted to have to face,” Board of Trustees President Jenny Proznik said in a prepared statement. “The overwhelming support of our schools from families throughout this process is a testament to the deep care and passion our community has for each campus.”

Monday night could be a turning point for Lewisville ISD, which has five schools on the line. NBC 5’s Alanna Quillen has the details.

In an interview with NBC 5 in October, Superintendent Dr. Lori Rapp said that adjustments had to be made as enrollment continued to decline and this had an impact on funding.

“We peaked at 53,000 enrollments in 2015-16 and are expected to stabilize at about 45,000 enrollments over the next decade,” Rapp said. “As we confront this trend, the enrollment trend, one of the things we’ve set out to do is put together a community committee to look at our enrollment trends and examine all of our schools. And so we created this efficiency assessment with efficiency indicators.”

The district has a budget deficit of about $4.5 million.

On Halloween, parents and children used trick-or-treat night to hand out flyers and petitions to save their schools.

“A lot of us bought our homes specifically for this school and specifically for the culture and the hiking and just the friendships that we made,” Olga Reed said in October. She is a mother who helped organize the evening.

The board tried to explain the situation it found itself in, but when the board voted unanimously to close all five schools. The parents burst into tears. She shouted back and angrily left the meeting, vowing to vote her out.

“It’s just devastating, we bought our house because of school. And I can say the same thing about so many people I know,” said Kelly Cummins, a parent at Garden Ridge Elementary.

“Let me say this: Giving back five schools does not protect us from bankruptcy,” Reed said after the vote. Before the vote, she and other parents said they recognized the budget shortfalls were due to state lawmakers failing to properly fund education in recent years, but after the vote those same parents couldn’t help but blame the board admit. “We don’t care that much about Austin. We care about them losing their jobs,” Reed said, referring to the board.

Lewisville is the latest of several North Texas counties to make this decision.

Richardson ISD voted to close and consolidate several elementary schools earlier this year. Over the summer, Plano ISD also voted to close four campuses at the end of the school year. Coppell ISD voted in October to close Pinkerton Elementary School, the district’s oldest elementary school. Last year, Irving ISD voted to close some schools.

Many districts have similar reasons for the closures: families are moving further to the suburbs to find affordable housing, a lack of state funding, declining enrollment and lower birth rates.