Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 30
Austin and Pinkerton are Closure Candidates • New Tech High’s Numbers Don’t Add Up • Voting for VATRE Won’t Save Any Schools • Coppell ISD Sets New National Merit Record
I would like to publicly thank the Coppell City Council for having an exceedingly boring agenda last week. Coppell ISD produced enough news on its own, thank you very much.
Austin and Pinkerton are Closure Candidates
Coppell ISD’s trustees have a choice to make: Do they close Austin Elementary or Pinkerton Elementary or neither elementary?
They’re definitely not going to close both of them. That was one of the options presented to them on Monday, and the trustees rejected it before adjourning their workshop.
“This seems, of the three that we’ve seen, to be the most extremely disruptive, if not almost a nuclear option in terms of efficiency,” Board President David Caviness said after hearing about the idea of closing both Austin and Pinkerton.
Shortly thereafter, Trustee Manish Sethi said closing both schools would affect almost every elementary-age family in the district.
“Considering all the other factors which we have made part of our rubric, this does look like a very heavy cost to pay right now,” Sethi said.
That rubric was part of a facilities evaluation tool the trustees approved in June. The district has never named the committee of parents, employees, and community members who formulated the tool, but Monday’s options were developed and presented by Superintendent Brad Hunt’s administrative leadership team.
The district has been talking about closing campuses due to declining enrollment and the associated effects on the budget. The current school year is the ninth in a 10-year span to begin with a forecasted deficit. Although none of those forecasts have been realized, the surpluses in the actual audited results are getting smaller. In the 2022-2023 school year, the district took in $84,000 more than it spent; four years earlier, that number was $9.2 million.
(If you’re new to this conversation, you can get caught up on previous articles here.)
Pinkerton is the district’s oldest campus by a country mile, having been built in 1940; closing it would lead to an estimated savings of $2.1 million. Austin, which was built in 1987, is the oldest of the eight “footprint” schools based on the same set of architectural plans; closing it could save the district $2.26 million. The considerations for each campus were listed on these slides.
When Sethi asked why Austin was presented as an option for closure, Hunt cited all of the factors on the slides, plus the school’s “long, skinny attendance zone.” Sethi said it appeared that closing Austin might be the “least disruptive” option, and this was Hunt’s response: “The disruptive part is relative. I mean, we can say it’s least disruptive, but if it’s your school, it’s very disruptive, so it’s hard to say that with a definitive statement.”
The trustees repeatedly thanked Hunt and his team for all of the work that went into Monday’s presentation.
“Staff has done an amazing job in bringing us exactly what we asked for, which was choices backed up by research and thought and intentionality,” Trustee Leigh Walker said. “I am loath to do anything to interfere too much at this time, because I feel like now it’s community time.”
The community has already begun to weigh in. If Pinkerton is closed, its International Baccalaureate program would move to Wilson Elementary, which would no longer be a Dual Language Immersion campus; the DLI program would be exclusive to Denton Creek Elementary. Consequently, some Wilson parents launched a petition against that idea. Meanwhile, other parents have created a Facebook group called “Keep ALL Coppell Schools Open.”
Parents and students have two opportunities this week to directly influence the trustees. Another workshop is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on Monday at the Vonita White Administration Building, and there will be a town hall meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Coppell High School Ninth Grade Campus. A decision is expected during the trustees’ meeting on Sept. 30.
New Tech High’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
New Tech High @ Coppell was also presented as a candidate for closure, but it may be given a chance to reinvent itself.