Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 36

Consolidation Will Have Ripple Effects • Lewisville ISD Refuses to Alter Border • Cemetery Has Dwindling Supply of Spaces • Warehouse Planned Near 2 Neighborhoods

Consolidation Will Have Ripple Effects

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, a majority of Coppell ISD trustees voted to move Pinkerton Elementary’s International Baccalaureate program to Wilson Elementary and consolidate Wilson’s Dual Language Immersion program with its counterpart at Denton Creek Elementary.

What you may not realize is that these moves could affect your child, even if he or she doesn’t attend any of those schools.

“I know change can be hard for our community,” Superintendent Brad Hunt said in a statement that was published moments after Wednesday’s 5-2 vote. “I truly believe that by focusing on taking care of our students, teachers, and families, we will navigate this transition smoothly by working together. The next steps include developing transition plans for staff, students, and their families, as well as adjusting district attendance boundaries to reflect these changes.”

During Wednesday’s special meeting, the trustees were shown a draft of new attendance zones that would need to be instituted to accommodate the recommended changes. Assistant Superintendent Kristen Eichel said the changes would affect about 825 students, representing approximately 16 percent of the district’s projected elementary population next fall.

The trustees have not yet approved this draft.

“The reality is we have other families and another 200-plus kids across the district that are gonna be impacted as we have to shift kids around to make all of this work,” Trustee Nichole Bentley said.

Those statistics are based on the assumption that all Dual Language Immersion students at Wilson will transfer to Denton Creek, but the administration and the trustees know that’s not likely to happen. Many Wilson parents have said they will pull their children out of the DLI program rather than have them commute across town.

That said, all “emergent bilingual” students — which is the district’s term for kids who are learning English — would “still be taken care of educationally,” Board President David Caviness said, even if they opt out of DLI.

That statement was confirmed by Anita de la Isla, the district’s Director of ESL, Bilingual, and LOTE Programs. She reminded the trustees that DLI is designed to have equal numbers of native Spanish speakers learning English and native English speakers learning Spanish. The program doesn’t work without the willing participation of emergent bilingual students. 

“We have to keep them in the forefront,” de la Isla said. “Now, it is an enrichment program for the other students, but we have to know that we will not have a DLI program if we do not have emergent bilinguals who participate in the program.”

Trustee Manish Sethi made the motion to move IB to Wilson, consolidate DLI at Denton Creek, and level pre-K programs across the district. Jobby Mathew seconded the motion. The dissenting votes came from Bentley and Anthony Hill. 

Before the vote, Bentley said she was “100 percent for DLI consolidation,” but there were parts of Sethi’s motion she could not support.

“I think it is OK for seven people to get the same information and come to different conclusions,” Bentley said. “I think that is healthy. I think that’s why we’re here.”

Hill said he agreed with Bentley: “We can come to different conclusions. And, you know, you may like some, you may like all, but at the end of the day, we all understand that there’s a need to do some things in order to preserve the quality of the district.”

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Lewisville ISD Refuses to Alter Border

Coppell ISD is not the only area school district that is considering campus closures. Last Monday, Lewisville ISD’s trustees narrowed the list of schools they may shutter from 10 to five.

They were presented with the initial list of 10 schools on Oct. 7. Earlier that evening, the trustees considered a petition from a Coppell couple to alter the district’s boundaries.

Jonathan Wang and his wife, Courtney Wong, have three children whose ages are 5, 3, and 1. When they bought their house in the Westhaven subdivision in 2015, they were told it was zoned to Coppell ISD.

The couple didn’t realize that the vast majority of their property is in Lewisville ISD until they tried to enroll their oldest child at Cottonwood Creek Elementary School. Wang showed the Lewisville ISD trustees how the property straddles the line separating Denton County from Dallas County, which aligns with the school districts’ borders.

The couple’s property is on the tax rolls in both counties. The Denton Central Appraisal District says its value is $520,294; that number equals $117,612 for the land plus $402,682 for the house. Meanwhile, the Dallas Central Appraisal District assigns a $1,500 value to what it lists as a vacant tract, because the couple’s house is north of the counties’ border.

In September of 2022, the Lewisville ISD trustees rejected a similar petition regarding more than a dozen other homes in Westhaven. Wang said he and his wife weren’t part of that effort because they assumed their house was within Coppell ISD at the time.

“This is no knock on LISD,” Wang told the Lewisville ISD trustees. “It’s just — my children, they just like their neighbors, and they want to be with them, and so, we felt like we had to give them a shot.”

To be clear, the couple’s oldest child attends Cottonwood Creek thanks to Coppell ISD’s open enrollment policy, and their other kids will be able to do the same. Given that fact, I’m not sure why they want the districts’ boundaries to change. My attempts to contact them were not successful.

Their petition to have the boundaries changed was also not successful. The Lewisville ISD trustees rejected it following a 32-minute discussion behind closed doors, but Trustee Katherine Sells — who made the motion for rejection — told Wang she was “truly sympathetic” to their situation.

“You’re not the first family to approach us about this type of situation who has experienced poor planning and communications by builders that design these neighborhoods and subdivisions,” Sells said.

Trustee Michelle Alkhatib thanked Wang for his respectful and courteous nature, and Board President Jenny Proznik echoed those sentiments.

“It is an unfortunate situation that I will tell you ISDs did not create, but that builders sometimes create in their planning process,” Proznik said. “And I wish they sometimes were a little more thoughtful.”

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Cemetery Has Dwindling Supply of Spaces

These butterfly sculptures are in the Zack Thompson Foundation’s Children’s Garden at Rolling Oaks Memorial Center.

Coppell’s cemetery has about 200 plots left to sell. City leaders were shocked by that statistic.

“I thought we had many, many, many, many more than that,” Mayor Wes Mays said.

Rolling Oaks Memorial Center has already sold 8,000 spots for eternal rest. That number includes in-ground burial plots, mausoleum chambers, and niches for urns holding cremated remains. About 1,850 in-ground plots are occupied, but as of Sept. 30, only about 200 were available. The rest have been reserved for future use.

Community Experiences Assistant Director Sheri Belmont shared those numbers during Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Council Member Biju Mathew, who was just as shocked as the mayor, asked how many of the occupied and reserved slots were purchased by Coppell residents. Belmont didn’t have that stat handy, but she said she could research it.

Belmont also couldn’t answer the mayor’s question about how many of the reserved but unoccupied plots were “bought on speculation.” I didn’t understand that question, and neither did Council Member Ramesh Premkumar.

“What do you mean by ‘speculation’?” Premkumar asked. “Everyone’s gonna die.”

It was explained to Premkumar (and me) that some buyers may have purchased plots with the intention of flipping them for a profit, just like people do with other types of real estate. The city has never instituted any policies prohibiting that practice.

However, the Community Experiences Department amended the cemetery’s operations plan about a year ago; at that time, it stopped dealing with families that didn’t have an immediate need for a space. And as of April 1, the cemetery is serving only Coppell residents, families that already own plots, or families that use the cemetery’s Rolling Oaks Funeral Home. 

Belmont reported that only 9 percent of the plots purchased between Oct. 30 and April 1 were sold to Coppell residents. Between April 1 and Sept. 30, that statistic shot up to 47 percent.

“That is a huge philosophical issue for the cemetery,” City Manager Mike Land said. “If it was intended to be for Coppell residents, there was never any policy put in place that restricted the use or the sale to only Coppell residents.”

Tuesday’s briefing was a primer for a debate that will happen in either December or January. Belmont wants the council to consider a few things, including the philosophy of Rolling Oaks: “Do we still want to be a community cemetery, or do we want to be a regional amenity?” she asked. Other topics to be discussed are a small expansion, potentially limiting the number of plots that one person can buy, and a possible change to the facility’s pricing.

“Early in its existence, the pricing was such that, in the market, people came to Coppell because the plots were so inexpensive,” Land said. “So we’ve put ourselves in this position based on philosophy of pricing.”

As for expanding, Belmont said about 1,500 plots could be added without altering the cemetery’s boundaries. She said that expansion would require just a few amenities, such as lot markers and irrigation. “That would add those 1,500 spaces pretty quickly, at a reasonable price,” Belmont said.

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Warehouse Planned Near 2 Neighborhoods

A developer wants to build a warehouse on the property due north of Rolling Oaks Memorial Center.

The Coppell Planning and Zoning Commission recently considered a plan to combine two properties along Freeport Parkway. One of them is a residence that fronts Freeport; the other is a business called Alford Media that you can’t see from the road.

Alliance Industrial Company aims to replace those structures with a 186,000-square-foot warehouse that would feature 55 overhead doors along its north side. On Oct. 17, Alliance’s Will Bohls told the commissioners that his firm envisions probably four tenants providing “neighborhood services” from the building. That means box trucks would be loading up between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., as opposed to 18-wheelers coming and going around the clock.

There are residential neighborhoods to the north and the east of the site. Commissioner Kent Hafemann wanted to know why “the active, trucking part of this facility” would face homes rather than the cemetery, and he wondered whether the configuration could be flipped.

Sony David, a consulting engineer with the Langan firm, said that would make the building more visible from the north, because it would be closer to the houses and it would be at a higher elevation. Senior Planner Mary Paron-Boswell pointed out that there would be 500 feet between the houses to the north and the warehouse as proposed, and that span would include 250 feet worth of trees. (She later said the houses to the east would be 220 feet from the warehouse.) She also shared these illustrations of the sight lines.

Only one neighbor spoke during the public hearing. Ram Sunkavalli lives in a house due east of the site, and he told the commissioners he already hears noise from the Alford Media operation. Sunkavalli also had concerns about how the construction process might affect the creek behind his home.

When Commissioner Ed Maurer asked about estimated decibel levels, Paron-Boswell reminded everyone that the site is already zoned for light industrial uses. The project was on the commission’s agenda only because the developer is requesting two variances: Alliance wants the warehouse to be 43 feet tall (8 feet taller than what is typically allowed near residences), and the developer wants to screen the property with trees instead of a masonry wall.

A 4-2 majority of the commissioners recommended approval of the variances, with Hafemann and Chair Edmund Haas dissenting. Haas said a warehouse didn’t seem like a good fit between the houses to the north and east, the cemetery to the south, and the baseball fields on the other side of Freeport.

“I feel it’s too much, just in the grander — the larger — context of that area,” Haas said.

The City Council will have the final say on Nov. 12.

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Political Particles

• Texas House candidate John Jun’s campaign recently sent a text to voters that included a graphic identifying him as “the only candidate that lives in HD115.” Based on voter records and property records, I know that Jun’s opponent, Cassandra Hernandez, has owned a home in Farmers Branch since June of 2023. Her home is within the boundaries of District 115. When I asked Jun about that text on Saturday, he said it was based on what he believed to be true at the time. He also alleged that Hernandez’s campaign has made multiple untrue statements about him.

• Jun and Hernandez got together for another forum on Tuesday evening. This one was hosted by the Coppell Chamber of Commerce, and the focus was public education. If you couldn’t be there, you can watch a video of it.

• U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne is seeking a third term representing Congressional District 24. The former Irving mayor is scheduled to appear at Dallas College’s Coppell Center at 9 a.m. on Wednesday for a breakfast event hosted by the Chamber of Commerce.

• Van Duyne’s Democratic challenger, Sam Eppler, was briefly in Coppell on Saturday as he rode a bicycle across District 24. He posted a video from Town Center on his Facebook page.

• U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was also in Coppell on Saturday. He was traveling by bus, and his tour made a pit stop at the Sports Garden DFW. You can see pictures on his X account.

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Chronicle Crumbs

• Until Tuesday, these were the rules for the “Citizen’s Appearance” portion of Coppell City Council meetings: Each speaker got two minutes by default, but each speaker could get two extra minutes if a majority of the council agreed. The aggregate time limit was 20 minutes.

These new rules were approved Tuesday: Each speaker gets three minutes with no extra time. If more than 30 people sign up at one meeting, the mayor may reduce the time allotted to each speaker, but everybody would get at least one minute. There is no aggregate time limit.

These new rules passed after a pair of 4-3 votes. Don Carroll, Mark Hill, Kevin Nevels, and Jim Walker were in favor both times, while Brianna Hinojosa-Smith, Biju Mathew, and Ramesh Premkumar were opposed.

• During that same meeting, City Manager Mike Land said the stretch of Interstate 635 that borders Coppell will be closed for an entire weekend so Texas Department of Transportation contractors can place beams for the new U-turn lanes at Belt Line Road. He said this will likely happen in early December; TxDOT is supposed to provide the public with 30 days’ notice.

• The City of Coppell has been dealing with an outage to its phone and digital systems for several days. Land thanked residents for their patience and grace in a statement posted to social media this morning.

• An unidentified person was fatally shot in Valley Ranch on Saturday afternoon, and the search for suspects briefly led to a lockdown at New Tech High, which was hosting a fall festival and haunted house. Channel 4 has a few more details.

• The Coppell ISD Education Foundation’s Give for Grants campaign is up and running, and the New Tech High teacher who is trying to establish a library of graphic novels certainly has this nerd’s attention. Take a few minutes to peruse the proposals before the Nov. 15 deadline. None of the dollars raised will be subject to recapture.

• The Coppell Fire Department is hiring new firefighters and paramedics, and the starting salary is $84,900. The application deadline is Nov. 17.

• Two new eateries opened their doors in Coppell last week. Luigi’s Italian Bistro is at 143 S. Denton Tap Road, in the space formerly occupied by Smashburger. Dumont Creamery & Cafe is at 1551 S. Belt Line Road, in the same building as First Watch.

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Community Calendar

Rejoice Lutheran Church Pumpkin Patch: The pumpkin patch behind the church at 532 E. Sandy Lake Road is open until 8:30 each evening through Thursday.

Guided Hike: Fall Foliage: No registration is required for this guided hike through the Coppell Nature Park at 9 a.m. on Saturday, but the 20 spots will be allotted on a first come, first served basis. Participants under 16 years must be accompanied by an adult.

Electronic Recycling Event: Members of the Coppell Community Chorale will accept your unwanted household items between 9 a.m. and noon on Saturday at the Coppell Arts Center.

Dia de los Muertos Craftastic: Cozby Library and Community Commons patrons of all ages will have an opportunity to create beautiful crafts, enjoy delicious treats, and honor loved ones who have passed between 2 and 3 p.m. on Saturday.

Reflex: Master juggler and visual artist Jay Gilligan will not only unravel 4,000 years of juggling on Saturday, he’ll do so twice. Shows are scheduled for 2 and 7 p.m. at the Coppell Arts Center.

Taste of Coppell: If you want to sample dishes prepared by a variety of Coppell restaurants, then be at the Four Points by Sheraton between 4 and 7 p.m. on Saturday. Youth tickets are $10 and $20; adult tickets are $40 at the door but $35 if you buy them in advance.

Once Upon a Time: The Coppell Children's Chorus will overcome treachery, trickery, and a little bit of dancing to bring you a story all their own at 3 p.m. on Nov. 3 at the Coppell Arts Center.

Coppell Band Community/Senior Night: The Coppell High School Band will present a free performance at 6 p.m. on Nov. 4 at Buddy Echols Field. If you want to preorder a meal from In-N-Out to enjoy during the show, click that link by Nov. 1.

Coppell Baseball Tailgate Dinner: Before rooting for the Coppell varsity football team in their regular-season finale on Nov. 7, swing by the high school’s main entrance for the baseball program’s fundraising dinner.

Pinot for Polio: The Rotary Club of Coppell’s third annual fundraiser is scheduled from 5 to 9 p.m. on Nov. 7 at Landon Winery, which is committing 10 percent of the evening’s proceeds to support the fight against polio.

Coppell Writing Fair: The Kindred Writing Collective will feature a variety of local authors plus some blowhard who pens a weekly newsletter. The free event is scheduled from 1 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 9 at the Cozby Library and Community Commons.

One and Only You: The Coppell Community Chorale will celebrate the songs of one-hit wonders. Ironically, they will do so twice — at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9 and at 3 p.m. on Nov. 10 — at the Coppell Arts Center

Black & White Gala: The Coppell High School Cowboy Theatre Company’s inaugural fundraising gala will begin at 6 p.m. on Nov. 9 at the Aloft hotel in Coppell. Tickets are $25 for students and $55 for adults.

Holiday House: The Coppell High School PTSO will host its annual shopping event — which will also feature live music and a visit with Santa Claus — from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Nov. 10. Admission is $5 for adults, and $2 for students who are 13 or older. The proceeds will benefit Project Graduation.

Assistance League of Coppell: The next meeting is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Nov. 21 at Valley Ranch Baptist Church. A Dutch treat lunch will follow.