Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 43
Enrollment Projected to Drop ‘Drastically’ • Coppell ISD to Adjust Attendance Zones • Coppell Has Recovered From Cyberattack • Council Rejects Condos Near DART Bridge
At the conclusion of his report to the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees on Monday, the district’s demographer said “Merry Christmas,” which led to a round of laughter. You’re about to find out why that sounded so funny in context.
Enrollment Projected to Drop ‘Drastically’
Coppell ISD’s student body is on track to drop by more than 1,000 kids in the next five years and nearly 1,000 more in the ensuing five years. That’s according to projections from the district’s demographer, Zonda Education.
“We make a lot of decisions based on your reports, and these are some drastically lower numbers,” Trustee Manish Sethi said during Monday’s school board meeting. Without consulting a thesaurus, Sethi also referred to the numbers presented by Zonda’s Rocky Gardiner as “vastly lower” and “substantially lower” than the statistics in previous reports.
In June of 2023, Zonda presented a 10-year forecast that said Coppell ISD would have 12,770 students in the 2032-33 school year. But the report presented on Monday said Coppell ISD would have 11,535 kids enrolled by 2032-33; two years later, the student body could drop to 11,239, according to Zonda’s modeling.
Sethi wanted to know what had changed, and Gardiner pointed to the dwindling sizes of the kindergarten cohorts. In the fall of 2020, Coppell ISD had 785 kindergartners. That number is down to 711 this semester. The forecast from June of 2023 predicted Coppell ISD would have 770 kindergartners this fall.
“When your enrollment came in about 100 students under our forecast, that impact begins to flow through,” Gardiner said.
Assistant Superintendent Kristen Eichel offered another reason. She said Zonda’s previous reports included a “cushion” predicting a bounce-back from the pandemic. “We had a little bit of COVID bounce-back, but we have never achieved the COVID bounce-back that was projected from year to year,” Eichel said.
As for why there are fewer and fewer kindergartners each year, Gardiner said people are not leaving Coppell, so there’s less regeneration or turnover.
“The housing product in Coppell is a pretty high-end product overall, so those homes oftentimes are the final destination for a lot of families,” he said. “So when the kids move up and they leave, the parents don’t leave too. So we’re seeing lower yields just simply because folks just aren’t moving.”
The trustees asked to see more visualizations in future reports. Leigh Walker requested maps that show where the district’s oldest residents live and where the district’s oldest homes are. “It does seem to be chunks of neighborhoods that were all built at the same time, and then it’s time to move on,” she said. Walker also asked for a map that shows where students who leave the district reside.
Trustee Nichole Bentley seconded those requests, and she wondered how the City of Coppell’s “community for a lifetime” campaign has impacted the regeneration rate.
“Because we’re making really big decisions right now,” Bentley said, “I want to make sure that I have a really good understanding of all the trends that are going into these numbers, and that it is not just a multiplier of what our kindergarten number is.”
Coppell ISD to Adjust Attendance Zones
Fewer students enrolled in Coppell ISD schools leads to less funding from the state. Less funding from the state led the district to close Pinkerton Elementary and consolidate the Dual Language Immersion program. And those decisions will lead to altered attendance zones.
Attendance zones will be discussed at every board meeting and workshop in January and February. This draft of a new map was attached to Zonda’s presentation on Monday: