Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 8
Could Coppell ISD Close Two Campuses? • Attendance Affects District’s Bottom Line • Trustees Approve Raise for Superintendent • Council Rejects Senior Living Proposal
Near the end of Thursday’s meeting of the Coppell Library Advisory Board, Frank Gasparro and Martha Garber discussed an upcoming event called “Local Journalism with Dan Koller.”
Gasparro: “I’m glad to see you guys have him coming in. He’s a really good guy and knows his stuff.”
Garber: “I think he’ll be entertaining.”
Gasparro: “Yeah, he’s a funny guy, too.”
Garber: “He is funny.”
Well, the pressure’s on now. If you have no other plans between 2 and 3 on Saturday afternoon, stop by the Cozby Library and Community Commons to find out whether I live up to the hype.
Could Coppell ISD Close Two Campuses?
I’ve wrapped my brain around the idea of Coppell ISD closing a campus, and I’ve urged my readers to do the same. But Trustee Manish Sethi blew my mind last week when he suggested the district could shutter two elementary schools.
Sethi floated that idea on Monday evening during a workshop dedicated to solving CISD’s budget woes. After the trustees spent more than two and a half hours debating demographic projections, an expansion of open enrollment, and potentially putting a tax increase on the November ballot, Sethi said closing a school would be “something close to a silver bullet.”
Board President David Caviness agreed with Sethi: “We’ve spent three hours talking about table scraps when this is really the silver bullet to make a dent in the problem we have.”
Here’s that problem, in a nutshell: The amount of funding the district gets from the state has been stagnant while costs keep climbing. At the beginning of this school year, the trustees approved a budget with a projected deficit of nearly $13.6 million. A year earlier, they approved a budget that projected a $9.7 million deficit, but Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar has said the actual deficit for 2022-2023 would probably be about $3 million. No matter the size of the deficit, the district is covering shortfalls by dipping into its fund balance, which is not a sustainable solution.
On Monday, Trustee Leigh Walker asked how much the district could save annually by closing one elementary school. After some discussion, Sircar agreed with Sethi’s estimate that the savings would add up to between $2 million and $2.5 million. Although some teachers would follow students to their new schools, you’d be eliminating the salaries of a principal, an assistant principal, a counselor, a nurse, a librarian, a P.E. teacher, an art teacher, etc.
The districts’ elementaries are projected to have a combined enrollment of fewer than 5,550 next school year, and that number is expected to keep dropping. Meanwhile, Sethi pointed out, the bond-funded renovations of three campuses will increase the elementaries’ combined capacity from 6,740 to 7,000. Because each of the nearly identical “footprint” elementaries can hold up to 600 kids as is, he suggested the district could afford to close two schools.
“We still won’t be even close to the capacity in our elementary schools if there were two less facilities,” Sethi said. “We’d still have plenty of excess capacity.”
Although his logic is sound, I doubt I was the only person surprised by Sethi’s suggestion. The trustees and administrators were oddly silent for several seconds after he made it.
“Dollar and cents wise, closing a campus makes sense,” said Trustee Nichole Bentley, who then turned the discussion to what would happen next. She wondered whether a school could be converted into a new headquarters for the district, consolidating administrators who are spread across multiple facilities today. She threw out that possibility as a way to prevent a charter school operator from pouncing on an opportunity.
I did not know until I watched Monday’s workshop that Texas law says charter schools get first dibs on facilities shuttered by public school districts. Section 11.1542 of the Texas Education Code is called “Open-Enrollment Charter School Offer for District Facility,” and it says this:
a) The board of trustees of an independent school district that intends to sell, lease, or allow use for a purpose other than a district purpose of an unused or underused district facility must give each open-enrollment charter school located wholly or partly within the boundaries of the district the opportunity to make an offer to purchase, lease, or use the facility, as applicable, in response to any terms established by the board of trustees, before offering the facility for sale or lease or to any other specific entity.
b) This section does not require the board of trustees of a school district to accept an offer made by an open-enrollment charter school.
This law’s existence was also news to Trustee Jobby Mathew, who said he was “absolutely flabbergasted.” Demonstrating that charter schools are perceived as competitors, he then came up with one heck of a sports analogy: “It’s like you’re playing a basketball game, you spotted them 20 points, you’re blindfolded, and you’ve got to play on one leg, just to be able to compete.”
Monday’s discussion was just that — a discussion. And more discussions will happen before any decisions are made. If you want to be involved, you have an opportunity to volunteer for a Strategic Planning Implementation Team. And if you just want to learn more about the budget situation, consider attending an update scheduled for 6 p.m. on Wednesday in the Coppell High School lecture hall or tuning into a Facebook Live session that the district will broadcast on May 1.
Those sessions will probably feature a lot of the same information that the district presented on April 4 during a Budget Community Dialogue event at Coppell High School. I was there briefly, and it looked like there were fewer than a dozen people in the cafeteria who weren’t CISD employees or trustees.
“These are serious topics, and it’s about to get even more real,” Superintendent Brad Hunt said Monday, “so we would love to have more involvement.”
Attendance Affects District’s Bottom Line
If you want to help Coppell ISD’s bottom line, send your kids to school more often.
Texas’ funding of public school districts is dictated by their average daily attendance. During Monday’s budget workshop, Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar showed this slide displaying each grade level’s attendance rate for the fall 2023 semester and the five previous school years. The red rates are below the district’s pre-COVID average of 96.7 percent. The red rates with red backgrounds are at least a full percentage point below that mark.
Last school year, the district’s overall attendance rate was 95.6 percent. Last semester, it crept up to 95.9 percent.