Coppell Chronicle Vol. 5, No. 22
Trustees to Decide New Tech’s Location • Elementary Enrollment Keeps Dropping • Phones Prohibited During School Hours • Lanes Blocked on Two Busy Streets
Trustees to Decide New Tech’s Location
Coppell ISD trustees are expected to decide on Aug. 11 where a reimagined New Tech High will be located.
As faithful readers of this newsletter may recall, I published an article a couple of months ago that said a constitutional crisis was brewing in Coppell ISD. The district’s administrators told the Board of Trustees that they wanted to rebrand New Tech as the “Coppell High School Leadership Academy,” within the halls of CHS, and that they could do so without the trustees’ approval. At least two of the trustees disagreed with that assertion.
(You can read my recent articles about New Tech by clicking here.)
That conversation happened in May, before Doug Williams became Coppell ISD’s interim superintendent. During the trustees’ workshop on July 14, Williams said he may bring them a recommendation on New Tech’s future during their July 28 meeting, but he said the trustees will make the call on Aug. 11. Board President David Caviness advised his peers to ask plenty of questions in advance of that date.
Williams has formed a “New Tech High @ Coppell Transition Planning Project Team” to brainstorm ideas. He said that team has narrowed their focus to two options:
Reimagine New Tech as a separate school on the Coppell High campus
Reimagine New Tech on its Samuel Boulevard campus with an expanded open enrollment
Let’s start with open enrollment. New Tech’s capacity is 500 students, but the district’s demographer projects it will have only 275 students during the upcoming school year. Williams said New Tech would need 397 students to be “cost neutral” as a standalone campus.
Williams said there are about 6,500 households outside of Coppell ISD that are eligible to participate in the district’s limited open enrollment program. In the 2024-2025 school year, that program yielded only four New Tech students who live outside the district’s boundaries. To generate an additional 122 transfers to New Tech, the district would need to expand its open enrollment to 200,000 households.
“I am highly skeptical that aggressive marketing would bring in students from outside the district, to the level that we’re talking about,” Williams said. “Also, there is a philosophical thought from some in our community that they don’t want to educate students from outside Coppell ISD.”
That philosophical statement resonated with Leigh Walker, the only trustee who is a former Coppell ISD student and, coincidentally, the only trustee with a child enrolled at New Tech during the most recent school year.
“Fundamentally, I believe that Coppell ISD should serve Coppell ISD kids,” Walker said. “I mean, that is our mission, and we need to create schools and programs that people want to attend, right? Step one: If they don’t want to attend it, then we need to relook at it.”
Williams estimated that the yield from open enrollment would increase if the hook for New Tech was something more specific than “project-based learning.” That’s where the reimagining comes in. Nothing has been finalized, but New Tech Principal Zane Porter mentioned potentially shifting the school’s focus to engineering or health sciences or filmmaking.
“Staying in the current building, you’re going to have to have something that’s even more innovative and flashy,” Porter told the trustees.
If the trustees do opt to move New Tech into Coppell High School, it would take over the building’s southwest corner. The New Tech students would arrive earlier than Coppell High students to alleviate traffic concerns, but Williams said a distinct bell schedule would also reinforce the idea of two separate schools sharing a campus. The New Tech wing would have a dedicated exterior entrance and branded glass doors separating it from the rest of the building. The district’s architects already drew up some renderings:
Those renderings include the phrase “Leadership High @ Coppell,” but Williams called that a “placeholder,” and he urged the trustees not to get bogged down by it. A new brand identity will be dreamt up as part of the reimagining.
“It feels like there’s gonna be a culture shift regardless,” said Trustee Nichole Bentley, who is a former New Tech parent. “Whether we keep it at the building it’s at or it moves to CHS, it’s not — by the very nature of keeping it — it’s not gonna look and feel and be exactly what it has been, historically.”
Elementary Enrollment Keeps Dropping
The number of empty seats in Coppell ISD’s elementary campuses keeps increasing beyond expectations.
Last spring, the demographers at Zonda Education projected there would be 5,223 students in the district’s elementary schools this fall. As of July 10, the elementary enrollment was 4,874. That’s a difference of 349 students relative to the projection, and it’s 574 fewer students than last fall’s actual enrollment.