Coppell Chronicle Vol. 5, No. 24
Superintendent Recommends Moving New Tech • Elementary Closure Timeline Gets Refined • Dickey’s to Lose Some of its Parking Lot • Fire Station 5 Gets Off to Hot Start
I’m really enjoying one of the latest additions to our local landscape, and I don’t mean Coppell’s new fire station. No, I’m talking about this behemoth along Interstate 635 in Irving, which makes me chuckle whenever I drive by it.
Superintendent Recommends Moving New Tech
Coppell ISD’s interim superintendent has recommended making New Tech High a “school within a school” on the Coppell High campus one year from now. The Board of Trustees will decide its future location on Aug. 11.
Not long after he joined the district, Interim Superintendent Doug Williams formed a “New Tech High @ Coppell Transition Planning Project Team” composed of New Tech parents and students, Coppell ISD employees, and volunteers from the Coppell ISD Efficiency Review Committee. The 22 members of this team met a few times and were ultimately asked to rate their threshold of acceptance for two options:
A reimagined New Tech at its Samuel Boulevard location with open enrollment
A reimagined New Tech within the Coppell High building
The higher the number on a scale of 1 to 5, the higher the level of acceptance. Keeping New Tech as a standalone campus was rated a 5 by seven members of the team and a 4 by three others. Moving it to Coppell High was rated a 5 by eight individuals and a 4 by eight more.
During the school board’s July 28 meeting, Trustee Jonathan Powers said he was surprised by those results, given the makeup of the project team. He asked what specifically led to the recommendation.
After making clear that the recommendation was coming from him alone, Williams said it came down to shuttles. New Tech students are eligible to participate in extracurricular activities and take certain classes at Coppell High. Running shuttles between the campuses costs the district money, but Williams also decried how much time the shuttling takes from a student’s day.
“If it is relocated, then it would allow students the opportunity to be able to experience New Tech but be able to do some things with Coppell High and not spend time on a shuttle,” Williams said.
A relocation is not all Williams is not recommending. He also wants to reduce staffing to align with New Tech’s decreased enrollment, institute strategic marketing to hopefully boost the school’s enrollment, and reimagine the school’s branding, which will probably include a new name, although no possible names have been floated publicly since Williams took office. He asked the trustees to make these changes starting with the 2026-2027 school year and give the reimagined school at least four years to become sustainable.
“The change that we are talking about — the change in personnel, the change in relocation — would be significant cost avoidance to the district. This would stop the bleeding, so to speak,” Williams said. “So that does give you the opportunity to allow the program to grow.”
District administrators presented New Tech as a candidate for closure last year. When the trustees took that option off the table, the collective sentiment was that New Tech would be given at least three years.
During the July 28 meeting, Trustee Leigh Walker said three years was just an arbitrary number. She said the board and the district need to approve a plan for New Tech with specific benchmarks.
“We haven’t had a plan. We’ve just had words, and those words have changed,” Walker said. “So let’s just call things what they’ve been.”
Trustees Nichole Bentley and Anthony Hill are former New Tech parents, but Walker is the only board member who had a child enrolled there in the most recent school year. She praised Williams for his initiative, but she said everything he’s proposing about New Tech — other than a new location, of course — could be achieved on Samuel Boulevard.
“I don’t think of it as, ‘Oh, if we consolidate within CHS, then we do all these things.’ To me, we do all these things, period,” Walker said. “Because our small school is not gonna thrive if it just is allowed to exist.”
The trustees will decide where it will exist for the next few years during their Aug. 11 workshop.
Elementary Closure Timeline Gets Refined
Coppell ISD residents will have plenty of opportunities to have their voices heard before the trustees decide which elementary schools to close.
Pinkerton Elementary was shuttered this year due to the district’s budget deficits and declining enrollment. It’s highly likely that two more elementary campuses in Coppell will be mothballed in 2026.
On July 28, the Board of Trustees approved a revised timeline regarding their decision. It includes a series of “community dialogue meetings” this month at elementary schools around Coppell. On each of the dates below, there will be a meeting at 3:30 p.m. so the school’s employees can provide feedback, followed by a meeting at 5:30 p.m. so the school’s parents and neighbors can do the same.