Coppell Chronicle Vol. 5, No. 35
Open Enrollment Policy Has Had Limited Effect • Coppell Arts Center Endeavors to Fill Seats • Short-Term Landlord Seeks Permit’s Removal • CFBISD Plans to Upgrade Agricultural Center
DC Comics and Marvel Comics recently announced that their flagship characters, Superman and Spider-Man, will team up for the first time in 50 years. This is exciting news for nerds worldwide, especially the one who writes this newsletter. Have you ever noticed that those superheroes’ secret identities, Clark Kent and Peter Parker, are both employed as journalists?
Open Enrollment Policy Has Had Limited Effect
Coppell ISD may expand its open enrollment policy, but administrators and trustees say this won’t solve all of the district’s financial woes.
“This would be one tool to continue to work towards balancing our budget. It’s not a magic bullet, as some maybe have assumed,” Assistant Superintendent Kristen Eichel said. “It helps — it’s an improvement — but it’s one piece of the puzzle.”
During the Board of Trustees meeting on Oct. 6, Eichel shared statistics regarding where the district’s open enrollment students come from and where they go to school. Let’s start with where those students live:
When the limited open enrollment policy was created in 2011, only families who resided in the parts of Coppell outside the district’s boundaries were eligible to participate. About five years ago, a few Lewisville subdivisions and one apartment complex in that city were added. A couple of years later, students from two Irving neighborhoods — Hackberry Creek and the Villas at Mustang Park — were welcomed.
Because the state’s basic allotment to school districts is $6,160 per student, the 255 open enrollment students denoted on that chart bring $1.57 million to Coppell ISD that it wouldn’t get otherwise. But Eichel said 255 is an all-time high for the district. She said Coppell ISD’s open enrollment population peaked at 242 last school year.
“It is clear that open enrollment is not the answer to keeping all of our campuses open,” Trustee Nichole Bentley said.
As you can see on that chart, the limited open enrollment policy has yielded 0.073 students per household. I’m just speckelatin’ here, but I have a theory as to why the yield for the newly added Irving neighborhoods is less than half as much (0.031).
Parents who send their kids to Coppell ISD via open enrollment don’t get to choose their campuses. Those students are assigned to schools and classrooms where seats are available. The Coppell ISD schools in Irving and Cypress Waters have very few empty seats, so most kids from Hackberry Creek and Mustang Park have to commute to campuses within Coppell’s city limits. Meanwhile, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD has an A-rated school, Las Colinas Elementary1, right outside the gates to Hackberry Creek.
Take a look at where the 255 open enrollment students go to school:
The trustees didn’t discuss specific campuses when this chart was displayed during their Oct. 6 meeting, but I noticed that Lee Elementary and Valley Ranch Elementary each have one open enrollment student, while Canyon Ranch Elementary has none. Meanwhile, Town Center Elementary, which has been recommended for closure, has 28 of them.
If you’re looking for a great illustration of Coppell ISD’s lopsided enrollment issues, check out the middle schools’ numbers: North has space for 63 open enrollment students, while East and West have only three apiece.
Eichel didn’t specify which neighborhoods might be added to the list of those eligible for open enrollment. Presumably, the trustees will get that information after they decide the fate of Town Center Elementary, which they are expected to do on Oct. 27. Whenever they vote on expanding open enrollment, they will also vote on two related policy changes.
Grandchildren: Coppell ISD already accepts an elementary student if his or her primary after-school caretaker is a grandparent who lives in the district. The administration is proposing to cast a wider net: any student, regardless of age, with a grandparent residing in the district would be welcome to enroll.
Legacies: The administration also wants the trustees to consider accepting the children of people who graduated from a Coppell ISD high school, regardless of where the children and their parents live.
I assume that a Venn diagram of those two sets of kids would have a lot of overlap. Nonetheless, Bentley asked that those policies be considered separately. As the only grandparent on the Board of Trustees, she plans to recuse herself from the vote on the grandchildren policy.
Coppell Arts Center Endeavors to Fill Seats
If you don’t already have a ticket to see the Bacon Brothers this Friday at the Coppell Arts Center, then you’re out of luck. The show featuring Hollywood icon Kevin Bacon sold out quickly.
Ideally, every seat would be filled for every performance at the Arts Center. But in reality, some shows sell better than others.