Frisco Independent School District has four school campuses already at capacity for the upcoming 2023-24 school year.
Student enrollment at Nelson Middle School, Lebanon Trail High School, Reedy High School, and Wakeland High School has closed, according to Frisco ISD’s website.
Students living in the zones of these schools who did not attend a designated feeder school in the 2022-23 school year will be sent to a different nearby campus instead.
Speaking with Candy’s Dirt, Lauran Ituarte from Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty in Plano explained that “basically anybody who moves in now will not be grandfathered into those particular schools.”
For newcomers to Frisco who might have purchased a home with the expectation of sending their children to a particular school, this could mean disappointment.
“They will be bused to different schools within Frisco ISD,” Ituarte continued, adding that while none of the campuses are “bad,” some might be “quite far away from where they’re actually living.”
Exceptional population growth in Frisco these past few years has left school officials scrambling to keep up with growing student enrollment numbers.
With a total of 75 schools, 67,226 students enrolled in 2022-23 compared to 65,617 students the year prior. Similarly, 2,332 new students were added between the school years 2020-21 and 2021-22, according to a report from the Frisco ISD board.
The report further suggested that enrollment could continue to swell by between 6,000 and 10,000 students in the next decade.
While a high-achieving school district is certainly a draw, Frisco has also been catapulted into the limelight by corporate relocations — such as the PGA — and expansions.
For instance, Frisco City Council approved a new Universal theme park near the Dallas North Tollway earlier this year, as The Dallas Express reported.
There has also been a boom in the development of mixed-use complexes.
Fields West is one of these projects and is touted as a corporate village boasting 4,200,000 square feet of office space alongside 425,000 square feet of retail, restaurant, and entertainment space. Two hotels and 2,000 residential units are also in the works.
Frisco ISD is also dabbling in development projects, as The Dallas Express reported. It is partnering with the HALL Group and the city to transform HALL Park from a business complex to a mixed-use community to the tune of $7 billion.
While Frisco and other cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — such as Plano, McKinney, Denton, and Allen — have doubled in size since 2000, Dallas has not seen the same kind of growth. Polling suggests residents attribute the city’s stagnation and even decline to its issues with crime, vagrancy, and a failing school system, as The Dallas Express reported.
Frisco ISD had an on-time graduation rate of 99% last year, according to the latest Texas Education Agency accountability reports. For its part, Dallas ISD — aside from facing scrutiny due to allegations of many-layered mismanagement — only managed to graduate 81.1% of its Class of 2022 in four years.
Compared to Dallas ISD, where only 41% of students scored at grade level on last year’s STAAR exams, Frisco ISD performed vastly better, with roughly 74% of its students scoring at grade level last year.
Despite outperforming Dallas ISD, the rapid growth within Frisco ISD has caused the district financial concerns.
Kimberly Smith, Frisco ISD’s chief finance and strategy officer, disclosed in late May that the latest funding generated from increased enrollment was not enough to balance the budget for the upcoming 2023-24 school year, resulting in a deficit, according to Local Profile.
This poses a challenge for a district that may need to open new schools or add grade levels to existing ones to meet an increase in student enrollment.