The Allen ISD school board saw protests outside its board meeting on Monday following an announcement it made to district parents last Friday about possibly closing or repurposing some campuses.
Dozens of parents rallied outside the district office, with some holding signs that read, “Save Our Schools.”
At issue is a significant geographic imbalance in student enrollment, with schools in the eastern part of town under capacity, while some west-side schools have reached the verge of or surpassed functional capacity, according to WFAA.
The district is proposing a “realignment of attendance zones” that it claimed would alleviate functional capacity issues while minimizing the number of students affected by the shuttering or repurposing of some campuses.
“We very specifically moved to this school district two years ago because of this school,” stated Michelle Boren, the mother of a fourth-grader attending George J. Anderson Elementary School.
The Anderson campus is one of a handful that the district is considering repurposing on the east side. One proposal is to transform the school into an early childhood campus for the next school year. Current elementary school students would be sent to Olson Elementary, 2 miles away.
Holly Bernard, another Anderson parent, told NBC 5, “I definitely feel blindsided about our specific school.”
She added that the possibility of her child having to change schools just as things were getting back to normal in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic makes the situation more difficult.
A district spokesman stated that the school board will hold two public meetings before a final proposal is chosen. The first meeting will be held on October 7.
Despite the difficult choices facing the district, it boasts a relatively impressive on-time graduation rate of 97.7% for the high school graduating class of 2021, and its solid STAAR scores this year indicated that 71% of its students were performing at grade level or above.
As Boren noted, the quality of the district’s schools motivated her to move to her current home. While the popularity of Allen’s schools may temporarily stress its operations, the population growth could be related to the comparatively poor performance of bigger districts like Dallas ISD, which is experiencing an exodus of households and taxpayers.
Only 81.1% of Dallas ISD’s graduating class of 2021 graduated in four years, and just 41% of its students scored at grade level or above on their STAAR exams.
