WHITE ROCK ELEMENTARY VS. THE WORLD

The untold story behind RISD’s decision to forgo boundary changes and expand the district’s fastest-growing elementary

Story by KERI MITCHELL

Photos by DANNY FULGENCIO

egeneration in full swing,” states a slide from Templeton Demographics’ January 2012 report, trying to answer the question of why Richardson ISD had experienced such substantial enrollment growth in a single year.

Regeneration is the term demographers and planners use to describe an area “turning over,” so to speak. For a neighborhood full of single-family homes, it’s when longtime residents move out and new, generally younger residents move in.

Most of Lake Highlands’ residential neighborhoods were built in the ’60s and ’70s. By the 2000s, RISD had the highest rate of over-65 tax exemptions in the state. So demographers watched the area, wondering when the families who originally established the neighborhood would move out.

It happened almost all at once between 2010 and 2011. Maps showing the lots of residents who had an over-65 tax exemption were colored in one year and nearly wiped clean the next. What the demographers had been projecting for years was finally occurring, says Tony Harkleroad, RISD’s recently retired CFO.

“It’s like predicting it’s going to rain,” he says. “If you predict it long enough, it’s going to be right.”

Instead of the 500 students Templeton had predicted would enter RISD between fall 2010 and fall 2011, the number was 1,000. The most significant jump was at White Rock Elementary, which had 589 students in 2010 and 926 today — and is projected to have more than 1,000 by fall 2018.

“It happened a little sooner than they thought it would and to a greater degree than they initially thought it would, and then it just snowballed,” Harkleroad says.

Voters had just given RISD $170 million in the May 2011 at Lake Highlands Junior High, and 10 at Forest Meadow Junior High.

Lake Highlands elementary schools have experienced substantial enrollment growth since 2010, nowhere more so than White Rock Elementary.

Even with these classroom additions, three Lake Highlands elementary schools are nearing capacity again — Aikin, Skyview and Wallace — and White Rock is over capacity. In terms of rapid growth, however, “the only one that jumps out at you is White Rock Elementary,” says Bob Templeton, RISD’s demographer.

He shows this in household “yield,” meaning how many students per single-family home attend the neighborhood elementary school. At White Rock, the yield went from 0.28 in 2010 to 0.46 in 2017.

“That may not seem like a lot, but it literally almost doubled in six years,” Templeton says. “The six-year change bond election, the third since 2001, when RISD launched a 20-year plan to systematically upgrade aging facilities and technology. The prior two had focused on renovating schools built in the 1950s and 1960s; this one would target the 1970s.

None of the money, however, had been allocated for new schools or classrooms.

The district, however, had an ace in its back pocket: Officials had been setting aside surplus funds since 2007 in anticipation of further cuts in state funding. This money now had an explicit purpose. Between 2012 and 2016, RISD added 78 classrooms at 13 schools “to accommodate enrollment growth and allow as many students as possible to enroll at their attendance area school,” the 2016 bond website states.

Regeneration took place throughout Lake Highlands. Enrollment was on the rise at several campuses, and they were feeling the pinch. Of the 78 new classrooms in RISD, 52 were constructed at nine Lake Highlands schools — four at Aikin, five at Skyview, six at Stults Road, six at Forest Lane, six at Merriman Park, six at Wallace, six at White Rock, three in most elementary zones is pretty flat.”

Determining a cause for this is somewhat like “Monday morning quarterbacking,” Templeton says. One reason could be the affordability of housing, he says, even though “they’re not cheap, but for that area, it’s a great value.”

More likely, though, it has to do with White Rock’s similarity to Tanglewood Elementary in Fort Worth, another school district that hires Templeton to make demographic projections. Tanglewood is an older school in a historic area of Fort Worth that is beloved to its community, and it, too, has higher-than-normal yields, he says.

“It’s a sacred school, and it’s very difficult to either peel off the boundaries or change things,” Templeton says of Tanglewood.

White Rock, too, is a sacred school, he says, describing it as having the “Field of Dreams” factor.

“For schools like this, it may be the awesome culture, the parents or PTA, the staff or principal. It can be the student body as well. It can be formed in many ways,” Templeton says. “The building is not the factor; it’s the nostalgia of the area” that makes a school sacred.

As enrollment rose at White Rock and throughout Lake Highlands, RISD “overflowed” some students away from their home schools as classrooms were maxed out, but the district’s classroom construction and commitment to not change attendance boundaries kept most students in their neighborhood school.

“Keeping those historic boundaries the same was a priority” for both the board and the community, Harkleroad says. “By adding onto those schools, we accomplished both of those objectives.”

For the most part, the boundaries were formed when the neighborhoods formed. RISD officials say the only time in the district’s history that a school’s attendance boundary has changed was when a school opened or closed.

The last three elementary schools built on the outer edges of Lake Highlands primarily affected families living in apartments. Neither Forest Lane Academy, which opened in 1999, nor Thurgood Marshall, built in 2005, have any single-family homes within their boundaries. Both schools serve northern Lake Highlands’ copious multi-family complexes. Constructed along Forest Lane and Audelia Road for young, predominately childless, professionals during the ’80s tech boom, things changed after the Walker Consent Decree in 1985 required apartment owners to make 20-40 percent of each property affordable to low-income Dallas residents. Around the same time, new housing laws made it illegal to restrict rentals to adults. Coupled with the tech bubble burst of the early ’90s, these northern Lake Highlands apartments became low-income housing for families with young children. Audelia Creek, which opened in 2003, mostly serves this demographic, too.

RISD hoped the classroom additions