DRIPPING SPRINGS — Conversations surrounding attendance rezoning are still ongoing within Dripping Springs ISD.
Throughout the fall 2024 semester, the district has been working to develop new elementary and middle school attendance zones to go into effect beginning with the 2025-26 school year. In August, DSISD formed an Attendance Zoning Committee composed of parents, staff and community members to recommend new attendance zone boundaries to the administration and board of trustees. The committee has worked to develop recommendations for attendance zone boundaries to support the opening of Elementary School #6 (ES6) and the expansion of Sycamore Springs Middle School (SSMS) to be implemented for the 2025-26 school year.
At its Nov. 18 meeting, the DSISD Board of Trustees was presented with the recommended map of the school attendance boundaries for the first time. This comes after the Attendance Zoning Committee meetings, along with community meetings that were held in October and earlier in November.
The two-part committee consists of the administrative advisory committee and a community advisory committee, which includes 14 parents — two from each elementary and middle school — as well as two members to represent the community-at-large and two ex-officio DSISD trustees.
According to DSISD, the committee's goal is to reorganize the elementary and middle school attendance zones to ensure — to the extent possible — that the following parameters are met:
• Optimize the utilization of district facilities while relieving overcrowded campuses
• Work to defer the timing of future school construction where possible
• Consider proximity and, to the extent possible, keep subdivisions together and zone students to the closest campus
• Strive to minimize the number of times a student is rezoned by considering future zoning changes as attendance zones are developed What parents are saying
Several district parents spoke at the Nov. 18 board meeting to share their perspective of the proposed school attendance zoning boundaries, if they were approved. Similar to what was brought up at the community meetings, these concerns were regarding the safety and time it would take to drive to different schools, especially those on busy roadways like US 290 and Ranch Road 12, coupled with splitting up students from their classmates that they have grown up with.
For Breca Tracy, a parent who lives in Sunset Canyon North, she has already seen a divide amongst the different sides of the neighborhood on one topic: attendance rezoning.
“All of a sudden, part of our neighborhood feels that we are unheard. We're defeated; we're broken-hearted [and] we're scared.
Many have given up.
Many don't want to be here because of the backlash on social media because they stood up in front of the zoning committee and are being approached at their homes from other neighbors,” Tracy stated. “I'm here. I'm nervous.
I'm shaking, but I'm standing up because somebody has to do it.
I feel like I have to fight and I vowed to keep our children as safe as possible.”
Tracy continued by stating that the district needs to consider keeping Sunset Canyon North, and the 80 families who would be affected, zoned for ES6, as that would lessen the risk to the children’s safety on US 290.
“I can tell you personally, I've slammed on my brakes twice in the middle of an intersection at 290, turning left at a green light. I'm a very defensive driver and had the instinct to look one more time before turning left and if I didn't, I wouldn't be here today and neither would one of my children,” Tracy pleaded to the board. “The first time this happened, I was at the light at Sunset Canyon Baptist Church, the second time at the light at Trautwein. My children were both with me both times and are scared to death at those intersections.
Please help us keep our children safe.”
Another parent, Kyle Fernandez, who also lives in Sunset Canyon North and serves on the Attendance Zoning Committee, explained that the neighborhood was zoned for both ES6 and Dripping Springs Middle School (DSMS) in the proposed maps during the three meetings.
However, at the first two community meetings, two of the three proposed maps showed it was zoned for ES6 and DSMS, while one was for Sycamore.
Then, at the next committee meeting, which Fernandez was not able to attend, in the “final moments of a three-hour meeting” a decision was made to alter the map that the community gave feedback on, resulting in the zoning to be changed to Sycamore, he said.
“I am shocked to be standing here right now in opposition of the map that will be presented tonight, as I walked away feeling like the arguments were sufficient evidence that sending kids of Sunset to Sycamore was the wrong call for a multitude of reasons. We can debate child development, safety and transit on 290, left turns versus right turns, giving the only community literally connected to Headwaters the nod to be zoned for a school their children can walk to or ride a bike. While all of that should be considered in these final days before a vote, let's just boil it down to simple math and logic,” Fernandez said.
“If Sunset Canyon is within a stone's throw of the new elementary school and has no bearing on pushing that school over capacity until Big Sky and Canyon Ranch are built out and occupied by people that don't even live in Dripping yet,” Fernandez continued. “Given the timeline you will all see on slide seven tonight showing ES7 will open in the fall of 2028, why throw months of committee work backed by logic and reason zoning Sunset Canyon to ES6 and DSMS into the garbage can … The logical choice is to zone Sunset Canyon to ES6
and DSMS.”
Another resident of Sunset Canyon North, Garrett Tate, submitted a statement that said requiring neighborhoods on the north side of US 290 to travel to a school on the south side “almost doubles the number of vehicles, including school buses, [that] must turn left across oncoming traffic on 290.” He continued to state that left turns are significantly more dangerous than right turns.
Concluding the agenda-related public comment period, parent Shannon Mazza, who has two children attending Cypress Springs Elementary and lives in the village of Bear Creek, shared that she sees the balance that was achieved in the recommendation and that it reflects a process that considered many perspectives. Therefore, she hopes that the balance is preserved in the board’s final decision.
“I believe that [Superintendent] Dr.
[Holly] Morris-Kuentz's recommendation tonight reflects a thoughtful balance addressing logistics, enrollment across six elementary and two middle schools, incorporating community feedback, and most importantly, minimizing disruption to the well-being of our children and families,” she said. “I am especially grateful to Dr.
Morris-Kuentz and the planning committee for the willingness to listen to community input and for considering the needs of neighborhoods like ours. Your hard working collaboration reaffirms my confidence that Dripping Springs ISD remains committed to its mission of partnering with parents in the community to provide exceptional education for every student.”
Mazza continued to state that if there is an opportunity to incorporate additional changes to address more community feedback, she respectfully encourages the board to do so. However, “not at the expense of neighborhoods like mine that have been carefully reviewed and thoughtfully included in the map being presented later this evening,” she said.
Superintendent presentation & board discussion
As a presentation and discussion item only, the DSISD Board of Trustees was brought a recommendation by Morris-Kuentz at the Nov. 18 meeting. This was the first time that the board, in its entirety and official capacity, has received the recommendation.
“As board members, we hear the community's concerns. This is the first time this evening that the board as a whole has received this recommendation.
You've probably seen a lot of us coming to the [attendance committee] meetings on our own, but because of [the] Open Meetings Act, we are not permitted to discuss this as a body corporate until this moment in time,” said board president Dr. Stefani Reinold.
“We're excited to have a first reading. This is not an action item for this evening. None of anything proposed until this point is final until we vote on it, which is presumably at this point in time next month.”
Opening up her presentation, Morris-Kuentz said that the district is looking at the attendance zoning for both the elementary and middle school levels. Currently, there are two middle school attendance zones for DSMS, which has a larger boundary, and SSMS. With the expansion of SSMS in spring of 2025, the district is looking at a change of campus capacity from 850 to 1,200 students, the superintendent explained.
“As we look at middle school growth over the next 10 years, we can see that the Dripping Springs Middle School side of our district, that current attendance boundary is a boundary that will have about 1,500 new students in that boundary,” Morris-Kuentz said, “Which is part of why that expansion was needed, and then, that will ultimately be part of that capacity balancing that we're trying to look at to plan for long-term.”
DSISD also currently has five elementary attendance zones, but with the opening of ES6 in the fall of 2025, that will lead to the district having six zones. This is ultimately geared to help with capacity issues that some campuses are already facing, Morris-Kuentz explained.
“We currently have two campuses that are overenrolled. Dripping Springs Elementary School and Walnut Springs Elementary School both have portables on those campuses [and] both are overcapacity,” she said. “While we have some other campuses that currently have some capacity, overall as a district, even with perfect rezoning, we're still overcapacity. So, we need that Elementary 6 to help relieve some of the capacity challenges that we're facing right now.”
Throughout the planning process and gathering feedback from the community, the 13 original community advisory committeedesigned map options were adjusted and narrowed down to three starter maps — C, J and M — which were presented to those who attended the community meetings.
And ultimately, the committee map that went through the administrative advisory committee — which was presented to the board at its November meeting — had one change made to it after extensive conversation administratively, Morris-Kuentz explained.
“There was a neighborhood or a planning unit, rather, 18, which we did have some concerns about from a commutability standpoint of going down,” she said, “Trautwein down that one lane road crossing over that low water crossing versus the commute down Fitzhugh to Dripping Springs Elementary. That was a change to the original committee map that we made administratively, feeling like that was an issue that we did need to address.”
Morris-Kuentz continued to state that they tried to look at where they could make changes and did a lot of exercise on how they could change the map to meet as much community feedback as possible, however, there were some challenges along the way.
“The challenge is that the balancing of that ends up putting three campuses overcapacity in the third year, and four campuses pretty significantly overcapacity in that fourth year. And so, our issue is that we end up with portables at three schools, including some schools that don't currently have portables, which will mean that we would need to purchase and add portables to some schools … So, we end up at about four campuses at 120%, which isn't going to give us that opportunity to futureproof
if we needed to,”
the superintendent explained. “Basically, that would mean if our growth didn't happen as fast as possible, we're going to have some campuses that are overcapacity and then two campuses that would be sitting at 700. That's the challenge that we face if we try to move that all around. It doesn't quite work, although that's certainly a decision that we could make.”
Once a map is selected, the district will establish a grandfathering process to allow certain students being rezoned the opportunity to continue at a campus, said Morris-Kuentz.
Based upon the current map with no changes, she anticipates the following:
• Rising third and fourth graders will be able to continue at their elementary campus for fourth and fifth grades.
• Rising sixth and seventh graders will be able to continue at their middle school for seventh and eighth grades.
However, additional changes may prevent the addition of the second grade level and allow only incoming fifth and eighth graders to continue on, Morris-Kuentz said.
Moving into the board discussion, trustee Tricia Quintero questioned if in the event that the sixth and seventh graders are grandfathered in and the new high school opens, would they potentially have to transition at the high school level with a whole new crowd of people.
Morris-Kuentz responded that there is potential for that within future years, however, zoning for the second high school is not done yet and there’s still more zoning to come “before we get to that point, so it's hard to extrapolate that one's going to align to the other necessarily, but certainly that I think that's something to think through for families, whether it's elementary or middle school.”
For another trustee, Kim Cousins, going through changes associated with attendance rezoning is not anything new, as she has experienced it with her own family.
“When my daughter had completed second grade, we were moved to another school way on the other side of town and we were stunned at the beginning. Change is hard. Change is really, really hard and we just made the decision, ‘Well, if she's going to have a desk there and there's more room there, I guess they know what they're doing,’” Cousins said. “It was a great transition. It was change in the beginning and I know as an educator, change is hard, but we got through it and I think we're going to do our best. I think all of us on the board [we will] make the best decision possible to make as many people happy as we can, but we've got to balance those numbers. I don't want an elementary school in our district that has 1,300 students and then an elementary down the road that has 400-500 students. That would not be fair to the students in the school that's really large … We hear you, we're listening and it's a tough job, but we're going to do our best to get it right.”
Reinold said that ultimately, the board gave a charge to the superintendent to keep campus capacity as balanced as possible across the district, as “honestly, we didn't want to have to go back to our bond because we didn't want to increase your tax dollars. Because if we would go back for a bond any earlier than what this zoning is, it's going to increase your tax rate, which does affect everybody, and then everyone comes back to the meetings and they're pissed off at us again.”
The board president continued that they are trying to balance a lot of things to keep everybody happy from different angles, not just where students/families want to go to school, but also from a budget and staffing standpoint.
“We've heard tons of negative feedback from staff that their schools are overcrowded. They don't want to stay at Walnut and DSE because their schools are overcrowded. We hear that feedback, too. Just so you know, we have no say over the roads, so that was not at all, has never been a part of conversation. That is county, and that is TxDOT, depending on what road you're talking about. We want to avoid transitions. We do want to honor those families,” Reinold said.
The board did not take any action on this item, as a vote will take place at the next meeting on Dec. 16.
To listen to the extensive board discussion on attendance rezoning, visit www.dsisdtx.us/page/boardmeeting- livestream.
