One is growing quickly. The other has reached maturity.
On the surface, the challenges seem different for these two school districts in Texas.
Forney Independent School District is managing rapid enrollment growth, opening campuses nearly every year and continually evaluating where students will arrive next. Plano Independent School District, also in Texas, is navigating the more complex realities of a maturing district.
Yet these two districts face the same fundamental challenge: They need reliable housing, demographic, and enrollment data to determine how many teachers they’ll need, where students will attend school, and when facilities should be built, expanded, or reconsidered.
Read on to see how Zonda Education is helping both districts to make informed budget and planning decisions, and provides support for the board meeting and beyond.
The interviews here have been edited for length and clarity.
Join us at Education Week for a discussion of the districts in this article!
Wednesday, November 4th at 11 a.m. PT
Forney ISD: Keeping Pace With Growth
Located about 20 miles east of Dallas, Forney ISD serves roughly 20,000 students across approximately 27 schools. The district has built as many as 14 schools in five years and typically reconsiders attendance boundaries annually as new campuses open.
To keep pace, Forney uses Zonda’s quarterly housing and enrollment updates to project needs over the next decade, balance campuses, and determine when facilities should open.
“Are we going to need to add teachers? Are we going to need to add buildings? Do we need to remodel? Do we need to rethink how we’re doing education?” says Forney ISD Superintendent Justin Terry. “It’s a constant conversation. That means you need constant updated data.”
Those questions carry immediate budget implications. Forney operates with an annual budget of approximately $350 million, more than 80% of which is devoted to people. Enrollment projections help the district allocate teachers by campus and grade level and identify where additional program support may be required.
“It’s not just a number for projection of how many kids or how many houses,” Terry says. “It’s how that translates into daily operations.”
Zonda Education demographer Rocky Gardiner says Forney faces the same demographic pressure affecting many other districts: New homes are generating fewer students than they did several years ago. In Forney, however, rapid housing growth is helping offset that trend.
Knowing how long that growth will continue can prevent the district from adding facilities prematurely. Zonda data informs conversations surrounding approximately $2 billion in authority for new campuses. “We can help them understand exactly when they need a school,” Gardiner says. “If they don’t need to build it right away, we can push it out a few years and save them some money.”
For Terry, Zonda’s value also extends beyond the projections. Gardiner and fellow Zonda demographer Paul Cash help district leaders interpret the findings and present them to the school board, bond committees, and community.
“Rocky and Paul are part of our team and that’s how we treat them,” Terry says. “They’re not just giving us projection data, they’re actually breaking it down all the way into the classroom.”
Plano ISD: Planning Through Maturity
North of Dallas, the situation is different, but the need for accurate data is strikingly similar.
Plano serves 42,000 students, down from over 50,000 six years ago, according to Johnny Hill, the district’s deputy superintendent for business and employee services and technology.
Over the last couple of years, enrollment has dropped “about 2,500 students a year,” says Hill. That dropoff happened after a peak in 2011 and 2012.
What happened? Hill points to an aging population reluctant to leave their low mortgage rates and high home prices that aren’t conducive to young families moving in.
Another factor: Texas policy encouraging school choice with vouchers.
The enrollment slippage began before COVID but wasn’t helped by it. “And then just COVID, just by its nature, has changed the way that parents, specifically young parents, have viewed what they want for their students’ education.
Like Forney ISD, Plano needs to be able to predict attendance to properly allocate funds for labor and facilities, which together account for the vast majority of the budget. Even a small miss carries big consequences. Falling short by 100 students “you’re talking about over a million dollars being affected.”
“So it’s very, very important that we get it right.”
Gardiner, the Zonda Education advisor, has worked with Plano for years and personally presents twice a year in front of the school board. Hill describes the report as “an economic state of the district” because of its comprehensiveness in including housing development data and action recommendations in addition to enrollment forecasts.
The school board looks forward to these reports, according to Hill. He says that the information also gets used by others within the school district.
Presenting such a clear view of the situation provides clarity to the board and the public. “There’s a lot of value when you bring in an outside expert that just lends to credibility,” notes Hill.
Gardiner helped guide the district through an extensive rebalancing process that included a large (around seventy-person) committee representing a cross-section of the community.
Hill reflects: “Even though it was a difficult decision, at the end of the day, everybody was on board. It was the right decision that was recommended to our board. Our board took that recommendation and followed through with that. And I can say we had a really, really nice process. We set up policy CT Local as a result of that work, which would guide our future facility planning process. And so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel.”
“You know, next time we go through this, we have a blueprint of what that’s going to look like.”
Learn how Zonda Education supports data-driven staffing, capacity, and facility decisions.
