Current Status

At present, the children west of Lakeline Blvd in the Westside Preserve Neighborhood 2075 are zoned for Westside Elementary, Henry Middle School (MHS) and Cedar Park High School (CPHS). Vista Ridge High School (VRHS) and Cedar Park Middle School (CPMS) are closed for transfer. Per annum, only 40 children from Westside Elementary are subject to this unique scholastic progression while all the rest of their peers that will be attending CPHS are zoned for CPMS.

Issues

Systemically, our neighborhood experiences 3 specific issues with the current situation:

• Social and Emotional Impact: Our children spend 6 years making friends at Westside Elementary, only to be removed from them and placed at HMS, where they spend 3 years making new friends, only to be removed again, and placed at CPHS. This is a formative time in our children’s lives and providing our children with the ability to establish and nurture lasting friendships is key to their emotional and mental health.

• Location and Convenience: When one factors in the need for families to provide transport to and from the schools for extracurricular activities, CPMS is 1.7 miles from our neighborhood (from Kay Redden Park) and allows our children to bike or even walk to/from school. In contrast, HMS is 6.2 miles away and requires a car to get to (no middle schooler is going to bike down 1431). Furthermore, many families in our neighborhood have more than one child. If a parent is picking up a high schooler from CPHS and a middle schooler from CPMS, those schools are literally next door to each other and it is significantly more convenient than factoring an additional 30 minute round trip (given that this is usually at rush hour) from CPHS to HMS.

• Access to Consistent Developmental Programs: Both middle school / high school combination programs (i.e., Henry MS/VRHS and CPMS/CPHS) provide developmental programs such as sports, music and other extracurricular activities in order to create a consistent pipeline and feeder program into the High School. Our children, who are slated to go to CPHS, are at a disadvantage as they will not have access to these programs at HMS (which feeds to VRHS) and as such, when they get to high school, they will not have same exposure as the students who attended CPMS. We believe this puts our students at a significant disadvantage as they move into programs, activities, and athletic activities at the high school level. Further, we feel that they will not have an equal opportunity to be selected for these programs at High School.

Proposal

We believe we have a win/win scenario that remediates all the issues we’ve laid out as well as a separate impending issue for the school district. Current projections show that in 2017, HMS will be over capacity by 40 children and CPMS will be under capacity by 100 children. Further, this overcapacity at HMS/under capacity at CPMS continues every year as currently projected.

We propose two specific changes:

• Re-open the transfers to CPMS for our school zone. This will provide the option for our children to progress alongside the majority of their elementary school friends to CPMS and to CPHS
• Re-open the transfers to VRHS for our school zone. This will provide the option for our children currently attending HMS to be able to progress with their HMS friends to VRHS.

We believe that by opening up these transfers in the 2017/2018 school year, we will have alleviated Henry’s overcapacity issues while simultaneously addressing the issues we’ve laid out. As previously mentioned, we feel that this proposal is a win-win for both our students, their future, and continues LISD’s reputation of being student-centered and family-oriented. While it only affects a small number of students and minor over-capacity issues at HMS, it makes a significant difference for our families and our children’s long-term future. Thank you for your consideration.

Petition from Neighborhood 2075

Two specific changes to the current zoning policy in LISD are proposed:

• Re-open the transfers to CPMS for neighborhood 2075. This will provide the option for our children to progress alongside their elementary school friends to CPMS and to CPHS
• Re-open the transfers to VRHS for neighborhood 2075. This will provide the option for our children currently attending HMS to be able to progress with their HMS friends to VRHS.