Cleveland ISD struggles to keep up as Houston’s sprawl drives growth
Influx nearly doubles enrollment since 2014, changes district’s demographics
When Darrell Myers first came to Cleveland ISD in 2014, demographers told him to get ready for a wave of new students.
With the district’s enrollment at about 3,800 at the time, the new superintendent assumed an increase of 100 students would qualify as fast growth. The following school year, 294 new students registered. An additional 587 signed up in 2016-2017. And in 2017-2018, a whopping 847 new students enrolled in Cleveland ISD schools, more than enough new students to fill the district’s sole middle school at the time.
This year, enrollment again grew by more than 800 students, causing the district to nearly double in size from the roughly 3,800 students enrolled when Myers first arrived to more than 6,500.
“We’ve already hit capacity for the schools we don’t even have built yet,” Myers
said. “What we’re having to do is get by with portables until we can get the schools built, but this growth is not going to stop.”
Cleveland is far from the only district that added students during the past school year.
Of 48 traditional school districts in the Texas Education Agency’s Region 4, which encompasses most of Greater Houston, 25 saw their student enrollments grow between 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.
Even districts most affected by Hurricane Harvey’s torrential rains grew last year. Sheldon ISD saw enrollments rise by 217 students, or 2.44 percent, even as an estimated 70 percent of its students were left homeless by the storm. In both Katy and Humble ISDs, where entire neighborhoods and campuses were swallowed by floodwaters, enrollments grew by more than 2.75 percent in 2017-2018.
Still, the rate of growth in Cleveland ISD is rare.
“The last time we saw anything close to that probably was a decade ago or so, and that’s Frisco ISD” just north of Dallas, said Guy Sconzo, executive director of Texas’ Fast Growth School Coalition and a former Humble ISD superintendent. “Even at 5 percent growth, that’s challenging for a school district. But when you talk about 15 percent or more? That’s just extraordinary.”
Boomtown
Signs of Houston’s suburban sprawl are hard to miss 50 miles away in Cleveland, which was estimated to have about 8,125 residents in 2017 by the U.S. Census Bureau, up from 7,675 in 2010.
Model homes pop up as quickly as weeds on vacant lots. Signs for new subdivisions seem to outnumber rusted roadside mailboxes a few miles away from the town’s center. Ash-colored stone pylons bear the weight of humongous wrought-iron gates less than a mile from the middle school, guarding bulldozers as they plow through clouds of dust. The Grand Parkway will soon expand near the area, creating a new pathway for commuters.
Cleveland Mayor Otis Cohn, whose family has lived there for three generations, said three huge developments are under construction near the city’s limits. One, Grand Oaks Reserve on the west side of town, will sell homes for between $200,000 and $1 million, a surprising sum for a town that has been considered lower income for decades.
Another developer plans to build 40 warehouses near the city’s industrial district, and yet another group will develop 40 acres into a commercial district. Two new neighborhoods will offer homes in the $100,000 to $250,000 price range.
Much of the growth within Cleveland ISD, however, has come from outside the city’s boundaries, in the southern portion of the school district. There, developer Colony Ridge Land LLC has been driving much of the new construction. The group already has begun or completed at least three subdivisions there. It is working to develop another three neighborhoods, creating a total of 15,825 lots.
The developments have led to significant demographic changes in the school district. About 68 percent of students in Cleveland ISD were Hispanic in 2017-2018, up from about 40 percent just five years before. The share of English-language learners also shot up from about 19 percent of Cleveland students in 2012-2013 to 38 percent in 2017-2018.
Cleveland ISD is hardly mentioned on Colony Ridge’s subdivision websites, other than a mention as to which school district students would be zoned. Those moving in may not know the district would have received a “D” grade in the state’s accountability rating had it not received a Hurricane Harvey accountability waiver. Cleveland High and Cleveland Middle both met the state’s academic standard, although the high school was one point away from being rated as “improvement required.”
Still, new students are flocking to the district.
Making room
Cleveland Middle School added about 200 new students over the summer. Five minutes away, Eastside Elementary added nearly 140.
Although both schools have undergone extensive renovations to add space, portable classrooms remain a must. Eastside Principal Rebecca Smith has 10 on her campus, and she is waiting for more to arrive.
On picture day, Cleveland Middle School’s main hallway buzzed with students wearing their favorite shirts and dresses. Some studied their hair in newly installed windows while other leaned against the white cinder-block walls to chat with classmates.
The hallway used to be part of the school’s cafeteria before a new lunchroom was built so officials could create more classroom and hallway space. The old library was converted into additional classrooms, and a new media center has taken shape on the northeast edge of campus.
Renovations at Cleveland Middle and Eastside, Southside and Northside elementaries were funded by a 2015 bond referendum, which raised $35 million for mostly growth-related construction projects. The district had to pass a larger bond issue just two years later: $85 million in 2017 to build a new elementary school, expand the district’s sole high school and build a new multiservice center that will house the district’s growing fleet of buses, maintenance equipment and food-service supplies.
Myers said the board of trustees may ask voters to approve a third bond issue in the next year or two, as demographers expect the district to continue adding at least 800 students a year. By 2021, Myers said, Cleveland schools are projected to enroll more than 10,000 students. A new middle school and another new elementary school soon may become necessities. A second high school — once unthinkable — also could be up for discussion soon.
“Our hope is that we plateau and get an opportunity to catch up in regard to the growth,” Myers said. “We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out. There are so many factors involved that it’s hard to know where we’ll be next summer.”
Frisco ISD officials know the feeling.
Frisco’s ‘hyper-growth’
Jane Whitledge, a community relations specialist who helps new families settle into the district, said only about 5,000 people lived in Frisco when she moved there in 1988. In 2017, an estimated 177,300 called Frisco home, according to the Census Bureau. District officials went from opening the area’s second elementary school in 1995 and a second high school in 2002, to dedicating a new high school, three middle schools and two elementary schools in 2010 alone.
On average, Frisco schools welcomed between 2,500 and 3,000 new students a year during their busiest times. That has slowed to about 2,000 new students a year.
“We are coming out of hyper-growth and into fast growth,” said Frisco ISD Director of Communications Jamie Driskill. “People say, ‘Well, the growth is slowing down.’ Well, what does that look like? Two thousand new students a year doesn’t seem very slow.”
Growth in Frisco began similarly to Cleveland’s, Driskill said. Two tollways were completed there in the early 2000s, and folks from more populated suburbs and cities were drawn to the area by the affordable housing, a hot economy and, eventually, a school district that focused on creating smaller school communities.
Growing pains there took the form of frequent school rezonings, a multitude of bond referendums and hiring sprees. Whitledge, who once served on the district’s board of trustees, said the key to managing the new students was working with the city, local businesses, teachers and community leaders to develop plans that would benefit as many people as possible.
“When you’re dealing with changing demographics, the uncertainty of people moving in, how many may move in, what ages are they, are they young adults or starter homes, there’s a whole host of variables you can’t control,” Driskill said.
Teaching vacancies
Of all Cleveland’s government services, Cohn said the schools are bearing the brunt of the influx of newcomers.
“The school system is already overloaded,” the mayor said. “They are fighting all the time to make the room for the added growth that’s coming in, and the growth doesn’t seem to stop. It hasn’t yet.”
Finding enough qualified teachers to keep class sizes reasonable has been a challenge. As of Sept. 17, Smith at Eastside Elementary said her school still had seven teaching vacancies.
The schools can feel crowded, too. Even with an additional 20,790-squarefeet of new space in the middle school, 13-year-old Saraih Alvarado said she still bumps into classmates walking through the halls.
It is a familiar feeling for the eighth-grader, who attended KIPP Legacy and Houston ISD’s Burbank Elementary before her family moved four years ago from the nation’s fourth largest city to the rural suburb.
She still remembers the surprise she felt when she could see the stars at night, a welcome departure from the haze that blankets Houston’s night sky. The lack of cars seemed strange too, and the two-way roads seemed so tiny compared to Houston’s 12-lane freeways.
She also remembers being the new kid in school.
“I’m very sweet and nice to all the new faces you see around,” Alvarado said. “You have to welcome them, because we were all new at some point.”