Trustees grapple with access to schools

Fort Bend ISD board members discuss roads to serve new east-end campuses

A new complication has emerged in Fort Bend Independent School District’s plans to open two new schools in Sienna Plantation: road access.

School district trustees unanimously approved the schematic designs for the schools earlier this fall. They will have adjacent campuses in the largely undeveloped southern portion of Sienna Plantation. The board also moved the new middle school’s start date to midway through the 2017-18 school year instead of fall of 2018 due to concerns of overcrowding at other district campuses. The elementary school is expected to open in the fall of 2017.

But district trustee Kristin Tassin said despite her daughter’s experience of overcrowding at nearby Baines Middle School and even though she approved the schematic designs, she doesn’t want students heading to the new schools unless there are more roads to the campuses.

Currently, the planned access to the new schools is the extension of an existing road, on which a Fort Bend ISD high school, Ridge Point, is already located.

One road isn’t enough to get

kids to all three schools safely, Tassin said.

“I will have a hard time saying that we should go forward with two additional schools down the same road as a high school that only has one way in and one way out,” Tassin said. Lengthy commute

It takes an hour roundtrip for Tassin to drive her daughter to Ridge Point every day from their home in Sienna Point, one of the many homes and subdivisions that line FM 521, south of Sienna Plantation.

To get to Ridge Point and the future Sienna Plantation schools, she and other residents have to drive north on FM 521 past Sienna Plantation. They then take a left onto Texas 6 and continue onto McKeever Road, driving along the northern boundary of the subdivision, entering at a northern entrance and driving back down south through Sienna Plantation to reach the schools.

The future campuses will be located farther south than Ridge Point, requiring a longer commute.

Traffic on FM 521 is bad enough that Fort Bend County is in the early stages of expanding the highway, assistant county engineer Rick Staigle said.

“It’s starting to get busy now,” Staigle said. “As that area builds we expect there to be more delays for traffic.”

Because the road is a Texas Department of Transportation highway, the county is getting permission from the department to begin designs for a project that would expand the highway’s existing two lanes into four lanes, with a left-turning lane. But the estimated $37 million project doesn’t have funding yet and designs won’t be finished until 2017, so the road won’t be expanded by the time the new Fort Bend ISD campuses open. Another option

The post-closing agreement between The Johnson Development Corp., the development manager of the southern portion of Sienna Plantation, and Fort Bend ISD requires Johnson to extend a current road, Waters Lake Boulevard, farther south to reach the site of the two new campuses. Waters Lake Boulevard currently ends just south of Ridge Point High School.

In school board meetings, Tassin proposed asking Johnson to build alternative roadways to access the campuses, in particular, extending the existing Sienna Parkway to the east, so that it would provide the new schools direct access from FM 521 and avoid buses and parents driving around and then through the subdivision.

Extending Sienna Parkway to FM 521 is part of the subdivision’s eventual plan, said Alvin San Miguel, the general manager of Sienna Plantation.

San Miguel added that it is unlikely this will be done by the time the new schools open, because residential home construction drives road projects in Sienna Plantation.

The property for the new middle and elementary schools is in a largely undeveloped 3,800-acre parcel of Sienna Plantation; construction has started on only 500 of the area’s future 6,500 homes.

Though Johnson is looking into the district’s concerns, there likely will not be enough residential development to justify extending Sienna Parkway, San Miguel said.

If it were to extend the road, Johnson would present a plan to the owner of this parcel of Sienna Plantation, Toll Brothers and GTIS Partners. They would then approve the plans, and pass them along to Missouri City and Fort Bend County for approval, San Miguel said.

Fort Bend ISD contacted Johnson earlier this fall with the district’s concerns about the schools’ accessibility. As of press time, Fort Bend ISD is waiting for a reply.

Fort Bend ISD trustee Jim Rice didn’t share Tassin’s concerns

“I believe that Johnson Development will get those roads in,” Rice said.

But Tassin wasn’t assuaged.

“If we build schools that our kids don’t have access to, then that’s problematic,” she said.