Leave Shadow Ridge alone

My Shadow Ridge Middle School 7th grader’s class registration for next year came home last week, and is due by Friday of this week. He will sign up for the SRMS jazz band as an elective, a unique offering at SRMS.

What’s wrong with that picture? As parents in the current Garden Ridge Elementary zone, we don’t know what school my son will be zoned to attend next year, and Forestwood MS does not offer this elective. What happens to that course selection and hundreds of other choices students and parents are making right now, when rezoning occurs? 

This would be a problem if a rezoning decision was on track for this month, but the fact is we will not see the outcome of this process until April, far too late for affected schools to adjust in the organized way that our LISD faculty, staff, and administration deserve, and that our children need.     

More important than this late adjustment to programs and faculty is the lasting impact on Shadow Ridge MS. I have attended multiple public meetings for the rezone process, and I am aware that there is a real issue of under-enrollment at FMS and over-enrollment at McKamy MS. If an enrollment of over 600 students at FMS currently is not sufficient to offer the best environment for students, how does gutting SRMS enrollment to levels of 533(proposal 1) or 597 (proposal 2) make sense for the SRMS campus? What kind of rezone plan takes the existing problem from one campus and simply transfers it, as is, to another campus? I have heard statements that new development is expected in the SRMS zone, but per the Flower Mound Town Council, that development is not yet approved, and will not fill out the SRMS campus for years.    

SRMS parents love our school, and for good reasons. We have exceptional faculty, a great administration, and great programs such as the SRMS Honor Winds that was invited to the Midwest Band Clinic this year. Losing fully one third of SRMS students will degrade our programs and cause SRMS to lose faculty and staff, and to offer fewer options for the remaining students. If the best our school board can do is to propose two rezone plans that solve a problem at one school by causing the same problem at another campus, we need to stop the rezone process now. I call on the LISD school board to restore SRMS numbers by keeping GRE at SRMS, or stop this process entirely.  

Drew Convery
Flower Mound, TX