At a recent LTISD school board meeting, demographers advising the district announced that the area needs two more schools in the next 3-5 years.

With 12% growth in the last two years - mostly in the southern portion of the dirstict - they are recommending one more elementary school and one more middle school be built to come online between 2018 and 2020.

“There are many other factors as to how many kids can be fit into a school,” their data manager said. “Serene Hills (Elementary) is projected to exceed 1,000 students in the fall of 2018, so that should be the focus – an elementary school should come online in 2018 or 2020, somewhere in that area to relieve the population. Next is going to be Bee Cave Elementary, which will exceed 120 percent in 2021.”

“The difficulty of the whole system is doing just-in-time construction,” Superintendent Lancaster said. “We didn’t want to open West Cypress Hills (Elementary) with an enrollment of just 250 kids. We don’t want to open it with 750 kids either, because Bee Creek and the other elementary schools would have been hugely overcrowded. The complexity of getting the most for our taxpayers and not going too fast or overcrowding is why we do this kind of study.”