How Denton ISD’s $1.4 billion bond proposal came together

“I’ve served on many bonds before,” said Lewis, a retired educator who was a public school superintendent in Connecticut. “I don’t think I have ever seen a bond process that was this organized in my life.”

Seventy-two volunteers joined 14 Denton ISD students on the Denton ISD Citizen Advisory Committee to examine the needs of the sixth fastest-growing public school system in the country, meeting in sessions that ran nearly three hours. The committee sometimes met twice a month between September and December last year.

Mallouf is a mother of two Denton ISD students, but she might be better known as a busy real estate agent who specializes in home sales in Denton, where housing values are climbing and developers are building as fast as they can.

She said she accepted the invitation to serve on the committee because she understands the strain booming growth can have on a town.

“I see it on two different sides. I have kids in the system,” Mallouf said. “They’re high school kids, so they are not going to benefit from this. I also am a Realtor in this town. I see, every day, the needs. And I see the growth. My job is to sell Denton and what it offers. I can tell you the majority of relocation clients that call me, they don’t think about Denton first because we don’t have what other schools offer.”

Mallouf meets families regularly who mention Frisco and Prosper, whose school districts have “shiner, newer schools” and the facilities and amenities that come with brand-new construction.

District officials sought out Lewis because he was already plugged into the district as an advocate.

“I was serving on the Dental School Foundation Board,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the volunteers were cautioned that the committee would be a working board. It wouldn’t be something they could drop in on and finish on autopilot.

“They pointed out real quickly that would not be a fly-by-night process,” he said. “They let us know that it was going to be very intense, and they expected your attendance and they expected you to study. But you know, once you’re an educator, you’re always a teacher. And then as a child advocate, you want to serve, to be the best you can for students in any community that you work in. We knew going into this that we were going to have to be prepared and that we were going to need to do this work.”

Mallouf said the makeup of the committee reflected the breadth of the district. Grandparents and parents of Denton ISD students joined homeowners who don’t have students in the district and retired teachers, staffers and administrators on the committee.

Denton ISD is a diverse district, where nearly half of the students are considered economically disadvantaged. Mallouf and Lewis said that each meeting started with a video presentation detailing the needs they’d discuss that evening. The committee was broken down into tables of 10, with each table bringing the same volunteers together each meeting.

“If just a certain segment of the community is making all the decisions, then some segment of the school system and some segment of the student population is left out,” Lewis said. “So then that’s where you have turmoil and different things like that. So when we looked at the people in the room, and the different communities that they represented ... even at my table, the different segments of the community was represented at my table. I really applaud the district and the board. They did their homework on inclusion.”

Mallouf and Lewis said each table was permitted to ask district officials two questions each meeting.

“Something that really impressed me was that, when we walked in at 5:30, the staff members were already there. They moved around between the tables and answered questions, and then when it came time to submit our final questions, they were there to answer them,” Lewis said.

Mallouf said that any questions that weren’t answered during the meetings were submitted to the district administration, and then the committee received answers by email before the next meeting, “which is unheard of,” Lewis said.

The volunteers quickly learned that the pet projects they thought were list-topping needs weren’t, and the tables eventually largely agreed that a bond needed to benefit every campus and serve as many students as possible. The work was a wake-up call for some.

“The growth is big,” Mallouf said. “I think I knew it. But for me, it’s like, I guess I didn’t realize how much of it I tried to avoid thinking about. I don’t think I realized, you know? And I forget how big our area is. It goes all the way down south to FM407, all the way west, pretty much to Ponder, and then all the way up to where it’s almost like Celina and Prosper.”

Lewis has participated in enough bond meetings that he wasn’t surprised.

“What I would just say is that what I was impressed with [was] what I haven’t seen in most school bond planning meetings, and that was just the commitment to getting it right, you know? They were doing the best they could to get it right. And there were some tough discussions, don’t get me wrong.”

The committee did tackle some things that the volunteers said are exciting for the district’s future.

“I’m excited that we’re going to try to get another [advanced technology center] high school, because those kids do not be driving down U.S. 380 to get to LaGrone [Academy],” Mallouf said.

Lewis said he knows the bond might seem like too much money to some voters. But he thinks each proposition is crucial for the district’s future. He said he’d tell voters to consider the recent uproar over the expense of eggs, among other household goods.

“Now look at the cost of building, at the cost of technology, and everything in this bond,” he said. “Just like eggs, it has gone up. And even, to some degree, it’s gone up more drastically, because there’s not enough supplies, as far as steel, lumber, concrete, all those kinds of things. But the beauty about this is it doesn’t bring you any new taxes.”