LISD Just Approved $31.7M in Construction — Including a New Transportation Center and Safety Upgrades Across Campuses

If your child rides an LISD bus, the board of trustees just made a decision that will reshape that morning routine. Not this fall. But soon, and the gap between now and then is where the risk lives.

At its June 9 meeting, the Lewisville ISD board of trustees approved approximately $31.67 million across a package of construction and renovation projects, including building a new transportation center. The biggest single line item is the one that affects bus families most directly.

The transportation center is priced at $14.96 million, with construction starting this summer and an estimated completion date of August 1, 2026. That timeline matters. The center will not be ready for the coming school year — which means families live through the transition while the district is still building the facility meant to anchor it.

This isn't happening in a vacuum. LISD already voted to bring its transportation services in-house for the 2025-26 school year, a decision district leaders framed as a cost-saving move during a budget crunch. The change ends a more than 30-year partnership with transportation contractors — specifically, the contract with Texas Central School Bus, which ends July 30. So the district is simultaneously standing up a brand-new internal department and building the facility to house it. That is a lot of moving parts.

On the technology side, the news is genuinely good. Bus routes for 2025-26 are being established now, and the district is installing a radio-frequency identification system to better track students when they board and exit — with a proximity reader that can scan ID badges and alert drivers if a student is on the wrong bus. The parent tracking app will update every ten seconds instead of the current two-to-three minute ping — though that upgrade is expected to phase in around October. October. Not day one of school. Worth noting.

The district's goal is to hire 220 to 230 drivers before the school year starts. As of early June, the numbers were still being assembled — drivers in pre-employment, drivers in background checks, drivers who hadn't finished their applications. Trustees have already heard from parents about buses not arriving on time and families not knowing where their kids were. The in-house pivot was, at least in part, a direct response to that frustration.

The rest of the $31.7M package is no afterthought. A separate $989,070 project covers districtwide generator and radio system upgrades across multiple campuses — work designed to keep critical life-safety and security functions running during a power outage. That work starts during the 2025-26 school year, with most of it completing in summer 2026, and the district says disruptions during the school year will be minimal.

Most of the projects are funded through the 2023 bond. That's your money. These are the things it is buying.

Here is the honest read: the transportation center is the right call. A district serving communities from Flower Mound to Lewisville to Coppell needed a dedicated facility. The safety tech upgrades on buses are real improvements. But the department is brand new, the building won't be done until next August, and the transition period is where things tend to go sideways. If your child rides a bus, subscribe to LISD transportation alerts now, confirm which app the district is currently using, and have a backup plan for the first few weeks of school. Don't wait for a problem to figure out where to call.