LISD Just Voted to Sell Its Closed School Buildings — Including Three in the Flower Mound Area

The kids moved out last spring. Now LISD is selling the furniture.

At its June 8 board meeting, the Lewisville ISD Board of Trustees met for their regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, June 8 and took two real estate votes. The board approved a resolution and contract to sell ±18.3296 acres of declared surplus property on Quail Run Road in Flower Mound, and approved a resolution to negotiate and prepare agreements for the lease or sale of BB Owen Elementary School, Polser Elementary School, and Creekside Elementary School.

Those three campuses weren't plucked at random. The board voted back in December to close Creekside, BB Owen, and Polser — along with Garden Ridge and Highland Village — at the end of the 2024-25 school year. The students have already been rezoned and moved. This week's vote is the next step: turning empty buildings into cash.

Why sell now? The math is brutal. The district faces a $4.5 million deficit and projects nearly 10,000 fewer students over the next decade. "We're no longer a district of 53,000," Superintendent Lori Rapp has said. "We're forecasted over the next 10 years to stabilize at about 45,000." Keeping half-empty buildings heated, insured, and staffed costs money the district doesn't have.

The capacity gap is stark. BB Owen Elementary, for example, had an optimal enrollment of 653 students but only about 250 enrolled in 2024-25 — roughly 37% of capacity — a figure projected to hold around 245 through the 2027-28 school year. Across the whole district, optimal capacity is 62,508 seats against current enrollment of 47,711 — a gap of 15,907.

The funding squeeze underneath all of this is one the whole region is watching. The state allots school districts $6,160 per student based on daily attendance — a figure that has not increased since 2019. LISD has experienced around 22% inflation over that period, and utility costs — water and electricity — have risen 39% and 61% respectively. The buildings cost more to run every year while the per-kid check from Austin hasn't moved.

So what happens to those campuses now? Nobody can fully answer that yet. The board authorized staff to negotiate lease or sale agreements, which means a developer, a charter school, a church, or a private buyer could all be in play. When trustees voted to shutter the schools last December, concerned residents filled the meeting, with some blaming insufficient state funding and others demanding the administration building be shuttered instead. The anger was real. But the buildings are empty now, and carrying costs don't pause for sentiment.

For Flower Mound families, the Quail Run Road land sale is the one that hits closest to home geographically — more than 18 acres of declared surplus property somewhere in town that the district no longer needs. What gets built there shapes a neighborhood for decades.

Here are the honest stakes: once LISD signs a deed, those buildings don't come back cheaply — or at all. Enrollment is projected to dip by more than 3,000 students over the next decade, driven partly by more families choosing homeschool, private school, and virtual options, along with fewer apartment options for younger families. If that projection undershoots and families flood back in, the district will be left without the capacity it sold off. That's the bet. It's not a reversible one.

Watch the negotiation process on those three campuses. If any sell quickly to a developer, the neighborhood conversations about what comes next will get loud fast.