Consultant: Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD enrollment to grow ~2,000–4,000 students over decade amid strong homebuilding

Bob Templeton, staff member, told the Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent School District board on Feb. 24 that the Dallas–Fort Worth housing market remains active and that local building will drive student growth in the coming decade.

Templeton said the DFW region’s unemployment rate remains around 4 percent and Texas leads the nation in new-home starts. ‘‘Dallas–Fort Worth is number one in the country for new home starts,’’ Templeton said. He reported an annualized start rate of 47,421 for the DFW region and said state and regional starts and closings have begun to converge.

The consultant told the board the district saw about 2,213 annualized home closings in the district for 2024, with an annualized start rate of 1,676, about 1,946 developed vacant lots available and more than 10,800 future lots in the planning pipeline. Templeton said the average new-home price in the district is about $376,000 and the average existing-home sale price about $358,000.

Why it matters: District officials use housing and lot inventories to forecast school enrollments and to plan capacity, staffing and redistricting. Templeton presented campus-level impacts: Hatley Elementary’s attendance zone is seeing the most immediate new-home construction; Eagle Mountain Elementary has many vacant developed lots and is expected to accelerate; several zones (Lake Point, Northbrook, Parkview, Remington Point, Saginaw) are largely built out or have different near-term prospects.

Templeton walked trustees through quarter-by-quarter starts and closings, subdivision-level yields and multifamily development. He said the district currently has 28 actively building subdivisions, nine future subdivisions in various planning stages, groundwork underway on about 2,200 lots across seven subdivisions, and delivered 321 lots in the fourth quarter of 2024. He also noted multifamily pressure: more than 1,000 rental units were under construction in the district at the time of the presentation, of which 166 were single-family rental homes and 258 were senior-living units (age restricted and not expected to generate students).

Templeton presented enrollment projections that anticipate roughly 400 additional students next fall and about the same for the following several years, with enrollment reaching about 25,900 students in five years and about 27,900 students in 10 years under current assumptions. He flagged that some elementary campuses — Eagle Mountain, Elkins, Hatley and Lake Point — will approach or exceed capacity within four to five years and that several middle schools are already approaching capacity.

Board questions probed the assumptions behind the projections, including cohort patterns used to move students from elementary to middle to high school and how single-family rentals and multifamily absorption affect student yield. Templeton told the board he uses historical cohort patterns and campus-level feeder analyses to produce the high-school forecasts.

Templeton also told trustees the district’s housing inventory figure (about 650 available lots at the time) was lower because closings exceeded starts in the most recent reporting period, and that the district expected some zones to produce mostly multifamily rather than single-family product in the near term. Trustees asked about specific subdivisions and about a Peloton/Fleming Ranch corridor project in the Eagle Mountain zone that Templeton said had been on hold and might be water‑contingent.

Looking ahead: Templeton offered to produce a campus‑level breakdown of cohort patterns and to update forecasts as external factors (water availability, single‑family rental conversions, legislative policy) change.