As more schools are forced to close amid falling enrollment, districts and cities like Plano are facing a first-of-its-kind opportunity. The ability to potentially purchase land for redevelopment.
The question for many is: What should replace campuses, like the former Davis Elementary School in Plano?
As the former Davis Elementary School campus is carefully reduced to a pile of rubble, the city of Plano is seeking to purchase the 5-acre property from Plano ISD.
The city has plans to redevelop the parcel of land along Parkhaven near Independence Parkway in Plano.
What exactly will be built has not yet been determined.
“We really want to hear from the neighborhood and understand what they’d like to see,” said Matthew Yager, the City of Plano’s Real Estate Manager.
Neighbors have been coming to terms with losing the beloved campus and are now rallying against one redevelopment idea being considered.
New homes may be built on the plot of land, potentially a dozen single family houses, according to a city rendering.
“I know I feel strongly I don’t want additional housing,” said longtime resident Barbara Myers. “I would like for it to be used for either a park or some type of community event that would at least benefit people that live in the community.”
Myers joined residents at the city’s previous neighborhood engagement meeting on the future of the property.
Residents at the meeting were presented with examples of housing developments and asked to place a bright orange ‘dot’ sticker on the kind of home they would support between single-family detached, patio homes, townhomes, and duplexes.
The vast majority of attendees placed their dot on each column, indicating ‘I don’t want this.’
The city’s real estate manager explains that the land is currently zoned for single-family housing.
Yager emphasizes that the parcel is not zoned for multi-family buildings such as apartments, and furthermore, the city is not seeking to add apartment communities on the property.
However, the single-family zoning already allows other options to be approved, including the addition of a park, building a recreation center, a library, a fire station, a church, or a school.
Myers and others favor expanding Caddo Park, which is adjacent to the school property.
“Traffic is a nightmare to get anywhere in the evening or in rush hour traffic, and so adding more housing contributes to that again,” said Myers.
Something else the city is contending with is ongoing purchase and sales agreement negotiations with the school district, in which PISD has some say in the property’s future development.
“The school district and the city want to work together, be collaborative and do something that benefits the community,” said Yager. “We do have an interlocal agreement, kind of a handshake agreement to kind of work together [with the school district] but the school district could decide what the city might want to use it for doesn’t work for them and proceed to list the property if that’s what they’d like to do.”
Will Wood lives near the school building and stopped by to watch the demolition process.
He says he doesn’t have a strong opinion of what should be built next.
“If they build houses that would increase the tax base, I understand that,” he said cautiously. “You can increase the park area that would be good.”
The city’s Neighborhood Engagement Team will prepare a report for the city council following tonight’s last neighborhood engagement meeting at Haggard Middle School from 6 to 8 p.m.
It is not yet known when the city’s final recommendation will be brought to the city for discussion and additional public input, but Yager expects it to happen in the next two to three months.
“We’ve really heard that [Davis Elementary School] was a community amenity and there’s a desire to keep that,” said Yager.