What Does the Future Hold for Six Closing AISD Campuses?

Lindsey Kucharski says she still feels like the new kid on the block, and her family has lived on the same street in the Hyde Park-North Loop area for 14 years. Four doors down, her neighbor has lived in the same home since 1967.

The Kucharskis’ neighborhood school is Ridgetop Elementary. A single-story, red-tiled building canopied by tall sycamore and live oak trees, Ridgetop is one of the 10 Austin ISD campuses that will close at the end of this school year.

And now, six of those 10 school campuses have been tentatively placed on the district’s surplus property list, meaning they could be considered for lease or sale: Ridgetop, Becker, Dawson, Widén, and Sunset Valley elementaries, and the excess land surrounding Bedichek Middle School.

Last Tuesday evening, March 24, AISD hosted an open house in the Ridgetop library to solicit the community’s feedback and ideas about the future use of the property. AISD families and their non-AISD neighbors showed up, writing their concerns about the fate of the Ridgetop campus on sticky notes: “Kids in community rely on playground – no other walkable parks,” one read. “Worry it could become a huge development,” read another.

Kucharski shares the concerns of her neighbors. “And yeah, every neighborhood has seen lots of changes,” she said. “But to have a massive [apartment] complex here would destroy where we have chosen to live, and raise our kids, and find our community. It would be devastating.”

If the six campuses are finalized by the Board of Trustees as surplus, AISD has multiple options: They can be permanently sold, transferring full ownership to the buyer. The properties can be ground leased long-term (50-99 years) by the district, which typically means building demolition.

The campuses can also be leased for 20-50 years, allowing the tenant to renovate and maintain the campus, or leased short-term, providing affordable rent to nonprofits or community partners while the district remains responsible for improvements and maintenance.

But whether AISD will have the final word on future property decisions is now in question. On March 26, Austin City Council approved a resolution to establish a city-led process to manage the future use of their jointly-owned public parkland with AISD by May 28, with the intention to “[protect] the public’s interest in the land at issue” as AISD plans to make revenue-generating property sales.

Being listed as surplus property means that AISD has determined the five school buildings to be unneeded for district use within the next 20 years. Jaime Miller, senior executive director of facilities and operations at AISD, said that determination was based on the trustees’ November vote to close those schools. 

“Staff is recommending them as surplus property based on the direction that we’ve heard so far from leadership,” Miller said, adding that surplus properties could still potentially be used for educational purposes in the future through a lease partnership option.

AISD aims to use profit earned from the closing campuses to ease their budget deficit, recently projected to be $49 million by the end of 2026, a steep increase from the previous calculation of $19.7 million. Miller noted that revenue earned through these “real estate opportunities” is not subject to recapture, the local tax dollars (over $821 million in FY 2024-2025) that AISD must pay the state annually to fund Texas school districts with less property.

“That’s why we’re really trying to make sure that we’ve considered all options for monetizing these properties to help with the district budget challenges, and not just moving straight to a fee simple sale,” Miller said, explaining that while a simple sale is a one-time cash infusion, a long-term ground lease could generate continuous monthly revenue for the district.

The district will score each property to determine which lease or sale option it will choose based on site-specific logistics, city zoning flexibility, revenue potential, future reacquisition potential, and other factors. The “community impact” category, which includes “community-serving” future uses of the property, constitutes 25% of the scoring. 

“It’s important to realize that AISD’s primary mission is to educate students and to provide well-resourced campuses,” Miller told the Chronicle. “If everyone in that community says we don’t want this property to be sold, that’s not necessarily going to govern it.”

And AISD has already seen community pushback over the sale of the former Rosedale Elementary in North Austin to OHT Partners, who proposed building a 435-unit apartment complex with a parking garage. Neighbors have expressed concern that the heightened density and traffic will overwhelm their two-lane residential streets and decrease pedestrian safety.

Nonetheless, on March 17, the Austin Zoning and Platting Commission recommended that Austin City Council approve OHT Partners’ application to rezone the property to the highest level of residential density. “Once you’re doing a simple sale, it’s really hard to control what a developer is going to put there,” Miller said.

Community meetings for the six campuses will continue through April 8. Miller says the district aims to learn how the loss of each campus property would disrupt the local community. “Each campus has a different community involvement with the city. Some are more nonprofit-focused, … some are community hubs and parkland, and we want to hear that impact from everyone,” Miller said. “But when we say input, we want ideas for how to make these revenue-generating opportunities.”

Allison Steele, a Ridgetop parent, would like to see their neighborhood school repurposed as a community center. “That would be the ideal scenario for us … that we could still play on the playground, or have something we could walk to in our neighborhood,” Steele said. “That would maybe make it not so painful of a process.”

Natalie Wilson, a Becker Elementary parent and South Austin resident of 23 years, would like to see the Becker campus continue to be used for educational purposes as the land was originally donated for back in 1935. Wilson suggests turning the building into a dual-language academy partnered with a local university, similar to UTSA’s partnership with San Antonio ISD.

“We have so much higher education in Austin that it seems like a missed opportunity to not partner with what’s already in our backyard,” Wilson continued.

Wilson believes AISD should take the property reuse conversation as an opportunity to rebuild trust with the community, following the fall’s disruptive school closure process. “And maybe they don’t get the highest bid,” Wilson said. “Maybe they get something that still benefits the community, in the spirit of respecting that these neighborhoods need a third space, they need a green space, they need a park.”

Wilson fears that a development on the Becker property that’s uncharacteristic of Bouldin Creek, a school surrounded by single-family homes, could be detrimental to the “fabric” of the neighborhood. “We’re so close to Downtown,” she said. “Without a school, we’re just steps away from being Rainey Street.”

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