Why CFBISD's Open Enrollment Timing Is Losing Us Students
A Self-Inflicted Disadvantage Hiding In Plain Sight
CFBISD has a declining enrollment problem and an enrollment recruitment process that doesn't reflect the urgency of solving it. The district opens its 2026-27 transfer enrollment window on April 1. By that date, the families most likely to consider transferring into CFBISD have already enrolled their kids somewhere else.
This isn't a marketing problem. It's a calendar problem.
Is anyone asking why? I am.
The Competitive Landscape
Open enrollment, also called inter-district transfer, is the process by which families who don't live within a district's boundaries can apply to send their children to that district's schools. In the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, where families have real choices, the timing of when each district opens its transfer window determines who gets first pick of the available students.
Here are the open enrollment windows for the 2026-2027 school year for CFBISD and our two closest competitor districts:
Lewisville ISD: December 1, 2025 through February 13, 2026.
Coppell ISD: February 23, 2026 through March 6, 2026 for new students.
CFBISD: April 1, 2026 through May 8, 2026.
Lewisville closed its transfer window on February 13. Coppell closed theirs on March 6. By the time CFBISD opened its doors on April 1, families who had been shopping for a new district since the fall had already committed elsewhere. We weren't competing for those families. We weren't even at the table.
What this Costs Us
Texas school district funding is driven primarily by enrollment. Every student who chooses CFBISD brings approximately $11,487 in per-student funding to the district, per the Texas Tribune Schools Explorer. Every student who chooses a different district takes that funding with them.
CFBISD enrolled 24,165 students per the 2024-25 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, down from a peak of 25,796 in 2016. That's a loss of more than 1,600 students over a nine-year period. At $11,487 per student, that represents over $18 million in annual funding the district no longer receives. Approximately 22,700 students started in a CFBISD School at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, a drop of approximately 1,465 and impact of nearly $17 million.
A portion of that decline is driven by birth rate trends and demographic shifts that no district can control. But a meaningful portion is driven by competition for transfer students with our neighboring districts. And in that competition, we're showing up six weeks late.
The math is straightforward. If our open enrollment window opened in early February instead of April 1, we'd be in the conversation when families are actively shopping. We'd have access to the same pool of transfer-seeking families that Lewisville and Coppell are pulling from. Right now, those families are already enrolled elsewhere by the time we send out our welcome message.
This doesn’t even take into consideration the families considering moves to charters, homeschooling, and the private school subsidy vouchers/ESAs.
We are in a highly competitive situation and we’re sitting on the sidelines.
What this Signals about Governance
This isn't a complicated problem. It's not a budget issue. It's not a state mandate. It's not a recapture issue. It's a calendar decision that the district controls entirely.
Why hasn't anyone asked about it?
Possibility one: The administration has a reason for the April 1 timing that hasn't been explained publicly. Maybe it has to do with staffing decisions, finalizing campus capacity, or aligning with other administrative deadlines. If so, the board should know what that reason is and whether it justifies giving up the first-mover advantage to every competitor district in the area.
Possibility two: This is just how it's always been done. Nobody has questioned it, so nobody has changed it. That's the most common explanation for institutional inertia, and it's the explanation a board exists to interrupt.
Either way, the board's job is to ask. To require the administration to justify the timing. To compare CFBISD's calendar against peer districts and ask why we're consistently behind. To direct the administration to evaluate whether opening enrollment earlier would result in measurable enrollment gains.
I haven't seen evidence that this question is being asked.
The Pattern Matters
The enrollment window timing is one example of a broader pattern. The district has a marketing problem and a math problem stacked on top of each other, and the math problem doesn't get solved by better marketing.
CFBISD has a story to tell. We have a B accountability rating from TEA. We have an Early College High School with an A rating. We have strong CTE programs, strong elementary reading scores, and a community of educators and families who care deeply about this district. The story is real.
But the story doesn't matter if the families it's meant to reach have already enrolled their kids somewhere else by the time we tell it.
A board focused on enrollment recovery should be asking questions like:
When does our window open relative to competitors?
How many families inquired about transfers this year and how many actually enrolled?
What's our conversion rate from inquiry to enrollment?
Where in the process are we losing families and why?
These are not academic questions. They're the questions every business asks when its customer acquisition is weakening. A school district isn't a business, but enrollment is a market, and CFBISD is in a market with real competitors who are running their playbook better than we are. That isn’t an opinion. It’s a fact backed by the declining enrollment and more importantly the declining enrollment percentages when compared to our neighboring public school districts, AKA our competitors.
What I'd Do as a Trustee
I'd ask the administration to walk the board through the historical rationale for the current open enrollment timing. If there's a defensible operational reason, I want to understand it.
I'd ask for a comparative analysis of how peer districts schedule their enrollment windows and what their conversion outcomes look like.
I'd ask for the conversion data from CFBISD's own enrollment process: how many inquiries, how many applications, how many actual enrollments, and where families are dropping off in our process.
I'd direct the administration to evaluate whether moving the open enrollment window earlier would result in measurable gains, with a clear timeline for that evaluation. I’d argue that the increased number of available families considering where they’ll go to school makes this move a no-brainer.
And I'd hold leadership accountable for moving from analysis to action. CFBISD doesn't need another study group. It needs a board willing to ask why we keep doing the same things and getting the same results.
The Bottom Line
We are spending real money trying to attract students to CFBISD while running a calendar that systematically excludes us from the families most likely to consider transferring. The cost of fixing it is approximately zero. The cost of not fixing it is roughly $11,487 for every family that picked Lewisville or Coppell because we weren't open for business when they were ready to choose.
Enrollment recovery is one of the most important challenges this district faces. The voucher program is going to make it harder. We don't have time to keep handing our competitors a six-week head start.
This is the kind of question I want to be asking from a board seat. Not because it's flashy, but because it's the kind of question nobody else is asking, and the cost of not asking it is being paid every year in students we never had the chance to recruit.
Sources
CFBISD enrollment dates: CFBISD official enrollment page (cfbisd.edu)
Coppell ISD enrollment dates: Coppell ISD official enrollment page
Lewisville ISD enrollment dates: Lewisville ISD official transfer page
Per-student funding figure ($11,487): Texas Tribune Schools Explorer, CFBISD funding profile
CFBISD enrollment figures (24,165 current; 25,796 peak in 2016): CFBISD 2024-2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR), audited by Whitley Penn LLP
TEA accountability ratings: Texas Education Agency 2025 District and Campus Accountability Ratings
Dave Jimenez is a candidate for the CFBISD Board of Trustees. Election Day is Saturday, May 2, 2026. Polls are open from 7 AM to 7 PM. CFBISD uses cumulative voting; you have two votes and you can give both to one candidate. You should vote for Dave… twice. You’re allowed
