By the middle of September, Kenzie Kingston has already shown half a dozen new students around her TikTok-famous campus. The senior and student ambassador at Walnut Grove High School, in Prosper, about 35 miles north of downtown Dallas, is used to hearing them react with a single word: wow.
From the outside, Walnut Grove, which opened in 2023, is a block-long wall of two-story beige brick, broken in the middle by the building’s neoclassical-style entrance. Inside is a soaring atrium that contains the school’s open-concept library, furnished with blond-wood bookcases and sleek navy-and-gray armchairs.
Walking down one sunlight-flooded hallway after another, Kingston opens the door to robotics and manufacturing labs, a vast commercial kitchen for culinary education, and the broadcast studio where a student-produced newscast is filmed. She stops by the innovation lab, a makerspace with a laser cutter, woodworking tools, and two 3D printers (last year she printed out a humerus bone for her anatomy class). The halls are punctuated with the sort of study nooks typically found in a college’s student center, with cafe tables beneath cylindrical pendant lighting.
Kingston steps inside the indoor practice facility used by the football, baseball, softball, and soccer teams, where the air is thick with the pungent aroma of athletic excellence. She finishes the tour with a quick loop through the 2,306-seat basketball arena, complete with a JumboTron.
“We’re really thankful for the school,” Kingston says of her roughly 2,200 fellow students. “We’re fortunate for the architecture and everything about it. . . . We’re really lucky to be in Prosper ISD.”
It takes more than ninety minutes to tour the building, which at 530,000 square feet is larger than your average IKEA. Kingston wraps up at the front vestibule, where the following week the Wildcat Mega Mum, 23 feet of ribbons, glitter, and bling assembled by floral-design students and their teacher, would hang to mark Walnut Grove’s first real homecoming. The campus opened the previous year because the Prosper Independent School District knew the two other local high schools wouldn’t be able to accommodate all the students who would be moving to the area.
For the past decade, the schools in Prosper ISD have been among the fastest growing in the state. In 2000 the district counted fewer than 1,000 students. Today, it serves 31,702, and that number is expected to reach 50,000 within the next decade.
The extension of the Dallas North Tollway to the town’s southern border, in 2007, opened the floodgates. Seven years later, Toyota began moving its North American headquarters to Plano, 25 miles south of Prosper. District staff soon started fielding inquiries from out-of-state families who had nothing to do with Toyota but had heard about the town’s top-flight schools. “All of a sudden word was out that if you lived in Cincinnati or Chicago and you had your kid in private school and you could work remotely, or if you just had to be close to an airport, this was a place to come,” says deputy superintendent Greg Bradley. “You could buy a bigger house on more land, and you didn’t have to pay to put your kid in private school.”
Developers covered former cornfields with new homes, and the district added two thousand students each year from 2015 to 2019. When the pandemic hit, Bradley says, he wondered if the growth would pause; instead it accelerated, a product of the widespread adoption of remote work, combined with low interest rates that propelled the housing boom. Prosper schools reopened in August 2020, and a wave of West Coast students followed, as families in districts with online-only classes took the leap of selling their homes and moving to Texas so their kids could learn in person. Then residents of older Dallas suburbs such as Frisco, McKinney, and Richardson sold their houses and purchased newer, larger homes near Prosper’s brand-new schools.
Social media also played a role. When Walnut Grove opened, a Texas football TikTok account shared photos of the facilities that were reposted by ESPN, giving the campus a moment of viral fame. “I have had some people from student tours say, ‘Oh, I saw this school on ESPN, and that’s why my parents moved us here,’ ” Kingston says.
Since the pandemic, Prosper has enrolled more than three thousand additional students annually. But the district has only so much land. Sometime in the mid-2030s, its demographers predict, every developable acre in Prosper will likely have a house on it, and families looking for new homes will have to buy farther out. By that point, superintendent Holly Ferguson says, Prosper ISD might see competition from the charter and private schools that have siphoned students from districts in nearby suburbs. Prosper’s facilities, while built to last, will no longer be quite so shiny and new. The small-town charm that attracted early arrivals could be harder to find. And the aging of the community will eventually mean fewer young children, a demographic shift that has led the Plano and Richardson districts to make the agonizing choice to close schools.
Even as Ferguson oversees a multibillion-dollar construction program, she spends much of her time focused on the future, she says. “I’m always thinking about, What do the next ten to fifteen years look like for Prosper ISD, when the growth starts slowing down?”
Until the mid-nineties, every K–12 student in the district attended class in a one-story brick building constructed in 1963. That structure, which now houses administrative offices, sits in “old Prosper,” where the streets are lined with humble ranch-style homes. A handful of local shops and restaurants fill the buildings lining Broadway Street, the main commercial thoroughfare that dead-ends at a stand of giant silos, relics of the area’s agricultural past. Until a few years ago, the town had no doctor, grocery store, or Dairy Queen—“all the markers of civilization,” jokes Rachel Trotter, the district’s chief communication officer. Now gleaming new strip malls burst with pediatric dentists and hair salons. The Gates of Prosper shopping center recently brought Dick’s Sporting Goods, PetSmart, and Panera Bread to town.
Prosper ISD opened its first separate elementary school in 1995 and a dedicated high school five years later. It added a handful of elementary and middle school campuses in the mid-aughts and between 2018 and 2024 opened at least one school every year—in total, it has built twenty schools over the past decade. Next fall it will add four, including a fourth high school with a capacity for three thousand students, a mere two years after Walnut Grove opened.
Prosper’s population has grown so quickly that a new school will often, within a year of launching, need portable buildings to accommodate all the students. The district updates attendance zones every year to shift kids from overcrowded campuses to new ones; some schools have closed enrollment, sending students zoned for their campuses to a different one.
To pay for all their new campuses, Prosper ISD voters approved substantial bond measures in 2007 and 2019. In 2023 the district approached voters again, asking for a total of $2.8 billion for new school buildings and buses, a new performing arts center, new athletic facilities, and technology. Roughly $2.4 billion was for the school buildings and buses and by itself constituted the second-largest successful school bond proposal in Texas history (ranking behind a 2020 measure in Dallas ISD, which has more than four times as many students).
The community planning committee that recommended what to put on the ballot arrived at its total assuming that Prosperites wanted their new schools to have at least as much of a wow factor as the existing ones. The new Prosper High School, opened in 2009, set the standard for the two high schools that followed, including Walnut Grove, which has cost more than $200 million. “When you have that expectation set,” parent and committee member Emily Adams says, “I think you could really disappoint people if you put a new high school in and you simplify things.”
Residents who voted on the 2023 bond agreed to a point, passing the propositions for the buildings and buses, the performing arts center, and the technology but turning down the measure for athletic facilities, which included a $94 million stadium that would have been the district’s second. (That outcome wasn’t unprecedented; since 2019, when the state began requiring districts to separate athletic-bond proposals from academic ones, voters in several large school systems have declined to fund new stadiums.)
“A lot of people had sticker shock,” Adams surmises. Prosper’s existing 12,000-capacity stadium opened only five years ago, but by 2025 it will be shared by four high schools. If the district tops out at six high schools, as is currently expected, some teams will join the ranks of Texas squads that have to play under Thursday- and Saturday-night lights.
On the first day of school in August, twelve-year-old Elias Valdovino shouldered his backpack and walked toward the imposing entrance to Prosper’s Jones Middle School. Although he had friends inside, he was still nervous about navigating the unfamiliar structure. “I was feeling lost and a little bit confused, because I didn’t really know where my classes were,” he remembers. Last year he’d been a sixth grader at nearby Hays Middle School, a four-year-old campus built for 1,300 students that by 2023 had been forced to accommodate more than 1,900. The school was short on space—Valdovino’s classes often had thirty students—and relied on twenty portable classrooms to accommodate everyone.
This was, in fact, the second time Valdovino had been rezoned; three years ago he had to switch elementary schools at the start of fourth grade. It’s not uncommon for kids to shuffle campuses at least once, as the opening of each new school prompts a realignment of attendance boundaries. Next year more than four thousand students will start the year on a newly opened campus, the bulk of them rezoned from other schools. Knowing that such changes can be difficult for young children, the district uses the same floor plan for virtually every elementary school, a cost-saving strategy that ensures kids, at a minimum, immediately know where the bathrooms are.
Amid the constant change, district leaders are trying to preserve the small-town atmosphere that drew many families to Prosper, but it’s not easy. Ferguson, the superintendent, attends softball games, orchestra performances, and awards ceremonies, taking selfies with kids and sending them congratulatory notes. When she started the job, in 2020, she instituted a back-to-school tradition of writing words of encouragement on every teacher’s classroom whiteboard. As more campuses opened, the task became time-consuming; she now writes them on small magnetic boards that she or an intern delivers.
Ferguson wanted to continue her predecessor’s practice of sending a birthday message to every student. But did it make sense to spend time hand-signing more than 31,000 cards? She switched to postcards with a printed signature. “It’s figuring out a new process to continue those old traditions,” she says.
A much bigger challenge is avoiding the scenario, twenty years from now, in which growing pains give way to shrinking pains. Even as the district struggles to accommodate a booming population, it’s working with demographers to figure out when the tide will turn. Administrators are trying to learn from older suburban districts, such as Plano ISD, which grew rapidly in the eighties and nineties and peaked in the 2011–12 school year at 55,659 students. It’s now down to 46,551. In June the Plano school board voted to close four older schools, a move that provoked “a lot of feelings” in the community, said board president Nancy Humphrey. During the meeting’s public comment period, parents voiced their opposition to the closure of their campuses. “My heart aches for the hundreds of kids and their families that this will affect,” one told the trustees as she choked up.
To avoid making similar heart-wrenching decisions, Prosper leaders have chosen to build fewer, bigger schools to maximize efficiency. This means the campuses are enormous—Jones will hold 1,500 kids—but keeping up a few dozen big buildings and staffing them with a principal, nurse, and custodial and cafeteria workers costs less than maintaining twice as many smaller ones, and not as many buildings will have to close when the inevitable contraction comes. “That’s a lesson learned from these districts that, like us—but in the nineties—were busting at the seams,” says Bradley, the deputy superintendent.
If Prosper is the new Plano, another town will, inevitably, emerge as the new Prosper, so long as the region continues its explosive growth. As parents seek newer, less expensive homes, they’ll follow the Dallas North Tollway. The North Texas Toll Authority plans to extend it all the way to Grayson County, which borders the Red River. “I think Oklahoma is going to be a suburb pretty soon,” Humphrey quips. Already, a six-mile segment connecting Prosper to Celina is under construction, and homebuilders have plotted subdivisions on Celina’s cornfields. The road beckons families ever northward, toward smaller towns, cheaper land, and the promise of the new.
Austin journalist Robyn Ross has written for The Texas Observer and The New York Times.
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “If They Come, You Must Build It.” Subscribe today.
