15-03-2025
Did this Fort Worth Realtor's report compel Keller school board to kill district split?
A vocal Fort Worth real estate broker presented the Keller school board a detailed report on various issues surrounding a proposal to split the district in the week before the district announced the split was off.
Did his report play a part in that decision?
'It gave them something to chew on, whether it was the thing that was the motivating factor or something else, I'm not sure yet,' Fort Worth Realtor and tax consultant Chandler Crouch said in an interview. Crouch said he began sharing the report with board members a week ago and met with them separately to discuss it.
The district did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the report, now posted to his website, Crouch attempted to impress upon the Keller school board that the costs were too high for their plan to go through.
For one, it would have cost the district around $25 million, his report states. He got that number by breaking down estimates for the expenses on administrative restructuring, legal and consulting fees, student transportation changes and debt allocation and financial structuring, among other expenses.
His report included cost breakdowns for similar splits of school districts in other states, as well.
Records obtained by the Star-Telegram in February found that costs for bilingual and special education would have gone to the new district formed apart from the Keller side.
Crouch's report also includes a detailed real estate market analysis related to the split proposal. He found that new home listings in the district surged 139% since the day news of the split broke.
He attributed the surge to uncertainty over the split, rather than the split per se.
'If the decision is prolonged, further instability in the market could occur,' Crouch wrote. 'If the split moves forward, a second wave of listings could follow, amplifying supply-side pressure.'
Abandoning the plan could stabilize the market, he wrote, 'but the uncertainty has already created measurable disruption.'
There were also various 'legal landmines' that would have affected the split, Crouch's report states.
These include a lawsuit alleging violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act, another alleging violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a bill recently filed in the Texas House of Representatives that would raise the bar on school district splits, among others.
Crouch used a canonical children's fantasy movie as allegory for the the legal hurdles the district faced in relation to the proposal to split.
'It reminds me of Atreyu's quest in The NeverEnding Story, battling 'The Nothing,' facing relentless obstacles, and navigating his own Swamp of Sadness,' he wrote. 'That's about where we are now, hoping we'll pass safely through judgmental gates and maybe even meet our own Luck Dragon, Falkor.'
Crouch also tapped his significant client base in Keller ISD to conduct a mock vote in order to get an idea of how district residents feel about the split.
And this was no polling post on X, either. Crouch enlisted two Ph.D.-level statisticians to analyze his work. He had the help of Christopher Gaffney, a decision sciences expert at the LeBow College of Business at Philadelphia's Drexel University, and Karla Hamlen Mansour, a professor of research and assessment in education at Cleveland State University, for outside analysis.
'Their findings confirm that, even when accounting for potential biases, the overwhelming majority of Keller ISD taxpayers oppose the split,' Crouch wrote.
His polling of around 2,300 respondents found that residents overwhelmingly — 87% — disapproved of the split, and 89% wanted to be able to vote on it.
Just over half of respondents were parents of students in the district.
Reflecting the student demographics of the district, just under three-fourths of respondents said they live west of Denton Highway, which was the proposed dividing line, and 23.5% live east of it.
A question regarding how informed respondents were of the split was about even: 48.1% responded yes, and 46.7% answered no.
Time may tell if Crouch's report was the tipping point in this dramatic months-long saga.
But like the tale Crouch cited in his report, the Keller school board's story likely doesn't end here.
'I was able to determine in half a day that this was a terrible idea and it would never work out,' he said. 'I'd like to take all the credit, but it's hard to say. I know one thing for sure, if it wasn't for all of us standing up, this wouldn't have happened.'
