Northwest ISD families,

The excitement is building across Northwest ISD as we look forward to welcoming students for the 2023-2024 school year. Wednesday, August 16, marks our first day of school, and our teachers and staff are energized and ready to begin the new school year. We expect more than 30,000 students to walk through our school doors this year, and we are eager to greet each one.

Northwest ISD is a unique and special fast-growth district, and it’s no wonder our students, staff, families and communities take great pride in our local public schools. We represent three counties and more than 14 communities, yet together, we serve as one Northwest ISD. We are particularly pleased to welcome the addition of Carter Elementary, Daniel Elementary and Worthington Middle School this year. Also, we are excited to open two more brand new, state-of-the-art replacement schools for Hatfield and Seven Hills elementary schools.

NISD continues to further enhance the school safety of our facilities. In compliance with H.B. 3 from the 88th Texas Legislative Session, we are planning to add armed professional security personnel to our 22 elementary schools by September 1, 2023. This will complement the current School Resource Officers (SROs) that serve at each of our secondary schools. This fall, we will also update glass and windows to comply with the Texas School Safety Standards issued earlier this year. Although it is not required until the fall of 2025, we are planning to implement silent panic alert technology in each of our classrooms this year. We are working to implement an open-door alert system as well as one-touch lockdown technology at every campus.  Northwest ISD will continue to seek ways to improve student safety on our campuses, and we will update you as these improvements are completed.

 

We ask our parents and community members to pay close attention to school zones and our pedestrian students as we start school.  Our new schools, with their new traffic patterns, will require everyone’s patience as we all learn these new patterns. As with all school districts, traffic and congestion can be extreme for all our campuses at arrival and dismissal for the first few weeks of the school year. Please be patient with us and each other – and especially with our student drivers, bike riders, and walkers – as we monitor and adjust for the safest and most efficient conditions for arrival and dismissal.   

This fall we are also implementing a new SMART tag bus rider card system that will provide families with improved real-time bus tracking. You can read more about this service here, but we do expect delays initially as we roll out our SMART tag bus rider system. We expect parents will be happy with the information available to them with this new service. Because we are the fastest-growing school district in North Texas, we ask you to please be patient as we adjust routes the first few weeks of school (based on ridership demands at each campus).  

In the spring of 2023, we brought together an amazing Committee of students, parents, staff and community members for our NISD Strategic Planning Summit. Over several months, the Committee identified three broad district goals and developed nine priority statements that will guide our work for our learning community over the next five years.  Click here to learn more.

We are dedicated to pursuing these goals and priorities to help our students achieve personal success and to ensure we are providing the highest quality of education that our community desires and deserves. I am excited to begin our work on these new district goals and priorities this year.

Thank you so much for your ongoing support of Texas public schools and Northwest ISD and thank you for the opportunity to serve, equip and inspire the children of our community. We look forward to an incredible 2023-2024 school year.

Sincerely,

Mark Foust, Ed.D. 

Superintendent, Northwest ISD