We have outgrown our existing space. The current grade 9 – 12 Learning Center was built for 400  students. We now have 413 students enrolled in our high school. In addition, we needed space dedicated  for special education services. Currently those services are spread throughout the entire campus, and in  some cases, located in areas designed for collaborative learning, not special education. We are also  looking ahead and will need to accommodate the 8th graders transferring to the Gateway Prep high school  from the future K – 8 grade Gateway School of Arts & Sciences to be located on land adjacent to the  Gateway Prep Campus.

It has been our stated purpose from the beginning to offer a top academic charter school that is also  a member of the University Interscholastic League (“UIL”) offering some athletics, fine arts and academic  UIL programming and competition. Until recent years, Gateway Prep was the only charter school in the  greater Austin area that provided their students this UIL experience. Such an offering comes with a cost,  but we have never deviated from our commitment to do so in a cost-effective manner, thus our  requirement that student-athlete families pay an athletic fee to play, keeping our athletic costs at a much  lower percentage of our school budget than our UIL public school competitors. While our academic scores  have continued to improve over the years, now ranking us a top ten academic school in the greater Austin  area, our athletic expenditures not covered by the athletic fees have consistently been less than 2% of the  school budgeted expenditures. We also offer the same nine sports as when we started the school, and  have denied numerous requests by some families to add sports over the years. There is no conflict  between the best in academics and the best we can be in the sports we chose to offer. Most of our  families are here because of this unique dual offering. 

When we build we typically go to the private bond market to borrow money for construction, or we  use local lending institutions we already have relationships with. Because of our strong financial rating  from Standard & Poor’s credit rating service, we are one of a small number of charter school operators  that qualify for the State of Texas “Permanent School Fund Bond Guarantee” backed securities, allowing  us to borrow at very low interest rates. We then service construction debt from our school operations. Unlike traditional public schools that use local tax revenues to service building debt, public charter schools  don’t have that luxury, so state per pupil funding is primarily how we service our debt. We dedicate our  charitable giving funds to help cover our faculty and support staff salaries. 

The “performing arts center” labeled on one of the older master facility plans was intended as a dual  purpose space to serve as both a gym for P.E./athletics, but also to accommodate some arts  performances, and large gatherings such as assemblies and graduation. What is currently labeled as the  “main gym”, and “auxiliary gym” in the most recent master facility plan serves the same purpose as the  space once labeled “performing arts center”. We all know that gymnasiums are poor substitutes to also  host artistic performances. We’d like to have a single purpose Performing Arts Center like our better funded local public schools have. With less funding to work with we’ve had to make do with what we  could afford. The future Gateway School of Arts & Sciences will have a space dedicated for artistic  performances that will not be shared with P.E/athletics. Regarding tennis, we decided to only offer the nine sports we currently do for budgetary reasons. 

We recently commissioned a traffic flow study by Kimley-Horn engineers to look at the impact of the  Westinghouse Road improvements, the added high school enrollment, and the future Gateway School of  Arts & Sciences to the current situation. The final report with recommendations is due early summer, in  time for us to make changes before the new school year begins. Preliminary results show significant  improvements to our current traffic flow can be expected following the Westinghouse Road  improvements. To see the Williamson County plans for the Westinghouse Road improvement and  expansion in front of, and to the east and west of our campus, go here: https://www.wilco.org/CR-111- 105

Both the existing 9 – 12 grade Learning Center, and the new HS Annex Building, will be needed to  accommodate all our high school classes and students. There is a separate wing for special education  services, with its own entrance, also located in this new building that will serve multiple age groups.

People are our most valuable asset. We are extremely careful to balance the necessity to recruit and  retain qualified teachers, offer extracurricular programming that enhances student development and  have adequate space for learning, collaboration, and extracurricular activities. As a public charter school  we have no taxing authority, receive fewer revenues than traditional public schools, and therefore must  prioritize charitable fund raising to make up this large funding gap. The majority of our operating revenues  comes from the state of Texas per pupil funding formula based on the school average daily attendance. Unlike traditional public schools, when the state does not increase per pupil funding to keep up with the  cost of living, we can’t go to the taxpayer and increase the tax rates to fill our coffers. If we don’t grow  our revenues from enrollment growth, and charitable fundraising to help bridge this gap, we eventually  have less money to pay our teachers, or secure needed resources. We don’t want to get into the same  situation as schools with stagnate or decreasing enrollment, such as Austin ISD. When you get into that  type of situation the most difficult budget cuts become necessary. 

We will continue to follow the law for open-enrollment charter schools that requires a “blind lottery”  to determine an applicant acceptance and wait list number. We have never considered any other criteria  for acceptance into any of our charter school campuses other than what the law requires. Very few  students enroll in our Gateway Prep high school unless they are coming from our Prep 8th grade graduation  class. The additional 350 seats will be filled mostly from the new Gateway School of Arts & Sciences 8th graders coming over to Gateway Prep high school.

The plan is to expand the indoor dining area and seating at the same time we perform construction on  the new Gateway School of Arts & Sciences. Until then we are looking at weatherizing the outdoor seating  area with pull down covering and space heaters. 

No. This is the last of the seat expansion we want, or can physically accommodate on this property.  That is why our sponsoring entity, Orenda Education, made plans to build a new grade K – 8 Gateway  School of Arts & Sciences on land adjacent to the Gateway Prep property in the next three years. 

The initial Master Plan for Gateway Prep School back in 2009 was for 400 elementary students (K – 4),  400 middle school students (5-8) and 400 high school students (9-12) with an average of 100 per  graduating class. After about eight years of existence we had reached our enrollment goals for elementary  and middle school, but our high school enrollment remained well below the goal of 400. A study of our  transfers showed that only 62% of the graduating 8th graders continued on and through high school  graduation at the Prep campus. There were several reasons for this, including that some of our middle  school students wanted to go back to their assigned public high school because that school offered some things Gateway Prep did not, such as certain electives - football or girls basketball for example. But the  primary reason, based on exit surveys, was that they didn’t intend to enroll in college after high school  graduation, and did not want our rigorous college preparatory curriculum. To address this and fill out our high school seats, we decided to increase our average graduating class size  in the middle school to what is currently 138 per graduating class. This is our thirteenth year of existence,  and for the first time in our history we reached our high school enrollment goal of 400 this school year  because of that adjustment. 

Currently between 1,200 to 1,400 students are on the Gateway Prep waitlist at any given time  throughout the school year. While we don’t have a legal obligation to accommodate all the families that  apply for enrollment, since 1995 the mission of Orenda Education has been “to create new and innovative  school choice opportunities in Central Texas for families seeking an alternative to the large, more  traditional public school system”. We will continue to operate multiple campuses that meet a demand  niche in a given location. In staying true to this mission, we expect to see our Orenda Charter School  District enrollment continue to grow modestly over the coming years, as long as we continue to satisfy  the families in our service area. 

As a highly rated academic school offering UIL extracurricular programming, the demand to enroll in  Gateway Prep far exceeds our initial enrollment Master Plan of 100 students per graduating class. The  community surrounding our school is exploding with new homes, coinciding with the upcoming  Westinghouse Road improvements, so demand is expected to multiply into the foreseeable future. In  order to meet some of this demand, and yet keep our Gateway Prep elementary and middle school  enrollment capped at our current numbers, the Governing Board decided to build a future grades K – 8  Gateway School of Arts & Sciences on the property we recently purchased just to the east of our existing  Prep campus. With a planned maximum enrollment of 800 K – 8 students, we hope to open this school in August 2024 or 2025. This will be a totally separate school, with its own entrance, parking, buildings,  administrators and faculty, and some different program offerings.