Frisco ISD at a Crossroads: Trustee Stephanie Elad on Declining Enrollment, Teacher Retention, and Trade Pathways
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Frisco ISD, one of North Texas's most prominent school districts, is navigating a new reality. After years of explosive growth, the district is now landlocked, built out, and facing declining enrollment. In a recent episode of The Building Texas Show, host Justin McKenzie sat down with Stephanie Elad, a two-term Frisco ISD trustee and former corporate HR executive, to discuss what this inflection point means for teachers, families, and taxpayers.
Elad, reelected last year to a term running through 2028, shared how a 2021 board meeting comment—"this is our meeting, not the community's"—triggered a standing ovation, statewide press coverage, and ultimately her decision to run for office. "The board president said, you know, this is our meeting, meaning theirs and not the community's. And that just did not sit right with me," Elad recalled. "I didn't like it. And so I was sitting waiting for my turn to talk, and I realized that what I really wanted to talk about at that point was what he had just said."
Drawing on her HR background, Elad brought a confidential, third-party employee engagement survey into the district to improve teacher retention. "Tough conversations with staff and parents have never really been foreign to me because I've just been doing it for so long," she explained.
The conversation also delved into workforce readiness and the stigma around the trades. Elad pointed to a neighbor who owns a plumbing business, clears a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, and cannot find apprentice plumbers. She argued that Frisco high schoolers should be able to enter apprenticeship programs earning $60,000 to $70,000 within a year or two of graduation, without debt or a four-year degree. The district is building plumbing, electrical, and HVAC apprenticeship pathways alongside existing CTE tracks like medical terminology, legal assistant work, and e-gaming.
McKenzie connected the thread to his advisory work with the startup Founding Up and to PTECH welding programs in the San Antonio area, where students graduate with as many as 60 college credit hours through community college partnerships. Elad also discussed the district's new superintendent, hired roughly a month before taping, and expressed renewed optimism about Frisco ISD's next chapter.
Elad emphasized the importance of preparing students for careers that AI cannot replace and urged families to actually vote in low-turnout school board elections.