Why Is Klein ISD Shaped The Way It Is?

[Reefmonkey]

I've always wondered, why does Klein Independent School District have that long, skinny "panhandle" of territory that extends south of Cypress Creek (otherwise the southern border of the rest of the district) between Champion Forest Drive and Stuebner-Airline? Seems like logically that panhandle ought to be either part of Cy-Fair, or divided up between Cy-Fair and Aldine and/or Spring (although Spring is also weirdly shaped with two "lobes"). It seems like most of the 56 school districts in the Greater Houston area (with the exception of Houston ISD's western finger) are fairly reasonably compact in shape, Klein (and Spring) seem to be outliers.

 

Who decided on the boundaries of the school districts, anyway, and what was their criteria? Especially why was Klein given this strange appendage that would quickly become the worst part of the district?

 

http://texasbest.com/schools/map.html

 

https://kleinisd.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_568041/File/District/District Quick Info/Kmap-Superintendent 2-26-18.pdf

Edited July 17, 2019 by Reefmonkey

[mkultra25]

The answer lies in this post:

 

Quote

Klein ISD has a weird shape due to the fact that they gerrymandered in more 'diverse' neighborhoods stretching towards Houston, back in the 1970's in order to obtain more federal dollars.

 

[Reefmonkey]

17 hours ago, mkultra25 said:

The answer lies in this post:

 

 

 

 

That explanation still leaves me with a lot of questions. If it's true, who did the gerrymandering? The district, or the state? It seems like the district wouldn't be able to just grab another ISD's land like that, and I have to assume that by the 70s, the timeframe the people in that thread are saying the land was gerrymandered, it should have already been long applied to another district. And having grown up in the Klein district in the 80s, and knowing the mindset of the residents there at that time (let alone 10 years before that), that then mostly lily-white group of voters would never have willingly agreed to annex Acres Homes and other nearby very black, very poor areas. So did the state force the annexation on them? If so, how, and why, and there must have been some record in the local papers of the inevitable public uproar and even legal fight over that.

 

But there is another problem with this explanation, and it's related to the 1970s timeframe for the explanation. Klein ISD lists Recreation Acres Elementary School as a former campus, it was opened in 1949 "to serve elementary students in the southern part of the district." Recreation Acres is just south of the intersection of 249 and Antoine, down in that southern panhandle that our fellow Haifers say wasn't annexed until the 1970s to get federal funding for being more diverse, but Klein ISD is saying that area was already part of the district back in 1949, when the feds weren't giving out such diversity funding. Its the same story for Garden City Elementary School, which opened in 1956 and closed in the 1970s. It was in the extreme southeast corner of the panhandle, if still open today it would be the southernmost campus in the district.

 

So unless Klein is distorting history and making it sound like these schools were opened and run by KISD when they were actually run by a predecessor district before Klein Annexed the area, it seems Klein owned this panhandle since at least 1949. That would be before anyone cared about "diversity", before the feds were offering dollars to schools for being more diverse.

 

So the question still remains, how and why did Klein end up with that long skinny panhandle extending so far south, when the rest of the district stops at the natural and logical boundary of Cypress Creek?

 

 

Edited July 18, 2019 by Reefmonkey

[zaphod]

Google Earth pro has aerial imagery for almost all of Harris County from 1953 and 1978. What I'm seeing is that from the 50's through the 70's, the KISD appendage would have been majority rural with some then-new middle class subdivisions. The poor areas in that part of the district seemed to have emerged later.

 

In the 1953 imagery, Recreation Farms was an actual "buy a lot in the country" type of community, and not just a collection of large, deep lots full of trailers and shanties as evidenced by the ratio of normal looking houses to other structures.

 

Is it possible that the district was trying to gerrymander its way towards some source of property tax revenue like oil wells or towards a large new subdivision?

[Ross]

The district was formed in 1938 by consolidating 5 existing districts. There's some information here https://web.archive.org/web/20160223162436/http://www.kleinisd.net/default.aspx?name=75.history

[hbcu]

Klein didn't have the Khorville area and Acres Home was ripe for the taking as Aldine, HISD and Klein all got a piece of the action. Acres Homes should've had its own major high school and kept everyone there. But if you look at the older Klein Oak area it was real rural but I guess not enough minorities to feel the quota.

 

What made it odd was that the first AH group was bussed to Klein High then which was ridiculous. That's a far drive now but imagine it then. Sad how they done those kids only to send them back when Klein Forest was built but then the lines basically intersected with Aldine as kids who live across from Eisenhower are zoned to Klein ISD.

 

 

[H-Town Man]

An upshot of this was that Sylvester Turner attended Klein High School and was voted Mr. KHS one year in the early 70's.

 

[cowboybud]

On 6/18/2020 at 2:45 AM, hbcu said:

Klein didn't have the Khorville area and Acres Home was ripe for the taking as Aldine, HISD and Klein all got a piece of the action. Acres Homes should've had its own major high school and kept everyone there. But if you look at the older Klein Oak area it was real rural but I guess not enough minorities to feel the quota.

 

What made it odd was that the first AH group was bussed to Klein High then which was ridiculous. That's a far drive now but imagine it then. Sad how they done those kids only to send them back when Klein Forest was built but then the lines basically intersected with Aldine as kids who live across from Eisenhower are zoned to Klein ISD.

 

 

 

They did have GW Carver High (later ACE, now GW Carver again), which was/is Aldine ISD.

[Reefmonkey]

According to the Klein Historical Society, the present-day boundaries of the district were set in 1928, which would include the panhandle. If that's correct, it definitely debunks the theory that it was gerrymandered for diversity tax dollars.

https://www.kleinhistorical.org/kleinisd/

 

That means there must have been some other reason for the shape, maybe related to property ownership lines among the original families that owned property in the area or something like that? Pretty intriguing.

[Reefmonkey]

I've long been skeptical of KISD's claims that its present boundaries were set in 1928 with the creation of Rural High School District Number 1. It just doesn't make sense, most of the district's southern boundary follows the natural meander of Cypress Creek, a logical natural landmark to base a boundary on, especially back in 1928 when there were few bridges over creeks in rural areas, therefore it would have been difficult for anyone living south of the creek to get to the one high school in the district at the time, Rural High School #1 (later Klein High School on Spring-Cypress Road). The southern extension of Klein, a long, thin, straight-sided peninsula, stands out as such an extreme exception to this that it feels like it must have been a later addition. 

So I have done some additional digging. First, I found that in 1937, Aldine ISD absorbed a portion of Common School District 26, also known as White Oak District, that included part of Acres Homes. This is pretty much exactly in the area of Klein's southern appendage. If Aldine absorbed only a portion of White Oak, then it stands to reason that other districts would have absorbed the rest. It still doesn't explain why Klein would be asked (or volunteer) to absorb this area when it makes more sense geographically for Cy-Fair, Aldine, and/or Spring to have carved it up between themselves, but at least it lends credence to this appendage being part of a later acquisition, a reason why the territory was available for annexation, and a likely date for that annexation. The fact that the annexation would have happened a year before Rural High School District Number 1 changed its name to Klein and became an ISD might explain why present KISD's history neglects to mention the annexation. 

As far as the long, thin nature of the southern extension goes, I noticed much of the extension follows Steubner-Airline Road. Looking back at old USGS maps of the area, in 1937 Stuebner-Airline Rd was the only road with a bridge that crossed Cypress Creek for miles (and was also present on the 1920 topo map), so it would make sense only to zone kids for Klein if they could reasonably hop on Stuebner and take a straight shot up to the high school, hence a narrow corridor. But that corridor could have been feasible as far back as the 1920s, so it's also possible that KISD is correct when they say their present boundaries were set in 1928.

I found some additional corroboration that the southern appendage was a part of Klein at least as far back as the 1930s (which rules out racial considerations for having it, which would not have been a factor until the mid 60s at the earliest).  In 2003 the Houston Chronicle interviewed several alumni from the Klein High School class of 1943 for their 60th reunion. A 1943 graduation date means these students would have been 9th graders in the 1939-1940 school year. One of those students, L. V. Gregg, said he moved to Recreation Acres as a boy. Recreation Acres is located along Antoine Road south of White Oak Bayou, so definitely near the extreme southern tip of Klein's southern extension. Gregg and Gibson, another Recreation Acres resident, remembered the long bus ride of almost an hour to reach Klein High School. Gregg also remembers playing in the Klein marching band at the grand opening of the Houston Farmers Market on Airline. The land for the Houston Farmer's Market on Airline was bought in July 1941, and the market began operations sometime in 1942, most likely in the late spring or early summer of 1942 in order to coincide with the availability of vegetable crops. So all these details do corroborate the southern extension being in place before 1942 at the latest.