At Coppell High School, our hallways are bustling with people; conversations are loud and blurred, and you can occasionally hear the sound of a kid playing a straw kazoo in the sea of teenage stress. 

The halls smell of excessive Axe and not-so-discreet sweat stains. It is impossible to block out the waves of people and frankly, I feel like my personal space is infringed upon. The problems of over population have become clear to many.

The reality is that Coppell needs a new high school.

Coppell is a growing town. In order to accommodate this growth, Coppell ISD built CHS9 this year, but it is not enough. Signs of growing infrastructure and new housing have become synonymous to our landscape. It would be foolish to believe that CHS9 will be a permanent solution to accommodate the influx of people.

“CHS9 helped and that it’s a stop gap for a little bit, but there’s new house development going up everywhere,” CHS GT/AP history teacher Diane De Waal said. “We’re not a small town, and I know that Coppell ISD doesn’t just mirror the parameters of Coppell.”

In fact, CHS encompasses areas of Irving and Dallas.

“We are having a lot of growth in our southern districts, but overall when you look at other surrounding districts such as Frisco, we aren’t really a fast growing district,” CISD trustee Leigh Walker said. “We’ve just had this current pop that’s different for us.”

Walker elaborated later that these “pops” were hard to predict in the course of over five years. We may not be considered a fast growing district in technical terms at the moment, but what is to say another future “pop” will not change that? A new school will be needed in the next five to 10 years to accommodate for growing numbers. CISD has taken notice of this and is having a board meeting in October where one of the topics to be discussed will be the growing demographics.

Another benefit is larger classes make it difficult to have a concept personally explained, and this problem will only worsen. That does not mean the teacher is not doing their best, but with so many students, the task is almost impossible. A new high school would make the Coppell learning experience more personal and help the performance of students.

“Certain courses would benefit from having less kids,” De Waal said.

A new campus would create a local rivalry between CHS and a new school that would increase school spirit in both establishments. School pride would not waver or diminish as critics of the plan may state.

“I don’t think it would affect the school pride at all. Even if it did, that’s not what we go to school for,” CHS junior Angie Smith said.

By moving freshmen back to the high school campus, they would be able to take part in high school traditions, maybe even elevating the school pride. When I first arrived at the high school, I enjoyed being able to rally behind the football team in the student section, where pride is never lacking. Freshmen cannot share that experience now. How can they really feel they are a part of us when they have been moved to another campus? Not only that, they face the uphill battle of having to adapt to a new school twice in two years.

“[CHS9 students] are probably not going have as easy of a time adapting to to the high school,” Smith said. “For me, I would’ve been kind of sad not going to Coppell High School, I would’ve wanted to have the real high school experience. The freshmen are kind of segregated from the rest of us.”

Overpopulation. Lack of a personal learning environment. Preserving school spirit and unity. The solution to all of these problems lie in the construction of a new high school in Coppell.