Plano weighs parks, fire station for former school campuses

Two former Plano ISD campuses have already moved into city hands, and residents are pressing Plano to turn the empty land into parks, open space and public safety sites rather than another wave of houses.

Ownership of the former Davis Elementary site transferred to the City of Plano on April 22, and the former Armstrong Middle School property transferred on May 6. Forman Elementary is set to follow later this month, giving city leaders a clearer path to decide what replaces the closed campuses that once served nearby neighborhoods.

The public response has leaned strongly toward community uses. At open house meetings, residents backed expanding Caddo Park with the Davis property, converting the Armstrong site into a park and placing Fire Station 3 on the former Forman Elementary campus. Those options would preserve open land and add city services, while avoiding a heavier housing build-out that could bring more traffic and parking pressure into established neighborhoods.

Plano’s planning materials give the city room to pursue that direction. The Davis and Forman parcels are zoned single-family residential, and the Armstrong site is zoned the same way, but the permitted uses include parks, playgrounds and public safety buildings. That flexibility matters because the city is not just picking a new owner for the land. It is deciding whether these sites become neighborhood amenities, emergency response facilities or something more intense that could change the character of the blocks around them.

The future of the campuses is tied to Plano ISD’s broader downsizing. The Plano ISD Board of Trustees approved the district’s long-range facility plan on June 10, 2024, after a planning process that followed the Strategic Roadmap approved May 2, 2023. The plan called for closing four instructional facilities, Davis Elementary, Forman Elementary, Armstrong Middle School and Carpenter Middle School, and the district said two centralized special education programs were also affected.

The district said its planning effort included more than 70 parents, staff members and other community members on the advisory committee, along with six community meetings, campus staff meetings and digital communication over nine months. Later public meetings on the closed campuses drew roughly 354 residents across six sessions, after more than 80 nearby residents and community members attended the first open-house discussion at Haggard Middle School on Sept. 24, 2025.

For now, one major piece remains unresolved: the former Carpenter Middle campus is still owned by Plano ISD. That leaves Plano partway through a larger land-use shift, with the choices at Davis, Armstrong and Forman set to shape open space, emergency response and neighborhood character for years to come.