While students are on summer break from Great Hearts Lakeside, a charter school off of Altamesa Boulevard and Chisholm Trail Parkway in Southwest Fort Worth, people living in the surrounding neighborhood are catching a break from the school’s traffic.
With just a few weeks left before the new semester begins, residents can already predict what’s going to happen come August: Parents line up for hours on both sides of Harris Parkway, a main access road for both the neighborhood and the school, therefore clogging access, sending cars on alternate routes through the residential area and potentially impeding emergency vehicles.
The problem has steadily grown since 2020, when Great Hearts Lakeside opened its doors to grades K-5 in the developing Tavolo Park neighborhood. The school has since added more grade levels, and Tavolo Park built more homes, gradually increasing congestion in the area.
Records show that city leaders were made aware of this potential problem in 2019, when the school project was OK’d by the city. But the project got a green light nonetheless.
Road improvements that could alleviate the problem aren’t in the city’s plans for several years, Tavolo Park resident Joe Komisarz said.
“The short version of the issue is they planned a K-12 school at the end of a dead-end street,” Komisarz said.
Great Hearts Lakeside’s pickup route directs parents to enter Harris Parkway, a two-way, two-lane road, from Altamesa Boulevard. Vehicles take Harris south toward the dead end, loop around the median and head back north to drive into the campus.
Ryan Travis, director of strategic communications for Great Hearts Texas academies, said the school has worked with the community, public officials and residents to identify practical improvements as they wait for the long-term project to begin.
The school has hired two off-duty officers to help direct traffic flow on the campus and adjusted the arrival and dismissal times between upper and lower grade levels by 10 minutes to reduce the impact of traffic, he said.
“The academy has consistently asked families and staff to use approved traffic routes,” Travis said. “Neither the school nor the officers serving in that capacity can independently enforce traffic restrictions.”
As a former school principal, District 6 council member Mia Hall said she understands the drama created by after-school pickup can be dreadful. However, Great Hearts Lakeside needs to hold itself more accountable to the congestion it creates, she said.
“There has to be some systems (implemented) that may have to go beyond the boundary of your campus,” Hall said. “Your kids will not be safe if emergency personnel need to come to your campus.”
The daily traffic impact, according to residents
Komisarz lives in Ladera, a gated community for residents 55 years and older that’s one of four Tavolo Park developments directly west of Great Hearts Lakeside across Harris Parkway. When parents are picking up students, he said, they block two of the three entry points to his neighborhood.
“Cars are just jammed in here side by side,” Komisarz said. “You can’t move an emergency vehicle through there.”
Fort Worth police officer Percy Holland, who previously served as the neighborhood’s patrol officer, shared the same concern about whether first responders could navigate the roads.
During the school year, cars begin stacking up on Harris Parkway at 1 p.m. ahead of the student’s 3:30 p.m. dismissal, Holland said. Many times, the line extends half a mile, to where Altamesa Boulevard and Chisholm Trail Parkway intersect, he added.
“We wouldn’t be able to get to the emergency, especially if it’s at the school,” he said.
Current neighborhood patrol officer Mike Vargas said he is working with the community to find reasonable solutions to traffic flow before the semester starts.
Beyond emailing parents to remind them to comply with the procedures, the school is restricted in what they can do, said Katy Monwai, Great Hearts Lakeside’s upper school headmaster. While the school tries to stay aware of the neighborhood’s concerns, teachers’ main focus is educating kids, she said.
“Parents don’t always follow those instructions,” Monwai said. “We have a limited number of staff, and our first priority is doing what’s conventional and safe.”
Roadway enforcement challenges
Safety is the top concern for resident Ryan Beattie, a board member for Tavolo Park’s homeowner association. While the traffic on Harris Parkway has grown, some cars cut through the neighborhood from Bryant Irvin Road to get in line, he said.
The problem gets worse when cars that have cut through the neighborhood are blocked by vehicles on Harris Parkway from getting into the school line. That can lead to traffic spilling out on residential streets, Beattie added.
“Parents want to cut in (the line), they don’t want to wait for hours. I know I wouldn’t,” he said. “So they fly through here.”
A majority of the speeding tickets Holland issued during the five months he worked as the neighborhood police officer were given to parents picking students up from the school, he said. There are no stop signs in the neighborhood and no signs warning against vehicles stopping or standing on Harris Parkway, which restricted him from ticketing for other traffic violations, Holland added.
Without such road signage for police to enforce, roadway rules are vague, Beattie said.
Beattie’s seen it all: cars parked back-to-back on streets preventing residents from accessing their homes, residents trying to maneuver around cars idling in the single-lane streets, and cars traveling over the median to get closer to the school’s campus.
“We know that the ultimate goal that’s going to help is the second artery,” Beattie said.
Arterial roads are designed to move heavy volumes of traffic between major points in both urban and rural areas. Tavolo Park is located between Harris Parkway and Bryant Irvin Road, but these roads don’t connect, and traffic can only exit to Altamesa Boulevard.
While extending Bryant Irvin Road south to connect with Sycamore School Road was adopted into the city’s Master Transportation Plan on June 9 as a long-term project, it won’t be addressed until after 2034, according to the plan.
“No standing” signs were recently installed onto Harris Parkway by the city’s Transportation and Public Works Department. Neighborhood stop signs and short-term traffic flow resolutions are still necessary to alleviate the issue before the school adds 11th grade in August, Beattie said.
‘Bigger than what was foreseen’: School, neighborhood growth
Great Hearts Lakeside had over 1,400 students enrolled for the 2025-26 academic year, according to the Texas Tribune. The addition of another grade level at the school and the addition of many new businesses along Altamesa Boulevard between Bryant Irvin Road and Harris Parkway has only increased Heather Lamb’s concern for community safety.
Lamb is a resident board member for the Ladera at Tavolo Park homeowners association. Since she moved into the neighborhood in 2021, the growth has felt like a safety hazard, Lamb said.
“When you have a neighborhood school, you have walkers and kids riding bikes,” she said. “But then we have what could be up to 1,000 cars having to funnel through our neighborhood.”
This isn’t an uncommon occurrence for charter schools, and the current traffic situation isn’t unique to Great Hearts Lakeside, said Chelsea St. Louis, a senior capital projects officer for Fort Worth’s Transportation and Public Works department.
“We should have built the (Harris) road bigger, because we knew there was going to be way more traffic from the school, but it hasn’t panned out that way for most of the charter schools,” St. Louis said. “We see this issue pretty much all over the city at this point.”
In 2019, Great Hearts Lakeside was approved for a K-5 campus and to expand up to 12th grade in the following years. The 7400-7500 blocks of Chisholm Trail Parkway, where the charter school is located, were zoned as a multiuse development. The area’s zoning prevented any public or private schools from being built, according to documents from a 2019 council agenda.
The proposal for the school failed to meet many regulations such as required parking space, parking locations and multiple street setbacks, according to documents from a 2019 council agenda. However, city leaders at the time approved the zoning change and waived the restrictions, allowing a school to be built.
A 2019 traffic study predicted that the school’s traffic wouldn’t spill out onto public roads, said Jungus Jordan, District 6 council member at that time.
“There was a lot of effort that went in to make sure we had foreseen the issues,” Jordan said. “Apparently, the issue is bigger than what was foreseen.”
Temporary solutions to a multifaceted problem
Hoping to implement short-term traffic solutions, Beattie organized a public meeting with Great Hearts Lakeside representatives, Transportation and Public Works, District 6 council member Mia Hall, residents and officer Vargas on July 7.
Over an hour of discussion led to seven recommendations given to the school’s representatives from residents, Vargas and Hall.
“We all took a little bit of blame (for the situation), and now this is y’all’s turn,” Hall said. “We opened the dialog. We are all willing to work together. You’re the first domino to tell us what you are proposing.”
Ash Petrie is a reporting fellow for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at ash@fortworthreport.org.
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