Why I Think Lake Travis ISD Is the Best School District in Texas

Lake Travis ISD is the best school district in Texas. Not “one of the good ones.” The best. And I am not saying that as a guy who sells houses out here, though I am that too. I am saying it as a dad with two kids in these schools right now, a junior at Lake Travis High School and an 8th grader at Bee Cave Middle School. I live this district every single day, at the dinner table, in the carpool line, at the games. So when I tell you it is special, it is not a sales pitch. It is my own family. Now I know how “best in Texas” sounds, so lets get the bias out of the way up front. Yes, I have a dog in this fight, two of them actually. But stick with me, because the reason I believe this has almost nothing to do with what you would expect. It is not the buildings. It is not even the test scores (though we will get to those, and they are good). It comes down to people. It always comes down to people. And it comes down to something this district built a long time ago, long before I ever got involved.

This was already a great district. Lets be clear about that.

Here is the part I want to get right, because it matters. Lake Travis did not become great last year. It was great before any of the new names showed up. It has been great for a long time, and the people who built that deserve the credit first. You want proof the standard around here is high? Look at the football program, and not because this is a sports story, but because of what it tells you about the culture. Lake Travis won five straight state championships from 2007 to 2011, the first program in Texas history to pull that off. The quarterback on that last title team was a kid named Baker Mayfield, who went on to win the 2017 Heisman Trophy as the only walk-on ever to do it. And he was not a one-off. Lake Travis became a genuine quarterback factory, a long line of Division I starters one after another (at one stretch eight straight Lake Travis starting QBs went on to Division I), guys like Garrett Gilbert and Todd Reesing, who won an Orange Bowl at Kansas. Now here is why I bring that up. You do not produce a run like that by accident. That is coaching, that is teachers keeping kids eligible and pushing them, that is a community that shows up. The football is just the loud, visible version of a standard that runs through the whole place. The same culture that made the Cavaliers a powerhouse is the culture in the classrooms and the band hall and the special ed wing. Excellence here is not new. It is the water everybody swims in. So credit where it is due. The longtime teachers, the coaches, the counselors, the staff who have been here twenty years, the parents who built the booster clubs and the PTAs, they made this. Whatever happens next is standing on their shoulders.

Buildings do not teach kids. People do.

I have been selling homes around Lake Travis, Bee Cave, and the Hill Country for 19 years. In that time I have watched families pick a house for a school zone, watched the schools change, watched the district grow from a sleepy little system into one of the most sought-after in Central Texas. And if you do this long enough you start to notice something. The buildings do not make the district. The people do. You can pour money into a campus and still have a mediocre school. Or you can have an old building with a great principal and great teachers and the kids thrive. I would argue leadership is one of the most important things a district has, and it is the thing nobody talks about when they are house hunting. They look at the rating, they look at the GreatSchools score, and they move on. That is fine. But the rating is a snapshot of the past. Leadership is a bet on the future. And a great district is really just a great group of people choosing, year after year, to keep the standard high. Which brings me to this past year, and why I am as fired up as I am writing this. We got to watch a new leadership team take the wheel of an already great district for a full year, and it was something to see.

The new leadership, and why I trust it

On Monday, June 2, 2025, Dr. Curtis Null became the 8th superintendent in Lake Travis ISD history. He came from Conroe ISD up near Houston, where he ran the 7th largest district in Texas (about 73,000 kids) since 2018. The Lake Travis board reviewed 38 applications to land on him. So no, this was not a coin flip. They went looking, and they found the guy. And he did not come alone, which is the part that tells you something. A month after he started, Lake Travis brought on Dr. Bethany Medford, who had been the deputy superintendent at Conroe, as the assistant superintendent of school leadership. Then there is the one I see most directly, because of my junior. James “Buddy” Bush took over as principal of Lake Travis High School on July 1, 2025, and he came from Grand Oaks High School in Spring, which is also Conroe ISD. So that is the superintendent, his deputy, and my kid’s high school principal, all part of the same group that came over. When people leave a 73,000-student district and follow a leader to one a fraction of that size, you should pay attention. People do not do that for a paycheck. They do it because they believe in the mission and they believe in the person. And Bush in particular has been a blast to watch. Twenty-plus years in education, and at Grand Oaks he ran a 6A campus of about 3,900 kids with real academic gains and rising AP participation, so the substance is there. But he also went viral this year with a video where he used full Gen-Z slang to beg kids to actually show up to class, something like 400,000 views, and my junior thought it was hilarious. That sounds like a small thing. It is not. He brought life and energy into that building, and you can feel it. As a dad I see it on my kid’s face. That is the stuff a rating will never capture. Jim Collins has this line in Good to Great that I keep coming back to. Get the right people on the bus first, he says, then figure out where the bus is going. Thats exactly what this past year looked like to me, except the bus was already moving fast. They did not have to build it. They just made sure the right people were on it. That is not nothing. That is the whole game.

Ok, but the numbers are good too

I am not going to pretend the data does not matter, because it does, and Lake Travis backs up the talk. In the 2024-25 Texas Education Agency accountability ratings, LTISD earned an “A,” scoring 90 out of 100. Of the 11 schools in the district, 7 earned an “A” and 4 earned a “B.” That is 64% of campuses pulling an A. And it was a jump from the year before, when the district scored an 89 and landed a B. Those ratings are not vibes. TEA builds them off STAAR scores, graduation rates, and college, career, and military readiness. So when I say the kids here perform, I am not making it up, the state is grading it. But here is where I am going to lose some of you, and thats ok. Because the test scores are not actually why I believe what I believe. They are the easy part. Any realtor can read you a rating off a website. Let me tell you the part most people never see.

The real test of a great district (and where I have to be honest with you)

I need to disclose something, because it is exactly what makes my opinion worth anything here. On top of being a parent in the district, I serve on the board of LTSEPAC, the Lake Travis Special Education Parent Advisory Council. I give a lot of my time to it, and I do it because I care about it, not because it sells houses (it does not). So yes, I am biased. But I am biased because I have seen this district from the inside in a way most people never will. Here is what serving on that board taught me. You can measure a district by how it treats its top students, the AP kids, the ones with the perfect SAT scores, the future valedictorians. Everybody measures that. The colleges measure it, the rankings measure it, the realtors quote it. But that is the easy measure. The real measure of a great district is how it treats the kids who need the most help. The special education families. The kids with IEPs and 504 plans. The families who are scared, who are fighting for services, who just want their child to be seen. That is the test. Because a district that only works for the easy kids is not a great district. It is a lucky one. And what I have watched, up close, through SEPAC, is a district that actually shows up for those families. LTSEPAC works on three things: supporting the special education teachers, educating parents on what their kids are entitled to, and advocating for equitable access for every student. I have sat in those meetings. I have seen the staff who give a damn. I have seen parents walk in terrified and walk out with a plan. That does not happen by accident. It happens because the people running this place, the ones who were already here and the ones who just arrived, decided every kid counts, not just the ones who make the district look good on paper. A lot of that comes down to who is leading the special services department, the team that actually runs special education day to day. At Lake Travis that is Jennifer Freeman, the Executive Director of Special Services, who brings more than two decades of public education experience to the job. From my seat on the SEPAC board, that kind of experience at the top of the department is exactly what you want, because this is the work that needs steady, knowledgeable hands. It is not flashy. It does not make the highlight reel. It just quietly determines whether a scared family gets help or gets a runaround. That is why this first year mattered so much to me, and honestly, it exceeded what I hoped for. Null, Medford, and Bush walked into a district that already does this well, and the question we all had going in was whether they would protect it and grow it or let it drift. A year in, here is the report card we watched unfold. They showed up. They listened. They did not come in swinging a wrecking ball to prove a point, which is exactly what you want from people who understand they inherited something special. It is amazing to watch, frankly. And if they keep stewarding what the teachers and coaches and families built here, Lake Travis is not just going to stay great. It is going to keep being the standard everybody else in Texas measures against.

What this has to do with your house (because eventually it does)

Look, I will not insult you by pretending this is not also a real estate blog. Great schools are the number one reason families move to Lake Travis, Bee Cave, Lakeway, and the surrounding Hill Country. And if you are the next family thinking about making that move, that is exactly where I can help. I am not interested in talking you into anything. What I am good at is helping you figure out where YOUR family actually fits out here, which zone, which neighborhood, which school feeds into which, and what that means for the house you buy. As a parent in these schools and someone on the special ed side of things, I can tell you the stuff that does not show up on a listing or a ratings site. The real texture of it. If you want the deeper dive on the individual campuses, I put together a complete parent’s guide to the Lake Travis ISD schools that breaks down each elementary, the boundaries, all of it. If you are weighing your options across the area, I also compared Eanes, Lake Travis, and Dripping Springs side by side, and went even wider in my Hill Country school district breakdown. And if you have already decided this is where you want to be, here is what the Lake Travis and Lakeway market is actually doing right now. The reason I am bullish on this area is not a hunch. It is a legacy of excellence, plus the right people stewarding it, plus a genuine commitment to every kid. That combination shows up in home values over time, but more than that, it shows up in the lives of the families who move here. Mine included. And that is the part I actually care about.

Lets find your spot out here

If you are thinking about moving to the Lake Travis area and you want the honest, lived-in version of what it is like to raise a family here, that is a conversation I genuinely enjoy having. I will not give you a sales pitch about the schools. I will just tell you what I see as a parent in them, the good and the parts that are still works in progress, and help you find the right fit for your family. Reach out through the contact page or call the office at (512) 366-3270, and lets grab a coffee and figure out where you belong out here.

Featured photo: North entrance to Lake Travis High School by Leann Michelle Lara, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.