KERA education reporter Stella Chavez spent a few hours on campus Thursday doing initial research for a series of stories discussing the changing demographics in North Texas and their influence on public schools.

In addition to looking at a high school in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Duncanville, Chavez is also focusing on Liberty, partly because of its Asian population.

“It’s very ethnically and racially diverse and in this school, and I think it’s close to 30 percent Asian,” Chavez said. “In some other districts you often fine, like in urban areas, a larger Hispanic or Latino student population or African American population. People are coming from many different places than from Texas or from Frisco, so I wanted to look at how this school is dealing with those types of changes.”

Chavez said the Asian community in Frisco has a lot to do with the changes in demographics, since many of them are not originally from the area or Texas.

“I wanted to be able to tap into that Asian community and explore the families that are here, where they’re from, what their backgrounds are, and why they came to Frisco,” Chavez said. “I also just wanna get to see the rest of the student body and how they interact with everyone.”

As well as ethnic aspects of demographics, Chavez said she found that Frisco has a higher income and education level than the other schools she’s looked at in the area.

“It’s just economically different,” Chavez said. “In Frisco, for the most part, the level of education and income is higher. The issues here are perhaps very different from issues at other schools.”

The diversity of the school wasn’t the only thing that caught her attention. 

“You guys have a very active journalism program here,” Chavez said. “You tackle some pretty weighty topics and you cover a lot of different things. They’re meatier topics, and I wanna see how you all cover some of this issues and what you learn from them.”