Three Lake Travis Independent School District campuses lost water pressure Thursday, forcing early student pickups after restrooms across the buildings stopped working. Rough Hollow Elementary, Lake Travis Middle and Bee Cave Middle were all affected, with staff scrambling to organize car-rider lines and cross-check authorized guardians so families could retrieve their kids mid-day.
According to KXAN Austin, the outage disrupted restroom access at all three schools, and crews were working to restore water service as of Thursday afternoon. Rough Hollow Elementary began dismissing students through its front car-rider line and said it may relocate students to another LTISD facility, with more updates to come as needed, per the same report. At Lake Travis Middle, staff kept lunch running as normal and handed out bottled water even as restrooms throughout the building remained unusable.
How Each Campus Handled the Scramble
Lake Travis Middle organized pickup by grade level: sixth graders went to the front car-rider line, seventh graders to the bus line near the cafeteria, and eighth graders to the car-rider line by the tennis courts, the outlet reported. Families with multiple siblings were told to use the dismissal zone assigned to the youngest child, and staff gathered student names as they came through the line, only releasing kids to parents or legal guardians listed in the district's Skyward system. Parents seeking to pick up a student not normally authorized for release were asked to email the appropriate grade-level assistant principal — Mr. Toth for sixth grade, Ms. Bryant for seventh, or Ms. St. Clair for eighth, according to KXAN.
Bee Cave Middle followed a similar playbook, continuing lunch service and distributing bottled water while restrooms sat unavailable campuswide. Sixth graders were directed to the cafeteria, seventh graders to the front office, and eighth graders to the bus loop by the eighth-grade house, with families of multiple siblings also routed through the front office. Staff assisted with the pickup process throughout, and only guardians listed in Skyward were permitted to collect students, the outlet noted.
A Utility System Already Under Strain
The disruption did not happen in isolation. Just a day earlier, Crossroads Utility Services issued a boil water notice for Travis County Municipal Utility Districts 11, 12 and 13 — the districts covering the Rough Hollow area — citing system capacity issues, according to the City of Lakeway. Two days before that, the West Travis County Public Utility Agency placed its entire service area under Stage 3 mandatory water restrictions after storage tanks fell to critically low levels, the agency said. WTCPUA draws treated surface water from Lake Travis to supply western Travis and northern Hays counties.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rules require public water systems to maintain at least 35 psi under normal conditions, and any drop below 20 psi automatically triggers a boil water notice because of contamination risk, per the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That threshold explains why bottled water alone couldn't keep campuses open as normal — without adequate line pressure, flush toilets and handwashing sinks stop functioning, which is why LTISD confirmed to KVUE that restroom failure, not the boil notice itself, drove the decision to send students home early.
A Utility Handoff Just Days Away
The timing adds another wrinkle: Travis County MUDs 11, 12 and 13, which encompass Rough Hollow, are scheduled to transfer retail water and wastewater operations to the Lakeway Municipal Utility District on September 4, according to Lakeway MUD, which has supplied the area water on a wholesale basis since 2006. It remains unclear whether that pending transition played any role in the capacity issues behind this week's outage.
Lake Travis ISD serves roughly 10,770 students across 11 campuses spanning 118.2 square miles, according to the district, including seven elementary schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school. The district's rapid growth was underscored in June when its Board of Trustees approved a $299.5 million guaranteed maximum price for a second comprehensive campus, Highland Lakes High School, funded through voter-approved bonds. Communities inside LTISD boundaries, including Lakeway, Bee Cave and Rough Hollow, rank among the highest-demand real estate markets in Central Texas, with median home prices ranging from $800,000 to over $1.5 million, according to an August market analysis from the Seely Group.
What Happens to Instructional Time
Texas Education Agency rules require districts to log 75,600 operational minutes annually, but schools can apply for missed-day waivers when emergency health, safety or utility failures disrupt the calendar, per KCEN-TV. Whether Lake Travis ISD will need to file such a waiver over this week's early dismissals has not been addressed publicly. It's also not yet known when full water pressure will be restored across the three campuses, or whether Rough Hollow Elementary will ultimately need to relocate students to another district facility, as the school indicated it might.
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