If you’re moving to Aubrey with kids in tow, the first question is almost never about the horses or the historic downtown. It’s about schools. And in a town that has gone from a quiet 1881 railroad stop to one of the fastest-growing corners of Denton County, the honest answer is a little more layered than “your kids go to Aubrey schools.” Here’s a plain-English guide to how public education works in and around Aubrey.
Meet the Chaparrals
The main district serving the city is Aubrey Independent School District, and its mascot is the Chaparral — the roadrunner, a fitting emblem for a place that keeps sprinting to keep up with its own growth. School colors are red, navy and white, and Friday-night football at Aubrey High School is one of those small-town rituals that still draws a real crowd.
Aubrey ISD doesn’t only serve the city limits. Its boundaries also cover Krugerville and reach into parts of Cross Roads, Providence Village and a small slice of Little Elm. So plenty of families with a “76227” or Denton County address land inside Aubrey ISD even if they’ve never driven through downtown Aubrey.
A district growing about as fast as the town
The numbers tell the story. Aubrey ISD enrolled around 4,900 students as of the 2025-26 school year, according to the Texas Tribune’s schools data — more than double what it was a decade earlier, a jump of roughly 111 percent since 2016. The district is regularly listed among the fast-growing districts in North Texas, and its own projections have suggested enrollment could keep climbing sharply through the end of the decade as master-planned neighborhoods keep filling in.
That kind of growth doesn’t come for free. In May 2022, Aubrey ISD voters approved a bond package totaling roughly $385.9 million across two propositions. Proposition A — about $354 million — funded new campuses, including three new elementary schools and a second middle school, plus an expansion at Aubrey High School, renovations and land purchases for future sites. Proposition B — roughly $31.9 million — covered extracurricular facilities like practice fields, tennis courts and an indoor multipurpose building. District officials said at the time the bond was structured without a planned increase to the tax rate. Much of what you’ll see on the campus list below is the bond turning into brick and mortar.
The campuses, grade by grade
As of the 2025-26 school year, here’s how Aubrey ISD is laid out:
Elementary schools (roughly PK/K through 5th):
- HL Brockett Elementary — the district’s long-standing elementary campus
- James A. Monaco Elementary
- Jackie Fuller Elementary
- Pete and Myra West Elementary
Early Bird Learning Center rounds out the youngest end, handling pre-K and early learning.
Middle schools (grades 6-8):
- McNabb Middle School — formerly Aubrey Middle School, recently renamed to honor Terrie McNabb
- Evalois Owens Middle School — the district’s second middle school, which opened in the fall of 2025 to relieve crowding
High school (grades 9-12):
- Aubrey High School — home of the Chaparrals
The addition of Owens Middle School is a good example of how quickly things are changing here. For years, one middle school was enough. Now there are two, with attendance boundaries redrawn for 2025-26 to split students between them. If you moved to Aubrey even three or four years ago, the map your neighbors describe may already be out of date.
The Denton ISD twist every Aubrey parent should know
This is the part that trips up new families, so it’s worth slowing down on: not every home with an Aubrey address is zoned to Aubrey ISD.
Some of the big master-planned communities that carry an Aubrey mailing address actually sit inside Denton Independent School District instead. The clearest example is Sandbrock Ranch, the popular community off US-377. Kids there attend Sandbrock Ranch Elementary — which opened in 2022 and is a Denton ISD campus, not Aubrey ISD. The Union Park community, another Aubrey-addressed neighborhood, likewise feeds Denton ISD schools.
Why does this happen? School district boundaries were drawn long before these subdivisions existed, and they don’t follow city limits, ZIP codes or mailing addresses. A single road can have Aubrey ISD on one side and Denton ISD on the other. Both are well-regarded, growing districts — this isn’t a “good school / bad school” situation — but they run different calendars, different bus routes, different registration systems and different feeder patterns. For a family choosing a home, it changes which campus your child walks into on the first day.
How to confirm your actual zone
Because the map keeps shifting with each new neighborhood and each newly opened campus, don’t rely on what a listing, a neighbor or even an older article (including this one) tells you. Verify it directly before you sign anything:
- Check the district first. Confirm whether the specific address is inside Aubrey ISD or Denton ISD. Aubrey ISD publishes attendance-zone information at aubreyisd.net; Denton ISD’s boundaries live at dentonisd.org.
- Ask about the campus, not just the district. Even within Aubrey ISD, the 2024-25 and 2025-26 boundary changes mean two houses on the same street can be zoned to different elementary or middle schools.
- Call the district office. When in doubt, a quick call to the district’s central office will give you a definitive answer for a specific street address — far more reliable than a real-estate site’s automated “assigned schools” box, which is often a year or two behind reality.
The bigger picture
Aubrey’s schools are, in a real sense, a mirror of the town itself: proud of a long history, stretched by rapid arrival of new families, and building fast to keep pace. A district that had a single middle school not long ago now has two, several elementary campuses, and a bond-funded construction pipeline still working through its list.
For families weighing a move, the takeaway is simple. Aubrey ISD and its Chaparrals anchor the community, the campuses are newer and more numerous than the town’s small-town reputation might suggest, and the one thing you should never assume is that an “Aubrey” address automatically means Aubrey ISD. Confirm the zone, learn the campus, and you’ll be starting the school year on solid ground.
