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Architecture & Design

Adamson Teacher: Preservationists Are Being Selfish

By Josh Hixson |

When I talked with Tammy McLean on Friday, as Adamson High School students prepared for winter break and the news broke that DISD already had a demolition permit for part of the school’s new home, the journalism teacher and AP coordinator brought up a simple but unignorable point: “The people who are opposed to getting a new school need to come and sit in our classrooms where up until two days ago we had no heat in my room,” said McLean, an Oak Cliff resident who has been teaching at Adamson for the last 13 years. “Now that we do have heat, it’s going full blast. There’s no thermometer thing because the system is just ancient.”

Other basic necessities such as electricity are also unreliable, Mclean said.

“In the journalism room, if I run the printer at the same time they run the computers it throws the circuit [breaker].” McLean said.

The underlying question throughout our conversation was: Why discourage students who want to go to Adamson by creating more obstacles for them?

McLean said relocating the school to the Early College High School in the Nolan Estes Plaza while the current building is renovated, which was what parents and students were told would happen earlier in the year, is a significant obstacle for a community where most students don’t take the bus to school.

“You are asking kids to relocate again for the sake of saving some bricks on the front of a building? Our kids don’t have access to vehicles. Most of them walk here or they are dropped off,” McLean said.

She estimates that out of  about 1,300 students who attend Adamson, 300 go there through hardship transfers.

“They want to go to school here despite it,” McLean said referring to the school’s poor condition. “We are very family oriented. The feeling when you walk through the halls is that it’s a very safe place. That it’s a place where kids feel welcome. And I think that’s what draws a lot of kids here.”

She said they anticipate the school will grow in attendance when it moves into its new building because of the rising amount of transfer requests.

McLean argues that, in the end, decisions affecting the future of Adamson should not be influenced by alumni associations where many of the members no longer live or work in the neighborhood.

“They can’t be selfish and want to preserve something that’s not in the best interest of the kids and their future,” said McLean. “If given a choice of having my child go to school here or go to school in a new building where there’s enough technology, where they can run the Internet on a regular basis, I’m going to pick the new building.”

Look for more opinions on the Adamson issue from McLean and other Oak Cliff residents in the January 8 edition of Oak Cliff People.

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