Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
59° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement

FrontBurner

A Daily Conversation About Dallas
Education

Dallas ISD Will Soon Have a Student-Operated Food Truck

Nataly Keomoungkhoun
By |
Image
Curbside Delights, the student-led and operated food truck, was designed by Dallas ISD graphic design students. Dallas ISD

When 18-year-old Melvin Hicks graduates from Moisés E. Molina High School, he wants to work in a restaurant.  He’s a senior in the school’s culinary arts program, which teaches students how to cook, manage a restaurant, and develop other skills required for a career in the hospitality industry. Hicks wants to one day become an executive chef and own a restaurant.

But this spring semester, Hicks is trying to get a food truck up and running with his classmates. In January, Dallas ISD unveiled a new student-operated food truck, the first of its kind in Texas. Hicks—along with DISD high school students from Molina, Bryan Adams, and Skyline—is learning how to start a food truck from the ground up.

“I’ve never operated a food truck before,” Hicks says. “Once I get there, it’s going to humble some people—it’s going to humble me as well. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know. So, there’s just more to be discovered about it.”

The food truck, which the students named Curbside Delights, was created in partnership with TurboTax parent company Intuit, says Jason Hamilton, the district’s career and technical education coordinator. The financial software giant donated a fully operational food truck with a commercial-grade kitchen, and students will use Intuit products to help them learn the business and finance sides of the operation. Hamilton says he is aiming for Curbside Delights to debut in late April or early May. It’s expected to be fully functional for the 2024-2025 school year. Intuit has entered into similar partnerships with school districts in three other states, but Dallas is pioneering the project in Texas.

Hamilton has more than two decades of hospitality experience, including 18 years as an executive chef. His job with the school district is to manage the food truck initiative. The plan is to start with the three high schools—all of which have culinary arts, business, and graphic design programs—and then expand to another six schools.

Students and teachers within those three career programs have been collaborating on the truck’s design, its business plan, a menu, and the necessary permitting work. (Last September, House Bill 2878 went into effect to make permits easier for food truck operators, and the city of Dallas in 2022 rewrote its code to be more friendly to these operations.) Business students will handle marketing, point-of-sale operations, and budget management. The graphic design students will design the menus and promotional materials, and culinary arts students will come up with the dishes on the menu, manage truck operations, prepare and serve food, and clean.

The money the students make will go back into the program to support the Career and Technical Education pathways that are involved with the project.

Education

10 Dallas ISD Programs or Schools You Should Know About That Aren’t Magnet Schools

Bethany Erickson
By |
Image
Dallas ISD STEM Environmental Center is one of many schools tailored to different interests and ambitions within the district. Dallas ISD

There are, at last count, 240 schools in the Dallas Independent School District, and a handful of them get a great deal of attention (and rightly so). But among those 240 schools are some gems that even longtime Dallasites may be unaware of. 

First, an explainer: Dallas ISD, as a rule, has an open enrollment policy and a focus on school choice, which means that if you live in Far North Dallas but work downtown, and there’s a great school on the way to work, you could enroll your child there, provided there’s space. 

But the district also has several different varieties of schools. There are magnet schools, where students take tests to qualify and the campuses offer specialized instruction in everything from leadership to arts education. There are single-gender schools and neighborhood schools. There are transformation schools that center around innovative approaches in STEAM education, arts, Montessori, project-based learning, dual language, and more. 

Dallas ISD magnet schools often get a lot of attention. Our mission today? Find 10 schools or programs you should know about, that aren’t magnet schools. (Bear in mind that this is not an exhaustive list–there are a lot of really great neighborhood schools and transformation schools throughout the district.)

Nonprofits

In Joppa, a Shuttered School Could Become a Community Center

Will Maddox
By |
Image
The main entry of The Place at Honey Springs, where the existing school and new construction meet. Courtesy: HKS

The story of Melissa Pierce School is also the story of Joppa, the neighborhood in which it sits. Formerly enslaved people founded this freedmen’s town on the banks of the Trinity River after the Civil War. Following decades of isolation and neglect as the city grew, present-day residents want to turn the neighborhood’s historic school into its only community center.

Named for the daughter of a slave who donated the land for the school, Melissa Pierce was built in 1953 to offer a closer option for Black children in a segregated Wilmer-Hutchins School District. It operated as an elementary, middle school, and K-12 school over the years. As school districts gradually began to desegregate following Brown v. Board of Education, Joppa’s children had more options for schooling in nearby Dallas ISD. Melissa Pierce’s enrollment declined until the school closed in 1968.

A church used the building before it was donated to Habitat for Humanity, which built more than 100 homes in the area over the last two decades. During that time, Joppa became increasingly isolated from the rest of the city. Bordered by the Trinity River, train tracks, highways, and heavy industry, the community lacked access to healthy food and many other taxpayer-funded resources and services readily available to the rest of Dallas. It recently lost regular bus service and has never had a public space for gatherings.

Fifth-generation Joppa resident Shalondria Galimore is leading the effort to change that reality. Galimore is now the Joppa Neighborhood Association president and the CEO and founder of the Melissa Pierce Project, the nonprofit behind transforming the Melissa Pierce School into a community center. Habitat previously planned to build homes on the Melissa Pierce property, but Galimore and the Joppa community worked to preserve the building and convinced Habitat to donate it so it could be redeveloped.

Local News

As a Special Session on Vouchers Ramps Up in Austin, Who Will They Benefit?

Bethany Erickson
By |
Image
A sign is held up during a rally at the Texas Capitol on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. Protesters came out to speak about the upcoming special session where lawmakers will be discussing school choice and vouchers for private schools that many are claiming will hurt public schools. Sergio Flores/Special to American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK

The third special session in Austin has been chugging along for only three days, and already there has been a great deal written about the biggest item on the lawmakers’ to-do list: school vouchers.

Proponents of vouchers or “education savings accounts” say this push is to give parents choices on where they send their kids to school, giving additional resources to families who choose private or home schooling. Opponents say it’s an idea that’s been defeated time and again in Texas, lacks accountability to taxpayers and parents, and has been proven ineffective in improving student outcomes.

There’s a vertiginous amount of discussion on the merits and disadvantages of the so-called school choice movement supported by Gov. Greg Abbott. (We wrote about the discussion just as the regular legislative session began last year.) Nothing passed in that session. Abbott has vowed that some form of voucher legislation will need to come across his desk, or he’ll continue to keep lawmakers in Austin through multiple special sessions.

But on Monday, just as the debate over the governor’s priority matters of school vouchers and education savings accounts began, state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas) posed a question to a roomful of reporters: “How many of our so-called failing public schools are in affluent neighborhoods?”

He was asking who vouchers are intended to help and whether they are actually intending to address the social and economic issues that often impact the trajectory of public schools. According to last year’s accountability ratings, more than 90 percent of the state’s public school districts earned at least a C, with 75 percent earning a B or above. Dallas ISD earned an 86.

To Johnson’s point, many of the same schools that are often labeled “failing” are dealing with issues that you don’t typically see in more affluent schools. Jack Schneider, an education historian at the University of Massachusetts, pointed to a study this week that explored how accountability is often based on the assumption that schools are failing for lack of effort—a view that is often also repeated when people talk about the need for vouchers. The authors, Marshall Smith and Jennifer O’Day, warned in 1993 that it is often erroneously assumed that schools are low performing because “school personnel lack the will to improve.”

The two say that when teachers and staff are not supported, don’t have the resources, or where staffing a school fully is a problem, “as it is in many schools serving poor and minority students,” sanctions and rewards alone won’t work.

Advertisement

Earlier this month, a small movement by some school districts to withhold their property tax “recapture” payments to the state seemed to be taking hold. At least three North Texas districts were considering the idea, but two have put the idea on hold.

As of two weeks ago, two districts had voted to withhold their payments—nearby Keller ISD and the Houston-adjacent district of Spring Branch. Carroll ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD then placed a discussion about the prospect on their respective school board agendas. After Gov. Greg Abbott announced his plan to call a special session focused on school funding, those districts are now walking back the idea.

Recapture is a way the state distributes the part of property tax bills that is collected by local school districts. “Property-rich” schools that collect more in property taxes pay a portion of their tax revenue to the state, where it is placed in the general fund to be redistributed to property-poor schools. 

When a district’s property values per student exceed the threshold set by the Texas Legislature, school districts are required to “equalize” their wealth. They typically do that by purchasing attendance credits. But many of these districts are running short on cash.

Last week, Grapevine-Colleyville school board president Shannon Braun said the district would be postponing its decision in favor of a more “diplomatic” approach. Carroll also punted. They plan to use the coming October special session in Austin to speak with lawmakers before putting the idea to a vote.

“I just want to make sure that if we’re gonna make a punch that it’s effective and it’s the right time,” she said.

Education

The State Hasn’t Addressed School Funding. Some Districts Say They’re Done Waiting.

Bethany Erickson
By |
Image
As legislators drag their feet on school finance, some North Texas districts are considering not sending their "recapture" payments to Austin. Courtesy: iStock

The Texas Legislature failed to pass school funding reform in the regular session last May, and the issue has reached a boiling point.

A handful of districts are now considering withholding their “recapture” payments to the state. Trustees in the Houston-adjacent district of Spring Branch were the first to make that decision, and Keller ISD’s board followed with an affirmative vote this week. A discussion about recapture is on the agenda for Carroll ISD’s September meeting, and Grapevine-Colleyville board president Shannon Braun confirmed Tuesday that its trustees will also vote on whether to withhold the district’s payment this month. 

Recapture is a way the state distributes the part of property tax bills that is collected by local school districts. In simple terms, property-rich schools that collect more in property taxes pay a portion of their tax revenue to the state, where it is placed in the general fund to be redistributed to property-poor schools. That’s why you’ll frequently see it referred to by the sobriquet “Robin Hood.”

When a district’s property values per student exceed the threshold set by the state legislature, it is required to “equalize” its wealth by either purchasing attendance credits, or shedding property. The latter is unattractive, so most districts opt to purchase attendance credits, payments that require one-time approval by voters.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the number of districts required to pay recapture dollars has increased exponentially. In 1994, the first year, $127 million was collected from 34 districts. In 2021, the state collected more than $3 billion from over 170 districts. Dallas ISD became subject to recapture in 2009.

Education

10 Dallas ISD Programs or Schools You Should Know About That Aren’t Magnet Schools

Bethany Erickson
By |
Image
The Dallas ISD STEM Environmental Education Center has 500 acres of forest, farmland, trails, classrooms, laboratories and more, including a barn full of animals. Dallas ISD

There are, at last count, 240 schools in Dallas ISD, and a handful of them get a great deal of attention (and rightly so). But among those 240 schools are some gems that even longtime Dallasites may be unaware of. 

First, an explainer: Dallas ISD, as a rule, has an open enrollment policy and a focus on school choice, which means that if you live in Far North Dallas but work downtown, and there’s a great school on the way to work, you could enroll your child there, provided there’s space. 

But the district also has several different varieties of schools. There are magnet schools, where students take tests to qualify and the campuses offer specialized instruction in everything from leadership to arts education. There are single-gender schools and neighborhood schools. There are transformation schools that center around innovative approaches in STEAM education, arts, Montessori, project-based learning, dual language, and more. 

Dallas ISD magnet schools often get a lot of attention. Our mission today? Find 10 schools or programs you should know about, that aren’t magnet schools. (Bear in mind that this is not an exhaustive list–there are a lot of really great neighborhood schools and transformation schools throughout the district.)

Everyone knows who Jim Schutze is. But you might not know about his connection to Houston. Once upon a time, he was the Dallas bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. In that capacity, he made a lot of hay writing about the shenanigans at the Dallas Independent School District. Then Jim took a job at the Dallas Observer, where he wrote about the district’s turnaround and two people who had a hand in it: then trustee Mike Morath and then superintendent Mike Miles. Now Morath runs the Texas Education Agency, which is taking control of the failed Houston ISD. The tip of Morath’s spear, as Jim puts it, is none other than Miles.

Jim explains all this with typical Schutzean wryness in a new Substack he just launched called Shoots. The first installment, titled “Houston at the Spear,” went up yesterday. In the coming weeks, he intends to help Houston understand the people who’ve come to take over their public schools. He writes:

Do I understand how little anyone in Houston will want to hear from anybody from Dallas about how to run the Houston schools? My, yes. I already told you. I used to earn my living that way.

Worse, I intend to write about it here myself. For Houston. Oh, my goodness, it’s awful. Me. An old, white ex-hippie guy in Dallas. I venture, I dare, I presume to tell Houston in the months ahead what’s going on in Houston. And in all candor, I confess that a minor part of my motivation will be knowing exactly how irritating and preposterous that will be for Houston. 

I asked Jim whether he’d pitched this idea to the Chronicle, and, if not, how he settled on Substack. “Me no talk Chronicle,” Jim texted back. “I have no idea what I’m doing. A friend has been nagging me to break the Facebook habit. He’s right. It makes me feel stoopit. Supposedly Substack is smarter. Why, I don’t fully know yet.”

I asked him if he plans to write something every week. “Yes, at least that,” he texted. “Looks like, if I write 12 columns a week and charge for them, I can equal what I would get as a part-time Walmart shopping cart dispenser.”

So there you go. Jim’s Shoots is obviously aimed at Houston, but I think a fair number of folks in Dallas will want to follow along, too. Sign up and let’s see if his revenue projections are accurate.

Advertisement
Local News

A Day After Shooting, Staff at Thomas Jefferson High Prepare to Reassure Students

Bethany Erickson
By |
Image
Dallas ISD police and Dallas police responded to a shooting in the parking lot at Thomas Jefferson High School on March 21, 2023. One student was taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. Bethany Erickson

This story was originally published at 2:23 p.m., and was updated at 4:42 p.m. to include the names of the Thomas Jefferson High School staff members that responded to the shooting and clarify how much the district gets from the state per pupil for school safety.

Staff at Thomas Jefferson High School, near Bachman Lake in northwest Dallas, has trained for the worst and often has had to put it into practice. A tornado destroyed their campus in 2019 and they had to help their traumatized students relocate 20 minutes away to Edison Middle School. Months later, the pandemic shuttered schools, making it difficult to offer those students the same ongoing support.

But despite all of that, or maybe because of it, the staff was ready for Tuesday afternoon. Shots rang out not long after dismissal in the parking lot of the new campus, which welcomed students and teachers a little over two months ago. Raul Velazquez, an athletic trainer, immediately rendered first aid to the injured student, who had been shot in the arm. Bob Romano, the band director called 911 within seconds. Assistant athletic director Brandi Elder called principal Ben Jones to alert him. Jones called Dallas ISD leadership, who arrived on the scene within 10 minutes of getting the call.

Dallas Fire-Rescue, Dallas ISD police, and Dallas police were at TJ within minutes, Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said Wednesday morning. DFR said Tuesday that it arrived on the campus by 4:41 p.m.

There were about 300 students still on campus; the total student body is about 1,400. Other staff members rushed to get the kids back inside the building. The campus was locked down within two minutes after the shooting. It lasted until law enforcement determined the threat was over. 

The investigation is ongoing, but the district said three individuals were involved in the shooting. Two suspects were in a car that “drove up,” allegedly shot the victim, and then drove away. The male victim was a student at the school. He was taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. At least one of the suspects is also enrolled at Thomas Jefferson. No one has been arrested, but Elizalde said there was no evidence to indicate a fight or altercation preceded the shooting.

The superintendent also said she is “confident” that the event was an isolated incident. 

When students returned to school in 2021 after months of virtual learning during the pandemic, Dallas ISD knew it would need to address learning gaps.

One of its experiments involved introducing two calendars that extended the school year for campuses that opted in. The goal was to provide more time for teachers to get kids back up to speed.

Now two years later, the district is examining whether test scores prove a longer school year improved student outcomes. At the Dallas ISD board of trustees briefing last week, Chief Academic Officer Shannon Trejo walked the board through some preliminary data that indicates that offering three potential calendars—a standard calendar, an intersession calendar, and a school-day redesign calendar—may have helped some students retain more of what they learned.However, the gains were less than what trustees expected.

The 175-day base calendar is still used by 194 schools within the district. But as of last year, campuses could also opt for an intersession calendar that added 21 additional days of instruction, which were optional. They also could choose a school day redesign calendar that added up to 28 extra days that were not optional. Forty-one schools opted in to the intersession calendar. Five schools chose the school day redesign. 

The verdict? Extending the school year did lead to some growth. The district measured that growth two ways: the Measures of Academic Progress (or MAP) test, which is given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, and the STAAR test results.

When a child needs to stay home from school, it can translate to losses in state funding for public school districts across Texas.

“When a student stays home sick, the state pays schools less, but the light bill doesn’t go down,” Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde explained on Twitter. The solution, she says, is simple, yet complicated: “Fund schools on enrollment, not attendance.”

The biggest part of a district’s state funding comes from average daily attendance, which is the sum of a district’s daily attendance counts divided by the days it is open and teaching kids. The money is doled out on a per pupil basis, so if you had a student that attended regularly, a district would get $6,160. If a student missed, for instance, nine days over the school year, the district would lose about $300. That can add up.

According to Texas Education Agency records, Dallas ISD’s projected average daily attendance for 2023 is 133,983, but its projected total student count is about 136,821.406, a difference of 2,838. That would mean that the district could face losing nearly $17.5 million under the Average Daily Attendance funding formula.  

During the height of the pandemic, districts could have experienced financial hardships because of absences. But when it became clear that extended absences could mean some districts lose millions in funding, the Texas Education Agency made several adjustments that held districts harmless for those missing students. But that clearly wasn’t a long-term solution for a virus that still keeps students out for a week or longer at a time.

Local News

Welcome Home, Thomas Jefferson High School

By Jeffrey McWhorter |
Image
Workers install the TJ logo in the center of the school’s new turf practice field on May 23, 2022. The $1 million pledged by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones helped pay for the new field. Jeffrey McWhorter

The dance and the football game were in October, but Thomas Jefferson High School has been waiting for its true homecoming for more than three years. A tornado blew apart the campus in October 2019, displacing the community to another school in another neighborhood 9 miles away. The students, teachers, and staff were disrupted again the next year by the coronavirus pandemic.

But on Monday, the TJ community returned to a fully rebuilt campus on Walnut Hill Lane.

“What’s that phrase from Dorothy? There’s no place like home?” says teacher and senior class sponsor Cathleen Cadigan. “We finally get to click our heels.”

But even before their high school experience was upended by a twister and a pandemic, many TJ students were already well-acquainted with the concept of sudden and unexpected displacement. Ninety-seven percent of Thomas Jefferson’s 1,450 students are Latino, and 67 percent are considered “emerging bilingual.” Of those, 212 are officially classified as “newcomers,” meaning they have been in the United States for three years or fewer. That is the highest percentage of any high school in Dallas ISD.

Most hail from the arid plains of Mexico or the tropical hills of Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” made up of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. They have settled with friends and family in the dense maze of apartments beneath the Love Field approach pattern just north of Bachman Lake. Many TJ students, or their parents, left their countries of origin on treacherous northward journeys, often to escape gang violence, extortion, or crushing poverty, usually never to return.

“I came here seven years ago from Honduras,” Dennilson Duarte, a former TJ soccer player, told me shortly after the storm in 2019. He graduated in 2020. “Thomas Jefferson and Cary Middle School has been my home for the past seven years, and losing them feels like I’m losing my home again.”

Assistant Principal Erika Vigil oversees the Dallas International Academy, a district pilot program started at TJ this year to help newcomers assimilate. She says she regularly meets kids who boarded a bus at the border and “got off when the crowd got off.” Some have never seen a lunch line before. “Even for the kids who have been here for six months, they’re still kinda like deer in the headlights every day,” she says.“That little sense of familiarity [was] literally uprooted, so it [was] almost like a re-immigration.”

I began documenting the lives of these immigrant students five years ago as part of an ongoing project called The Time We Have Here, which focuses on the stories of two (now former) TJ soccer players from Central America. That project revealed that, while it can take time to adjust to the new language and culture, many students eventually find TJ to be a haven of security and camaraderie, especially for those living in small apartments packed with extended family. But whatever sense of home these students had discovered on Walnut Hill Lane was vaporized that night in October.

Advertisement