DISD documents, however, tell a different story.
After the News' editorial blast, Woolery convened a meeting in his office to develop some additional action. In attendance: Assistant Superintendent Hayes, Townview Principal Watson--and DISD trustee Ewell, who had requested the meeting and designated the players.
Like Watson, Ewell clearly views talented-and-gifted programs as exclusionary, catering to middle-class kids, mostly Anglos, who start off in life with unfair advantages that a school system needs to erase, not expand.
"If the parents can't read, how can they read to their children?" asks Ewell. "Not every person has that kind of environment. They don't turn the TV off; they can't. The kids are off running to the store and getting videotapes so the schools need to adapt that technology for these kids--to have pictures and videos in the classroom, not just the written word all the time."
Putting bright kids in separate classes is a mistake, she says. The goal should be to mix kids of all intellectual abilities in classes that are educationally superior, with some kids looking at picture books and some kids reading Kafka.
"You can teach a class on the Sahara Desert without reading about the Sahara Desert," she says. "You can have pictures and maps. Then they're all learning. Not, 'Did you read this book last night?' it's, 'What do you know about the Serengeti?'"
Despite a philosophy that runs counter to TAG, Ewell makes a point of formally declaring her support for it.
"Yvonne Ewell wants TAG," she says.
In conversation about Townview's TAG some strange beliefs emerge.
"There's all that stuff out there with the white children and the purple hair," she says distastefully, referring to TAG kids who have dyed their hair. "I don't think this is healthy behavior for white children. I think a lot of parents have pampered them. I hear there is some of this homosexual stuff going on."
"Is it only the white TAG students who are homosexuals?" I ask.
"I heard only about the whites," Ewell says.
The day after the meeting about TAG in Woolery's office, Assistant Superintendent Hayes composed a letter to Woolery summarizing the discussion. The superintendent subsequently forwarded the letter to all the board members with his own cover letter, assuring the trustees that the staff was moving quickly to solve the TAG problem.
Hayes' original letter to Woolery, a copy of which was found in Watson's files, began like this: "On November 2, 1995, after our meeting with Dr. Ora Watson and Dr. Yvonne A. Ewell, it was concluded that the Dallas Public Schools would proceed with plans to revise some components of the talented-and-gifted program at Townview Center."
Somewhere between Hayes' office and the board's mailboxes, that paragraph was changed.
Someone had apparently decided it wasn't a good idea to tell the board just who was doing all this behind-the-scenes work on TAG. So the draft was edited--twice. The first time, Watson and Ewell's names were scratched out with a black pen. The second time, the reference to the meeting was taken out completely--perhaps out of fear that some pesky board member would ask who attended.
Whoever deleted the two women's names also changed a key element in the implementation of the proposed plan.
Here's how Hayes' original draft read: "The plan will be reviewed in an open meeting of parents from the School for the Talented and Gifted to ensure that the majority of parent concerns will be addressed by the intended changes."
This is what it was changed to: "The plan will be reviewed in an open meeting of parents from the School for the Talented and Gifted to ensure that the majority of parents are familiar with the proposed restructure of the TAG Program at Townview."
What Woolery didn't tell the board was that the TAG parents had already rejected that plan a week before in a meeting with Watson.
During the next month the issue heated up dramatically in the press with no solution in sight. Finally, on December 1, Woolery summoned Feibelman, Hayes, and Watson to his office for another meeting.
As Woolery came out to greet his three employees for the session, Ewell and fellow trustee Hollis Brashear, on the way out of a different meeting, came upon the group, which caused Ewell to come unglued.
"You fix this problem!" she yelled at the four of them, standing in the superintendent's reception area, with secretaries and support-staff members sitting all around.
"Ewell was screaming at us," recalls Feibelman. "She was saying that we weren't going to have Townview ruined by a couple of hundred students."
Despite her behind-the-scenes involvement--and her insistence that she had chosen to bow out of the matter entirely--Ewell later complained bitterly in public that she had been cut out of the discussions involving Townview.
Why would Woolery help cloak her true role?
Woolery's refusal to discuss anything makes it impossible to know for sure, but it is a fact that Ewell, while a DISD administrator, played a role in Woolery's first principal appointment at Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Oak Cliff.
When Marvin Edwards--the district's first African-American superintendent--was quietly pushed out of his job in 1993 by the board's Anglo and Hispanic majority, Ewell and two other black board members made the transition easy by giving Woolery their blessings.
Continued...
