The Dallas Independent School District has been wrestling with how best to evaluate its teachers for going on forever. In August of 2011, the district unveiled a plan to develop an evaluation system, a lengthy, three-committee process that would take until 2014 to implement. That’s right: just creating the evaluation…
It was pretty much guaranteed that Dwaine Caraway’s “Saggin’ Pants Forum,” held Saturday in City Hall chambers, was going to be weird. This was, after all, almost a full afternoon devoted to the City Council member and former mayor’s ongoing crusade against men who don’t belt their pants at the…
Shakbsha Burleson has trouble sleeping at night. So around 3 a.m. this morning, as she told police, she set out for her usual late-night walk in her Lake Highlands neighborhood. Soon after, she noticed a man walking up and down the street nearby, then parking himself on a bridge railing…
Even as the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System (DPFP) tries to deflect media attention from its shiny, shiny Museum Tower project, Courthouse News reports that it’s also fighting to avoid releasing information on a different luxury developer, one that it wholly owns. The pension system filed a lawsuit in…
Governor Rick Perry, it may shock you to learn, is not such a big fan of abortion. Perry vowed some time ago to create a new, Texas-run version of the Women’s Health Program, one that would ban doctors from discussing or “promoting” abortion with their patients. It would also explicitly…
Back in June, we told you about Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton, a couple in Hardin whose rural farmhouse was raided after law enforcement got a hot tip from a psychic named “Angel” about a mass grave on the property. The mass grave didn’t exist, Angel quickly made herself scarce,…
Women of Faith, a conference put on by the nation’s largest Christian book publisher, hits the American Airlines Center next week. The “Feminine Faces of Freethought” conference is not coincidentally being held tomorrow at Resource Center Dallas. It’s safe to say that there won’t be a lot of overlap between…
In this week’s print edition, staff writer Anna Merlan provides a handy guide to natural-gas drilling debate in Dallas. Read on for a primer, a glossary of terms, a look at the opponents and supporters and a special fracking board game! Important civic issues have a way of sneaking up…
Earlier this week we told you about John Jay Myers, the Libertarian Senate candidate who believes he’ll be unfairly excluded from WFAA’s planned October 2 debate. He promised to bring protesters to the station’s headquarters on Young Street, which he did today around 11. When we got there, there were…
Safer Dallas Better Dallas is a local foundation that raises money to buy new equipment for the Dallas Police Department and, as they put it, “fund the priorities” of DPD, something they’ve done to the tune of $17 million since their founding in 2005. 7-Eleven is the place where you…
Back in July, the Animal Shelter Commission met for an update from city staff on the state of Dallas Animal Services (DAS). As usual, they ended up talking about a few major, unresolved issues: The air-conditioning in the shelter doesn’t really work. The shelter is still understaffed and manned with…
John Jay Myers owns the Free Man, a Cajun joint in Deep Ellum. He also runs a wholesale embroidery business, has a “deep, deep mistrust of the government,” would like to legalize medical marijuana, and thinks we should bring all the U.S. troops home. And he believes Texans are being…
Earlier this week, we all shuddered in unison upon learning that some Kotex Natural Balance tampons, possibly tainted with bacteria and “metallic particles,” were stolen and fraudulently sold under shadowy circumstances. Kimberly-Clark, Kotex’s Irving-based parent company, says they’ve received no reports of health issues stemming from the tainted tampons. They…
Strip clubs are the brave new frontier in employment lawsuits. Women who were for years treated as “independent contractors” are filing suit in droves against their current or former employers. All of them want basically the same thing: the minimum wage and overtime money they feel they should have gotten…
Glenn Beck has seen the face of hatred in America, and it looks like a surly flight attendant. In a transcript from his radio show, posted to his website this morning, Beck claims that an American Airlines employee slammed his drink down, barked the word “breakfast” at him, and delivered…
Three people walk into a strip club and start hitting a dancer “with closed fists.” The cops show up. Nobody gets put in handcuffs. Not exactly a joke. More of a riddle, we’d say. Marqualia Bernard is a dancer at Exposure Sports Cabaret, a fairly new club conveniently located near…
On the sprawling “social news” website Reddit, there are pages and pages of user-created discussions and links, ranging from funny to poignant to vile. One of the site’s most fascinating sub-sections is r/IAmA , also known as “Ask Me Anything,” or AMA. AMAs are question and answer sessions with unique…
The Nasher Sculpture Center has been feuding with Museum Tower, its shiny new neighbor in the Arts District, over light, heat and reflectivity for going on six months now. At the end of July, we published a story showing that the tower isn’t the only risky real estate project the…
A few weeks ago, City Council member Dwaine Caraway ventured down to the first floor of City Hall, where he saw a sight that made his blood boil. Among the people waiting in line at the Bureau of Vital Statistics window was a very young man with his pants hanging…
The shooting death in late July of felon and suspected drug dealer James Harper by Officer Brian Rowden during a foot chase at a South Dallas drug house has re-opened some barely closed wounds, touching off a painful debate about crime, enforcement, and police presence in low-income black and Latino…
Earlier this week, Time magazine opined that West Nile disease, which has now killed 12 people in Dallas County and sickened almost 300 more, is a “self-inflicted wound.” Bryan Walsh wrote that an extremely mild winter and scorching summer created a great breeding ground for mosquitoes. Climate change also isn’t…
At dawn yesterday, the lot behind the former New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church was mostly empty, save for dust, rocks and scrubby grass. Although the Pleasant Grove church still looks normal from the street, it too has been empty since going into foreclosure earlier this year. By April, the sanctuary,…
