On paper, Edwin J. Kiest Elementary in East Dallas’ Casa View neighborhood and Paul Laurence Dunbar Elementary in South Dallas/Fair Park, seem about the same, poverty-wise. Dallas ISD counts 96.1 percent of students at Kiest as “economically disadvantaged,” compared with 99.7 percent at Dunbar. Both are overwhelmingly, distressingly poor. On the ground, the…
Car crashes are part of the background of life in a big car-dependent city. The really awful ones maybe you’ll catch on the news. Others you gawk at as you drive by, or else rage at from a line of traffic. Sometimes they come and go like phantoms, vanishing by…
Dallas ISD’s Bonham Elementary was a gem. The school reliably received an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency plus an impressive number of accolades for one of DISD’s workaday neighborhood schools. In 2009, it was one of 11 campuses nationwide to receive a National Excellence in Urban Education Award…
Two-and-a-half years ago, around the beginning of May 2013, surveyors working for the city of Dallas staked out the contours of the Texas Horse Park’s centerpiece arena. Judging by the location of the stakes, the arena was going to be built more or less on top of an ancient and…
Christina Casas has lived on Rusk Avenue all her life. She remembers sitting on the front porch early one afternoon in about 1973 as her family bustled past her, lugging furniture and boxes into their new home, a small, wood-frame workman’s bungalow at the corner of Rusk and Carroll Avenue…
We have a confession to make. Two weeks ago, we published a piece in this space purporting to identify Dallas’ 10 HOTTEST Apartment Complexes. While this might seem to imply that we used some sort of objective methodology for determining HOTNESS — or, for that matter, had any knowledge at all about…
At a certain point, perhaps after they defund the roads and utility lines leading to its clinics, Texas politicians and policymakers are going to run out of ammunition in their jihad against Planned Parenthood. But that hasn’t happened yet. Last week, Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission promulgated rules banning…
It’s not easy, turning a few hundred acres of environmentally contaminated landfill in a long-neglected semi-rural pocket of southern Dallas into a top-of-the-line golf course. But Dallas does not do things because they are easy; it does them because they seem world-class. And so, three years ago, Mayor Mike Rawlings and…
Two years ago, DART proposed running a bus route from the city of McKinney to Parker Road train station. The transit agency was hoping to gain a foothold in the northern boom towns of Collin County, both to advance its vision of a seamless regional transit system and, more pragmatically,…
To get a flavor of the opposition to “Plano Tomorrow,” the northern suburb’s newly adopted comprehensive plan, you don’t need to listen to the dozens of residents who spoke against it at a marathon City Council meeting this week. Skimming this column by a leader of the opposition group Plano Future will…
Yeah, we know: Dallas is all about big houses with green lawns and a couple of cars in the garage — WRONG! Maybe that was true when your grandma was alive, but this is the 21st century. Apartment living is where it’s at, and in case you’ve been living under…
When our older son began kindergarten last fall, my wife and I rejoiced. Some of our joy naturally sprung from watching him pass such a key childhood milestone — OMG, the little guy’s starting school! — but most of it admittedly came from the game-changing impact it had on our budget…
The Texas State Board of Education, the body that decides what millions of Texas schoolchildren should and shouldn’t learn, is the frequent subject and ridicule, and rightly so, what with its penchant for pushing creationism into science curricula, identifying Moses as an architect of the U.S. Constitution, chalking up the…
On Sunday afternoon, with a 9-2 drubbing of division rival Los Angeles Angels, the Texas Rangers clinched the American League West title. Given the Rangers’ performance since their second consecutive World Series appearance in 2011, this should have been cause for unbridled celebration. But as slugger Adrian Beltre was shrieking girlishly under…
Every year or so, the Texas Transportation Institute releases its Urban Mobility Report, which looks at the impact of traffic congestion on major metropolitan areas in the United States, and every year or so the report’s release prompts a barrage of critiques from transportation wonks whose livings aren’t tied to building new…
The Volkswagen emissions scandal is not quite two weeks old, and it’s already spurred lawsuits from dozens of angry car buyers. The first such suit in Dallas was filed Monday, though it surely won’t be the last. All or most of these early cases revolve around a straightforward allegation of fraud. Customers…
My first inkling that America’s lawn obsession might not be terribly healthy came around 1995. We’d just moved into a new house in Far North Dallas, and 10- or 11-year-old me decided that the next-door neighbor’s lawn — green and smooth as flawless as a golf-course fairway with manicured grass…
The fight started on the third floor right before fifth period, when the kids were still buzzing from lunch and hardest to manage. Jennifer Duggins, a Spanish teacher, was monitoring the hallway outside her classroom when a surge of students rushed passed her and disappeared around the corner into an…
As odd as it may seem at first glance given Texas’ highly developed car culture, the Dallas-to-Houston corridor might be the best spot in the country for high-speed rail. The two cities are at the center of heavily populated and economically dynamic metropolitan areas. They are separated by 220 miles,…
Last Wednesday brought a dose of positive news for anyone concerned about Texas’ sky-high teen birth rate, which given that it costs the state an estimated $1.1 billion per year and puts Texas in the company of such bastions of progressive public-health policy as Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma, should be everyone. According…
The late-summer Sturm und Drang over high water rates made it to the Dallas City Council this week, where Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett explained that, calm down, you’re water meter’s fine, you probably don’t have a leak, you just probably forgot during the weird monsoons of spring and early…
A year ago, South Dallas’ Billy Earl Dade MIddle School was in disarray. Things there were so glaringly bad that, on an impromptu visit in mid-October, six weeks into last school year, Superintendent Mike Miles got rid of Principal MIchael Jones and 10 teachers on the spot. The following Monday,…
