About 10 years ago, a winter storm passed through North Texas, covering Dallas in a sheet of ice and snow and forcing schools to close for nearly a week. After a few days, Stephen Sekula, a physics professor at Southern Methodist University, started wondering whether there wasn’t a better way…
Dallas public schools will close indefinitely as health officials continue to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, district officials announced Monday afternoon. The district is on spring break this week. When students return, their classes will be delivered via online distance education, DISD officials said in a statement…
Gov. Greg Abbott is waiving student readiness testing requirements for school districts across the state as districts figure out how to respond to the coronavirus threat. Districts will no longer be required to conduct State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, testing for the 2019-20 school year. The…
As Dallas ISD students and their parents get ready to head off for spring break, the district is working on a plan to keep everyone safe once they get back. The district’s spring break is next week, and officials are asking parents to fill out forms detailing any domestic or…
A few minutes before 8 on a Thursday night last month, dozens of students, faculty and staff members crowded into a classroom in Baylor University’s Marrs McLean Science Building. Some stood in groups chatting. One faculty member stopped each student she didn’t already know, introduced herself and asked them about…
Every now and then, a student walks up to Yazan Naseef in the hallway at Plano East High School and tells him exactly what he thinks of him and his religion. I know how you guys really are, the student says, before railing about how Muslims all want to kill…
Close your eyes, hold your nose, turn around three times, stamp your foot and say “charter schools.” A vision will appear. No, really. I just noticed it, over on my personal Facebook. Personal Facebook is where the action is for me now. Over here on the Dallas Observer, it’s so…
Stacy Bailey and the Mansfield school district have settled a 2018 lawsuit that accused district administrators of suspending her for being gay. The district will pay out $100,000 and train staff members on LGBTQ issues but denies any wrongdoing. It will also scrub Bailey’s record of any reference to the…
Nearly half of America’s college students don’t have a safe, affordable and consistent place to live, and nearly 4 in 10 don’t have reliable access to food. Perhaps most troubling, 17% of the nation’s college students were homeless at some point in the past year. Those are the conclusions of…
Dallas and Fort Worth students’ performance on national standardized tests looks much better when you take demographics into account, according to a new report released by the Urban Institute. Dallas jumped to No. 5 in the ranking of 27 large school districts across the country. The analysis was based on…
Show me a silver lining, I will find you a cloud. From 2014 to last year, the Dallas public school system became a state leader and role model for its ability to turn around failing schools. That’s the silver lining. The cloud is what happened next. As soon as the…
The Dallas Morning News editorial page is schizzy. Most of the time, it’s pretty smart, even measured and thoughtful, at least on local non-partisan issues. But every fifth Thursday or something, a whole different crazy newspaper appears on my lawn. Right toe forward, hands on the hips of its checkered…
The Dallas County Community College District will seek approval from its accreditor later this year to merge its seven schools into one in an effort to help more students graduate. Joe May, the district chancellor, said he was motivated to pursue the change after realizing that thousands of students were being…
Baylor University’s athletic department is having a banner winter. Its football team, two years removed from a 1-11 season, finished 11-3 and made appearances in both the Big 12 Championship Game and the Sugar Bowl. Its men’s basketball team is No. 1 in the country, according to the Associated Press…
Last week, a day before candidate filing opened for the upcoming school board election, East Dallas/Love Field Dallas board member Miguel Solis announced he will not seek reelection. His public statement maintained a certain aura of mystery. He didn’t announce new plans. It was sort of like, “And now my…
We struggle, strive, scrape our shins and freeze our toes to see what’s on top of the cliff of urban poverty. Once up there, we all see the same thing. And we all shrug and say, “I am not seeing this.” What we don’t want to see is race. More…
A former University of Texas at Arlington student is suing the university’s chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity, saying fraternity members forced him to drink Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey until he blacked out during a hazing ritual. Plaintiff Roc Riner suffered serious injuries and received treatment for alcohol poisoning at…
Thousands of people, as we’ve reported and a few Texas politicians have lamented, come to North Texas from California every year. On arrival, they have to deal with the heat, higher property taxes and a political climate they may or may not welcome, but they get not having a state…
In 2016, when students at South Oak Cliff High School staged a walkout to protest the shabby conditions at the aging campus, Tyesha Brown was right there with them. Brown, then a freshman, didn’t want the school remodeled. Like many students at the time, she wanted it torn down and…
A national civil rights group is asking a Texas court to rule against an anti-affirmative action organization that’s seeking to have the University of Texas’ admissions policy declared unlawful. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington-based nonprofit, filed a petition in intervention last week in Students for…
A group of 16 law professors from Texas universities were among hundreds of legal scholars who signed an open letter stating President Donald Trump has “engaged in impeachable conduct.” The letter, which was addressed to Congress, was posted Friday on Medium. In the letter, the legal experts say they take…
In a casual conversation about suburban public schools and ethnic diversity recently, I noticed that the person with whom I was chatting did not believe the presence of Asian American students in a school system should be counted toward diversity. In fact, she sort of felt it worked the other…
