On Thursday, the Dallas Independent School District’s board of trustees will have their “second reading” of contingency plans for four high schools at risk of being labeled academically unacceptable by the Texas Education Agency for a fifth straight year. The at-risk campuses are Kimball, Pinkston, Roosevelt and Seagoville, and, exactly…
And, speaking of Mark Birnbaum …When last I spoke with the Dallas-based doc maker, he was out and about filming Mayor Tom Leppert and other council members for a short promoting the new convention center hotel. He hasn’t seen the finished film yet — he was but a shooter on…
Right before Christmas, Dallas Independent School District board president Adam Medrano told Unfair Park he is “not sure what can be done at this point” to save the Oak Cliff Christian Church, which DISD purchased in the fall to make way for some piece of the new Adamson High School…
Texas Tech fires head football coach Mike Leach. Two words: Holy. Shit. A saddening, maddening day for Red Raider Nation. My take: It took two to tango, and both Leach and the James family are at fault. Both Texas Tech and Leach will ultimately regret letting this spark burn out of control…
An op-ed, co-written by SMU President R. Gerald Turner, has been circulating through the nation’s newspapers in recent days; here’s yesterday’s pit stop in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which Turner and William Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system, argue that college athletics’ business model is “on a path…
Early this morning, a Friend of Unfair Park forwarded along an update from the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League: “A Glimmer of Hope for Oak Cliff Christian Church.” That, of course, is a reference to the 1905 building recently acquired by the Dallas Independent School District for the Adamson High…
If you like a Santa Rampage or a Santa Ride, don’t forgot: You’ll love an Unsilent Night, which makes its downtown Dallas bow tomorrow night. The NYC and SF events, among others, took place over the weekend; for those wondering what’s in store, some highlights. Also, after the jump, a…
The story of Taylor Pugh, the 4-year-old preschooler suspended by the Mesquite Independent School District for his long locks, is making the cross-country rounds today. Thanks to this Associated Press video, MISD spokesperson Laura Jobe’s hairstyle has now been called into question…
Waiting on a call back from Steve Leach, the so-called “buy guy” at Half Price Books, about something entirely unrelated to this point. But, to kill a little time, let me share with you a couple of items I picked up at the Northwest Highway mothership Sunday morning and converted…
A couple of weeks ago we noticed that the Dallas Independent School District’s board of trustees was considering a new “Superintendent Evaluation Instrument,” which broke down the criteria into three separate categories: “student achievement,” “sound financial management” and “stakeholder satisfaction.” For the purposes of this particular report card, percentages were…
Patricia Viramontes has long been one of Dallas Independent School District’s more controversial figures, dating back to at least September 2007, when district officials concluded that, yes, maybe the DISD’s executive director of instructional technology services shouldn’t be reporting to her husband after all, nepotism policies being what they are…
Jon Dahlander, spokesman for the Dallas Independent School District, posted a comment on Unfair Park today that perfectly expressed the school system’s official position on the preservation/demolition of Adamson High School. It blames abandonment of the school on the people who have been fighting to preserve it. And then it…
Speaking of old local cases involving schoolchildren sitting in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit …On Tuesday, the court handed down an opinion in that years-old case involving a Plano Independent School District third-grader and other PISD-off kiddies told by district officials that, no, they couldn’t hand…
Far as the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees is concerned, there are three factors that go into determining how good a job the superintendent’s doing: “student achievement,” “sound financial management” and “stakeholder satisfaction.” Those, say the board, “embody the core beliefs and expectation of the community as represented…
Governor Rick Perry stopped by DISD’s Emmett J. Conrad High School on Fair Oaks Ave. yesterday to tout the Texas Workforce Commission’s $1 million investment in expanding robotics education programs across the state. Conrad, of course, boasts an estimable robotics club — the RoboChargers — that, for the last three…
He sounded a little groggy when he spoke to Unfair Park this morning. But University of North Texas junior Stephen Michael Benavides had a long night: The chair of ACLU’s student chapter spent Thursday night appealing to the UNT Supreme Court to adopt language of a failed bill and allow…
This’ll most likely be our one and only item about the race for the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees — because, judging by the early-voting numbers, well, not too many folks seem to be all that interested. Take the hotly contested District 1 race, for instance: Incumbent Edwin…
Speaking of the Dallas Independent School District and grant money …I was poking around the briefing agenda for this week’s meeting of the board of trustees and noticed this intriguing item: NASA — yes, that NASA, not this NASA — is giving the DISD, via the Foundation for Community Empowerment,…
It’s a common scenario: an “A” elementary school student suddenly becomes a “C” middle-schooler. What happened? According to local brain health researchers, your child is suffering from information overload. “He was so overwhelmed by the amount of information he was trying to stuff in,” says Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, chief…
Whilst doing some research for something that may not lead to anything, I’ve been reading Walter J. E. Schiebel’s Education in Dallas: Ninety-two years of History 1874-1966, published by the Dallas Independent School District. So this isn’t entirely an exercise in futility, I thought I’d share some of the tome:…
On Monday I moderated a District 1 school board candidates debate, and long story short, all four contenders were thoughtful, well-reasoned and dead-level; even 79-year-old long-shot Melvin Cannon’s call for more vocational education was greeted with a few nods of approval. Most of the questions stuck to issues of policy…
In case you missed it, on Tuesday Tawnell Hobbs published Dallas Independent School District trustee Jack Lowe’s list of things he’s looking for in an “ideal” trustee. Among his bullet points: “Supports our vision of being the best urban school district in the country.” Fantastic. “Makes courageous decisions for the…
