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Jonathan Fox

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Not So Special

DISD's special education program is anything but, say parents and state officials, and it too often abandons the children who need attention most

By Jonathan Fox
Dec 28, 2000

Like any other parent, Maria Gomez has high hopes and aspirations for her son. Marco, 16, is a student at Moisés Molina High School in Oak Cliff who is well liked by classmates and teachers for his infectious laugh, limitless energy, and sunny disposition. Of medium height, Marco has a...
True Disbelievers

Deeper Life ministry says it saves homeless people from drugs and sin. Some ex-members say the church takes advantage of those who need help most.

By Jonathan Fox
Nov 23, 2000

When Johnie Hopkins walked into Deeper Life Christian Church, a Pentecostal storefront mission in East Oak Cliff that ministers to Dallas' homeless, he had nowhere else to turn. A former ironworker turned transient, Hopkins and his wife, Tina Howard, had been on the Dallas homeless circuit, from shelter to soup...
Flood Relief

A proposal for public potties in Dallas builds steam

By Jonathan Fox
Oct 26, 2000

Some city leaders hope to flush out downtown Dallas' void of pedestrian activity and tourist facilities by installing a very non-Dallas innovation throughout the central business district: European-style, self-cleaning public toilets. Councilwomen Veletta Lill and Lois Finkelman, Mayor Pro Tem Mary Poss, the Central Dallas Association, and city staff members...
Good Vibrations

Disputed Reform Party candidate John Hagelin thinks he can change the world with the power of positive thinking. Does that make him nuts?

By Jonathan Fox
Oct 5, 2000

This is not the place you'd expect to find a physicist. It's early September, and John Hagelin stands before nearly 400 roaring delegates and supporters in a hotel conference room in suburban Washington, D.C., accepting the presidential nomination of the obscure Natural Law Party. It is roughly one month since...
Anchors Aweigh

Channel 5's Mike Snyder has a load lifted as he settles an ethics lawsuit

By Jonathan Fox
Sep 28, 2000

It was just before 5 p.m. last week when KXAS Channel 5 anchorman Mike Snyder answered his phone, his voice hoarse from giving interviews. He'd spent the better part of the day as a news subject instead of a newsreader, talking to newspapers from across the country about that day's...
Back Off, Buddy

A Dallas titty bar strikes back in the city's war against SOBs

By Jonathan Fox
Aug 17, 2000

Like the lure of downtown parks to pigeons, the city of Dallas can't stop attracting litigation from topless clubs angered by increasingly restrictive laws against their businesses. The latest lawsuit comes from a strip club that, until now, hasn't been a starring player in Dallas' long-running titty-bar wars, yet its...
Public defenders

A surprising number of parents are shunning the 'burbs, pulling their kids out of private schools, and embracing DISD

By Jonathan Fox
Aug 3, 2000

Mike Looney vividly remembers his most nerve-racking day as a parent. It happened in early February of last year, when his oldest daughter, Sloan, made an unlikely life transition, officially leaving the exclusive milieu of private education in Dallas, a thriving industry not known for defections, for the less heralded...
His good name

Former FBI honcho Oliver "Buck" Revell fights against conspiracy buffs who accuse him of mass murder

By Jonathan Fox
Jul 6, 2000

Former FBI second-in-command Oliver "Buck" Revell of Dallas regularly makes the rounds of network and cable TV news shows to talk about everything from Internet security to international terrorism. A 30-year FBI veteran and international security consultant who authored the well-received autobiography A G-Man's Journal, he's a respected and knowledgeable...
Granny get your gun

Dallas' pistol-packing 'Second Amendment Sister'--63-year-old grandma Mary Thompson--takes aim at a million moms

By Jonathan Fox
Jun 29, 2000

Mary Thompson has her prey in sight. Thompson, a Dallas grandmother of six and co-founder of the women's anti-gun-control group Second Amendment Sisters, is patrolling the hallways of Capitol Hill, looking for targets in her war against gun control. What better place to find her enemy, the gun-control lobbyists and...
Whizzing inside the tent

ExxonMobil shareholders use their stock to push a corporate giant toward change

By Jonathan Fox
Jun 8, 2000

As with other behemoth multinational companies, Irving-based ExxonMobil's annual meeting is strictly a formality. Most of the crowd that packed the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in downtown Dallas to vote on shareholder resolutions last week were retirees who own relatively small amounts of company stock. The majority of big...
Brown-out

The problems at Silberstein Elementary--too few bilingual teachers, a PTA divided, tensions between black administrators and Hispanic parents--are a microcosm of the issues DISD faces districtwide

By Jonathan Fox
May 25, 2000

T he ugly battle that would divide a school started innocently enough, as such battles often do. It began with two unfortunate and seemingly unrelated injuries to children, the sort that could happen anywhere. But here, at Ascher Silberstein Elementary School in Pleasant Grove, they served as seeds, triggering within...
Raising the roof

Dallas' PTAs send a message to school administrators -- listen to us

By Jonathan Fox
May 11, 2000

Outside Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in East Oak Cliff, a concrete retaining wall is emblazoned with big red letters touting the slogan "Mighty Mustangs" and the credo "Pride, Respect and Responsibility." But the shabby condition of the '60s-era building, which sits a few blocks away from the Corinth Street...
Epistle to the Jews

Southern Baptist missionary Jim Sibley's job is to call Jews to Jesus. Is anyone listening?

By Jonathan Fox
May 4, 2000

The call to a Dallas evangelist came from Cincinnati, Ohio. On the line was a Jewish man seeking spiritual answers -- of the Christian variety. The Reverend Jim Sibley, a missionary for the Southern Baptists' North American Mission Board, took the call from the Hebrew soul searcher, who got Sibley's...
Sweating it out in Saipan

While other major retailers settle sweatshop lawsuits, J.C. Penney insists everything's cool

By Jonathan Fox
Apr 20, 2000

Dallas' garment industry has all but died, but critics say Plano-based J.C. Penney still has a connection to one of that sector's most notorious practices. The national department-store chain is one of four major retailers that has yet to settle class-action lawsuits alleging sweatshop conditions in factories owned by their...
With friends like that...

Protesters dog UT Southwestern over canine vivisection

By Jonathan Fox
Mar 30, 2000

Over the last two years, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have purchased 63 dogs for use in federally funded experiments that began as far back as 1988. The canines, mostly foxhounds and mongrels, are trained to run on treadmills, and are then anesthetized for...
Planting SEEDs of hope

An innovative math program recalculates which students will succeed and which will fail at DISD

By Jonathan Fox
Mar 23, 2000

It's an early Tuesday afternoon at Barbara Jordan Elementary School in South Oak Cliff, and Chet Baker, a tall and cheerful visitor dressed in a dark gray suit, takes off his jacket and makes this straightforward inquiry to Jeff Sughrue's third-grade class: "What signal would you show if today is...
Smoke gets in his eyes

A Dallas deputy sheriff is transferred because of his allergies

By Jonathan Fox
Mar 23, 2000

Like other organs of local government, the Dallas County Sheriff's Department adopted a strict no-smoking policy in 1988. Over the last two decades, such edicts have become routine and largely unquestioned in workplaces, exiling the nicotine-addicted to sidewalks. But Thomas Reilly, a sheriff's investigator, charges that his department holds itself...
Not easy being Green

Ralph Nader's running for real this time

By Jonathan Fox
Mar 9, 2000

Just when the McCain mania of the presidential campaign peaks and Ross Perot's Reform Party teeters toward meltdown, Ralph Nader arrives to pick up the banner of reform vérité. The respected consumer activist and critic of corporate power last month kicked off his fight for the fledgling Green Party's nomination...
Divided they stand

A pack of unions struggle for the right to represent DISD workers

By Jonathan Fox
Mar 2, 2000

On the grass in front of the Dallas Independent School District headquarters last week, a small group of school support staff workers protested before an almost equally large gaggle of reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen. About 10 workers and their children, members of Local 100 of the Service Employees International...
Hot and bothered

The city's ordinance governing topless clubs is a joke. But Bachman Lake-area residents are determined to get rid of the clubs by any means necessary.

By Jonathan Fox
Feb 24, 2000

It's close to midnight at Baby Dolls Saloon, a popular topless club north of Love Field near Bachman Lake, and the place is electrified. Dancers in nothing but g-strings gyrate on elevated stages as young and middle-aged men ogle them from below and shell out a steady stream of dollar...
Air homophobia

A gay-bashing pilot prompts a change at Southwest Airlines

By Jonathan Fox
Feb 24, 2000

Southwest Airlines, rated last month by Fortune magazine as the nation's second-best place to work, may be less than gay-friendly. Both gay and straight employees of the Dallas-based airline were outraged in December when a vitriolic letter in the company pilots union newsletter blasted a corporate proposal to offer domestic-partner...
Raise high the roof

A battle Uptown targets the city for bending its own rules

By Jonathan Fox
Feb 3, 2000

Claude Albritton, owner of the celebrated McKinney Avenue Contemporary arts and performance space in Uptown, is steamed. Last year, city building inspectors forced him to heed zoning restrictions and scale back his plans to expand the MAC's Kitchen Dog Theater. Because of the order, Albritton, one of Dallas' top arts...