Caine Smith, an 11-year-old from Haltom City, seems legit. He’s thoughtful, eloquent, and self-aware, moreso than many adults you’ll encounter. In spite of, or probably because of all that, he’s tormented daily by classmates, who push, punch, choke and otherwise abuse and humiliate him. So, he made a video for…
Even before the Internet, the young men at the Townview Magnet would have figured out that Cristy Nicole Deweese, their new Spanish teacher, had posed in Playboy. Someone would have gotten their hands on the February 2011 issue, in which an 18-year-old Deweese was featured as “Coed of the Month,”…
The robocalls from Alliance AFT; the misleading mailers hastily called up at the last minute by God (and a Houston PR firm) only knows; the scathing “research paper” by arch-nemesis Don Williams; the chastisements of John Wiley Price, they all failed to convince Dallas ISD’s Board of Trustees. On Monday…
Creationists wield outsized influence in the shaping of textbooks in Texas. In the past, they’ve worked to burnish history’s less-than-glowing view of Joseph McCarthy and to bring to the classroom Intelligent Design — creationism gussied up with the thinnest patina of science. And because the State Board of Education has…
Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist and former Texas State Board of Education Chairman who made a star turn as the anti-science Sunday school teacher in last year’s “The Revisionaries”, was unseated from the board in the 2010 Republican primary. Yet his crusade, to use science textbooks to explain the full…
Denton, despite the best efforts of the UNT student body and its lefty professors, has managed to hold on to the attributes of your typical small Texas city. A lot of people there still enjoy pickups, which they drive to high school football games while listening to country music and…
Someone give Samuel Ehrenreich a medal. On second thought, buy the man a beer, which the UT Dallas researcher desperately needs after spending a year collecting, then wading through, some 6 million text messages sent and received by high school freshman. All in the name of science. “We were interested…
Texas’ State Board of Education no longer has the stranglehold on textbooks it did a dozen years ago, when it forced an environmental science textbook to include skeptical language on global warming, or four years ago, when an attempt to slip creationist language into science books sparked a national uproar,…
It was a lovely idea, trading in the lumbering yellow school buses for minivans, sedans and Suburbans on routes with just a handful of students, thereby reducing fuel consumption and saving money. The problem with Dallas ISD’s recent adoption of the plan is twofold: Parents, through some mix of aesthetics…
Alif Laam Meem — or, for those who prefer fraternities to go by a Greek acronym, Alpha Lambda Mu — first blipped across the national radar this past spring when they attended Mayor Mike Rawlings’ anti-domestic-violence rally outside City Hall. A photo the group posted to Facebook showing members holding…
Stanford Hill’s glory days as a Dallas ISD basketball coach are now officially behind him. After winning a state title with Roosevelt in 2006, he moved to Skyline. During his tenure the team sunk from near dominance to mediocrity, posting a losing record in the 2012-13 season and barely sneaking…
When Mike Miles announced a month ago that his wife and son were headed back to Colorado Springs, the question of whether Miles himself would soon join them was unavoidable. It would at least have been understandable given the shellacking he’s endured over the past year and a half. But…
There are plenty of examples in Texas of some poor middle schooler getting a ticket for chewing gum at school, or nodding off in class, or wearing too much perfume, or something similarly outrageous. But to those pushing to reform the way school discipline is meted out in the state,…
Even when the USDA rolled out the new, healthier, Michelle Obama-approved version of the National School Lunch Program last year, there were grumblings. Kids complained that the new menu, which includes generous helpings of fruits and vegetables while capping meat, carbohydrates, and overall caloric intake, has “ruined school lunches” and…
Dallas ISD warned parents that it might not be a yellow school bus picking up their kids at their stops on the first day of school Monday morning. Smaller routes, like those serving magnets, would be served by a contractor, which promised to shuttle students in a van, SUVs or…
On Monday, the same day a big new elementary school re-opened in Jubilee Park, a woman who lives near the school called us from the hospital. She said her husband was recovering from a heart attack. “He’s been kind of a silent partner with this fight,” Norma Hernandez tells Unfair…
When a choked-up Anthony Tovar announced to a gathering of parents and supporters in April that he would resign as principal of Sunset High School — for real this time — he wouldn’t delve too deeply into why. He’d already done so in an earlier conversation with the Observer back…
Last night, WFAA’s Brett Shipp released the latest in what’s becoming a series of investigative pieces on the administration of Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles. “For the third time in less that two months, a DISD internal investigation has uncovered alleged wrongdoing by a top district administrator,” the report begins…
Update at 3:31 p.m.: DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander called to tell us we — and Brett Shipp — got it all wrong. “This was not a Mike Miles decision,” he says. “This is a decision that was made by the operations department of our school district.” As for why: “It…
When Mike Miles arrived at Dallas ISD, he brought his family with him. He and his wife bought a house in Northwest Dallas, and his son enrolled at Marsh Middle School. Now the family’s having second thoughts. The Morning News’ Matthew Haag broke the news this morning: Miles informed his…
In 1991, Woodrow Wilson High School installed a new floor in the main hallway. At the center, they put a tile mosaic of a stylized wildcat head based on a design that had been used around the school for a decade. Twenty-one years later, Principal Kyle Rains Richardson received a…
The culture war for young Texan minds is kicking back into high gear. The State Board of Education sent 28 invites to experts around the state to review high school biology textbooks. About a dozen showed up in Austin this week for the final phase of the review. They’ll make…
