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who are the most vulnerable in our community.”

Thus read an email from Lori Kirkpatrick to her supporters on June 10, 2017, the day she faced Trustee Dustin Marshall in a runoff election. DISD District 2, which they were competing to represent, forms a doughnut around the Park Cities, looping through pockets of wealth in East Dallas, Preston Hollow, Oak Lawn and Uptown.

East Dallas is a neighborhood where many people with the means to give their children a private education still choose public schools. It might seem like fertile soil for a movement that espouses using funding and research to provide the best outcomes for students. But it is also a hotbed of progressives, question-askers and city-hall barnstormers who don’t like to fall in line with the powers-that-be.

District 2 was Morath’s territory before Gov. Greg Abbott called him to Austin in late 2015 to serve as the Texas Education Agency Commissioner. Miles had thrown in the towel a few months earlier, and reformers’ hopes were dashed.

Desperate to hold onto Morath’s trustee seat, reformers mobilized behind Marshall and filled his coffers with $56,000 to finish the final year of Morath’s term.

If the strategy was to ward off contenders, it failed. Marshall ultimately raised five times as much as his fiercest competitor, Stonewall Jackson Elementary and Travis TAG parent Mita Havlick. She came up only 42 votes short in the runoff.

The close vote underscored voters’ suspicions of Marshall — why did his children attend private school at Greenhill, his alma mater, rather than Preston Hollow Elementary, the DISD school two blocks from his house? Why did he tout his experience on the board of Uplift Education, a charter school operator that draws from the same pool of tax money as DISD schools? And why were his campaign coffers allegedly full of “dark money” from real estate moguls, Park Cities zip codes and wealthy people who didn’t send their children to public schools?

Some wondered, what did this guy want with DISD?

Seven months later, Kirkpatrick attended a January DISD board meeting where trustees approved a resolu-

FLASHBACK: White people

have the (public school) building

Left

The percentage of white, black and Hispanic students attending Dallas ISD has changed drastically over the last five decades.

54% 36%10% in 1971, the year courtordered desegregation began.

6% 31% 61% in 2003, the year courtordered desegregation ended, after white families left DISD for private school or the suburbs.

5% 22% 70% in 2018.

tion supporting more funds for public schools and opposing school vouchers or “any program that diverts public tax dollars to private entities.” The resolution also included a stance against Texas’ proposed A-F accountability system, created by Morath.

Marshall and Flores were the only two trustees to vote against the resolution, citing their hesitation to oust the grading system before it rolled out. Kirkpatrick left the meeting determined to run for office. Later in the campaign, she cited Marshall’s vote that day as proof of his support for vouchers.

Marshall bristled at this accusation during an interview before the 2017 election, countering that he had been involved in efforts to stop voucher legislation.

“I don’t know how I possibly could have been more clear about it,” he said. “To debate with me on an issue we agree about is disingenuous.”

Marshall insists that he’s a public education advocate, not attacker. He says he grew up with a single mother struggling to make ends meet and “was fortunate enough to get into Greenhill.”

“To be honest, I’m trying to create the same kind of educational outcomes that I enjoyed in Greenhill at DISD,” he says. “Every kid deserves that same kind of lift up and potential that I got and my kids get.”

But “change is hard,” Marshall says, and education is “a system that has resisted change for a long time” and has “fierce defenders of the status quo.”

“Most reformers I talk to prioritize student outcomes above any other motivation,” Marshall says. “The folks that prioritize evidence and results and data, we’re on the right path, and if we continue down that path, we’ll change a lot of lives, so we want to stay the course.”

Kirkpatrick, a Lakewood Elementary mom who says she’ll run again for the board in 2020, doesn’t buy it. Her campaign website continues to host the blog she launched when she decided to run. Each post questions and casts doubt on “the corporate education reform movement” that “promotes underfunding public education, A-F, vouchers [and] ultimately leads to the privatization of public education.”

Enough people agreed with Kirkpatrick or were given pause to cast more votes for her than for Marshall in the general election. If it weren’t for a disgruntled former DISD employee who filed to run — and who received 3 percent of votes despite no campaigning or fundraising — Marshall and the reform community might have lost outright.

Kirkpatrick and members of her campaign team recently launched a nonprofit, the Coalition for Equity in Public Education, to “stand up to privatizers currently threatening ed- ucation as we know it.”

The problem isn’t a lack of knowing how schools and teachers are performing, Kirkpatrick argues. “Your outcomes for children are predicated on whether they’re wealthy or poor,” she says. The problem for urban schools, she believes, is poverty compounded by the underfunding of public education. The state spent $2.5 billion last year on charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, she says.

“What could we be doing with that money in failing schools?” she asks.

The people who need to be driving policy decisions are experienced educators, she says, not data wonks, business executives and Teach for America alumni with little classroom exposure.

MONTAGE: Young recruits get out the vote

The big money donors don’t bother John Hill. He’s one of the TFA alumni distrusted by people who distrust education reformers. He left DISD’s Pinkston High School after his twoyear TFA contract and went to teach at Jesuit College Preparatory, his alma mater.

But Hill, like many TFA alumni, never left DISD.

During his tenure at Pinkston, he launched a blog and podcast, Turn and Talks. The content has segued from teacher musings to political activism as Hill heads up the Dallas Kids First “C.A.M.P.,” an eight-month fellowship for 20 or so young recruits who commit to spending 100 hours campaigning for the PAC’s endorsed candidates.

Juliette Fowler Communities is the perfect balance of yesterday, today

This, even more than money spent on mailers, polling and advertising, makes the reform effort a force.

Hill, who lives in Oak Cliff behind the Tyler-Vernon DART station, says his parents attended DISD high schools in the ’70s, during the early years of desegregation. His father graduated from South Oak Cliff, and his mother was among the first black students bussed to Carter. Hill would have attended Roosevelt, but “my parents, when they were making the decision to send me to school, didn’t have faith that DISD would be the right fit for me, which for me, as an adult, is super sad.”

His grandmother spent her career teaching at Marsalis Elementary School, and her retirement savings paid for Hill’s Harvard education, so “I still have a lot I owe to the district,” he says.

Hill says he saw firsthand in 2016 that money doesn’t win elections. Only two of the four reform-funded candidates won their races, and one of those was Marshall’s runoff. He also felt deflated by the traditional model of campaigning — “show up six weeks out from an election and tell people you don’t know what’s good for them,” he says. Keeping voters engaged requires more, he believes, and C.A.M.P. is his solution to that problem.

Hill mobilized the C.A.M.P.ers, as he calls them, in the month between the District 2 general election and runoff between Marshall and Kirkpatrick last year. They spent 4,000 hours knocking on doors and talking to voters. According to Hill’s calculations, C.A.M.P.ers were responsible

— John Hill, director of Dallas Kids First’s C.A.M.P. fellowship for 3,200 votes, including 900 people who hadn’t voted in any of the three prior elections with Marshall on the ballot.

The result: Marshall went from nearly 300 votes shy of Kirkpatrick in the general election to more than 3,000 votes ahead of her in the runoff.

CLOSE-UP: ‘The gray-haired one over here’

A trendy bar just south of Downtown seemed an unlikely setting for a political action committee to host its kick-off for the 2018 DISD board election cycle. The crowd of diverse young professionals who gathered at Mac’s Southside seemed even more unlikely.

Melissa Higginbotham, describing herself as “the gray-haired one over here,” stood out. She started working for the Dallas Kids First PAC when it formed in 2011 after her children graduated from the Booker T. Washington arts magnet and W.T. White.

“I was pleased with my children’s education in Dallas ISD, but I also read the Dallas Morning News and thought, ‘Wait, there are some areas where it might not be so good,’ ” she recalls. Though the PAC’s membership is broader than the crowd at Mac’s would suggest, she says, “it’s exciting for me to have folks who don’t have kids yet who are investing in our city and our school system, so that when they do, they feel comfortable putting their kids in DISD.”

Higginbotham chafes at Dallas Kids First being identified as a PAC. It carries “somewhat of a negative perception,” she says. “But we did want to be able to endorse candidates and

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March 30, Good Friday, 7:30 PM

EDCC Sanctuary Stay With Me Tenebrae Service

EDCC Chancel Choir and Grace United Methodist Church Choir Dan Totan, Cello; Daniel Pardo, Flute

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CELEBRATING THE RISEN CHRIST Sunrise Service

10:45 - Noon - The Sanctuary Worship Service and Communion Joyous Music led by the Chancel Choir, Brass and Organ

Contenders for the DISD District 9 seat in the May 6 election are

Bernadette Nutall, the 8-year incumbent; Justin Henry, Nutall’s mentee who supports several reform efforts; and Ed Turner, a South Dallas native who has fans in the reform community.

come up with a system that shared more information about candidates and why they were endorsed. That just wasn’t happening [in 2011].”

They look for trustees who “are really seeking solutions,” Higginbotham says, and who support “things that have national research and national data behind them.”

Both Henry and Turner were at Mac’s Southside for the kick-off. Given the money the PAC has and the C.A.M.P.ers ready for action, an endorsement could be crucial.

Nutall didn’t attend the kick-off. No one, not even her, believes she will get the endorsement. At one point she found favor with reformers, but now she’s “in the outhouse,” she says, because she argued and didn’t always vote the way they wanted.

Without naming Nutall, Higginbotham notes that when Dallas Kids First interviews incumbents, “we ask them, ‘What policy initiative are you most proud of?’

“If they cannot answer that question right off the tip of their tongue, that’s hard for us.”

FLASH CUT: Race dominates a district race

As of press time, only one DISD trustee race was contested. Neither Micciche nor tenured Trustee Edwin Flores of North Dallas’ District 1 had drawn opposition.

In District 9, however, the race began last summer.

Henry, who filed to run against Nutall three years ago then withdrew, posted initial campaign donations last July, signaling that this time, he was serious. In September, Marshall introduced Turner to the invitation-only Dallas Breakfast Group, which functions as the incubator of northern

Dallas politics. Then he and Flores endorsed Turner for the District 9 seat — despite the fact that the race was eight months away and Henry was sitting in the room.

The endorsement caught the attention of southern Dallas Trustee Joyce Foreman, who, in a Facebook post blasting Marshall for being “hateful” toward the three African-American trustees, also noted that “he has a hand-picked Negro that he is supporting” in the race against Nutall.

Foreman’s rant against Marshall was the result of Marshall’s repost of Schutze’s column, the headline claiming that “The Worst Enemies Poor Black Kids Have Are Black Dallas School Board Members.”

“How do people think black folks are going to even embrace you when you have a writer saying the three African-American trustees are Public Enemy No. 1 to black children?” Nutall asks.

“You don’t get the right to tell me how to respond when you mistreat me ... when you say whatever about me, and you say it in the newspaper, and you say it on Facebook,” she says. “It’s been some pretty ugly stuff. And then you want me to say, ‘Oh, can’t we all just get along?’ ”

Nutall believes her role is to fight for her community. The problem, both Henry and Turner believe, is that she no longer represents the community or its best interests.

They might not have entered the race if it weren’t for last August’s board vote on a tax-ratification election, which was the focus of Schutze’s instigating column. The election would have asked voters for a property tax increase with most of the money coming from north Dallas property owners and going to southern Dallas schools. Nutall, Foreman and Blackburn supported a small increase but rejected the larger tax hike reformers wanted.

“This was literally about ego, power and control,” Turner said after the vote, this time pointing the finger at the southern Dallas trustees rather than the north Dallas agenda he fought against during the homerule effort. He’s moved past that debacle but others haven’t, he says.

“We have to decide to heal,” he says. “I think right now with the current board, it’s not going to happen. That’s why you have to have change. There’s too much divisiveness on the board, and you have to have someone that’s willing to work with everybody.”

Henry, too, saw the distrust rear its ugly head again. “To think that black trustees are sabotaging kids that they serve … I find that offensive in my most tolerant state. You’re substantiating those concerns and justifying their distrust,” Henry says.

Yet he’s frustrated that “they can’t see a good thing when it’s in front of them because they distrust each other. This gate keeping system is hurting District 9. It’s hurting the whole city.

“I think we have to use the past to inform every decision we make, but we shouldn’t let the past dictate the future.”

For the uncut version of “Dallas ISD: The Movie,” along with extras and behind-the-scenes action, visit lakewood advocatemag.com.

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