SPACE INVADERS

Dallas ISD’s magnet schools promise a hand up to our city’s most talented students. Why are so many of those students from the suburbs?

Story by KERI MITCHELL

“What makes the arts magnet special?” asks a headline in the fall 2016 Highland Park Village magazine.

The publication, crafted for the well-heeled customers of the Park Cities shopping center’s highend stores, showcases Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts with artistic images of dancers in motion and paint-splattered artist smocks. The story lauds the “renowned” school “founded in 1892 for African-American students” that evolved into the “anchor location for what would become Dallas’ burgeoning Arts District.”

“It should be noted,” the story continues, “that earning accep- tance into the school is an astonishing feat in itself. ‘There are roughly 900 applicants for only 220 places in each incoming freshman class,’ ” school spokeswoman Sharon Cornell tells the publication.

“While preference is accorded students residing in the DISD, jaw-dropping merit can also win a place among the ‘fortunate few’ who live in surrounding areas,” the story says.

This year, the “fortunate few” numbered 71 out-of-district students at Booker T.’s campus. That’s a drop from a high of 207 out-of-district students in 2009-10, when Parkies and suburbanites comprised more than one-fourth of the school.

Talk with Dallas ISD’s trustees, administrators and faculty, and there are a variety of responses to the issue of suburbanites blocking deserving Dallas ISD students from Booker T. and the other TAG and magnet schools in the district.

They all know the issue. They all have their opinions. There just doesn’t seem to be any real will or enough concern to do anything about it.

Dallas ISD Trustee Edwin Flores, who represents the North Dallas area, is an exception. One of his daughters attended Booker T., he has seen the problem firsthand, and he’s angry about the situation.

“If for every kid that Highland Park sends to Booker T., I could send one of my poor kids to Highland Park — do an even exchange — I’d be OK,” Flores says.

“If we had some kind of reciprocity. But this is not a county school— this is a DISD school, and it bugs me that we knock out kids with potential just because those kids didn’t have the access to the piano teachers, the dance teachers.”

THAN ZAW OO: NOT JUST A STATISTIC

A few years ago, Janet Morrison-Lane took her first tour of Booker T. She was there on behalf of students who live in

Vickery Meadow, a vast apartment community in Northeast Dallas populated with refugees from throughout the world.

“I work as a parent advocate to do what I know a parent would want to do if they knew their options,” says Morrison-Lane of her role as director of the Eagle Scholars at Vickery Meadow Youth Development Foundation.

The tour was led by one of Booker T.’s elite students. The young man introduced himself, telling the group he lived in Richardson while offering a few other personal details.

Morrison-Lane didn’t hear anything after “Richardson.”

“He said it nonchalantly, and I kept

Outsiders In The Inner Sanctum

This chart pinpoints suburban students’ annual enrollment at five of Dallas ISD’s most sought-after magnet schools. To determine these numbers, we analyzed enrollment figures provided to us by DISD directly and through Freedom of Information Act requests for the years 2000 to 2016, inclusive, which were then confirmed by the school district.

thinking about it,” she says.

She wondered: What deserving Dallas ISD student had he displaced?

On Morrison-Lane’s mind that day was a young Burmese refugee, Than Zaw Oo, a gifted artist with no formal training who, as a sixth-grader, created an exact likeness of President Barack Obama in pencil. Morrison-Lane knew Booker T. and its acclaimed art instruction would change his life.

But Zaw Oo was new to this country, having learned English in only a few years. That translated to test scores and grades that were on the low-end of the top tier magnet school’s acceptability scale. Plus, he was painfully shy, a characteristic that didn’t bode well for the interview portion of the application process.

“His academics weren’t there, but his artistic talent was,” she says, “and he could’ve risen up to that [academic level].”

Than Zaw Oo was denied the opportunity to attend Booker T.

Yet somehow, Morrison-Lane thought, this Richardson student had elbowed

Zaw Oo aside to become one of the fortunate few. The year Zaw Oo’s application was denied, 89 out-of-district students attended Booker T.

Something else Morrison-Lane eventually learned: It’s common knowledge that parents from the suburbs sign shortterm leases or even forge Dallas addresses to get their children into Booker T. and other select Dallas ISD schools.

As we scoured enrollment figures between 2000 and 2016, the data confirms it’s not unusual for suburban students to claim a sizable chunk of spots in Dallas’ most sought-after magnet schools.

The question is: Why?

WHAT’S THE GOAL: MAINTAINING TOP RANKINGS OR HELPING KIDS UP?

In a district without enough accomplishments to brag about, the magnet schools are an exception.

Booker T. has a long string of accolades and famous alumni. Townview’s Talented and Gifted as well as Science and Engineering magnet high schools (better known as TAG and SEM) annually are atop the lists of “best high schools in America” from Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. Altogether, these three schools are educating 145 out-of-district students this year.

At Dallas ISD’s Montessori magnets, George B. Dealey in Preston Hollow and Harry Stone in southern Dallas, suburban students are sprinkled among the pre-kindergarten to eighth-grade mix. They’re even at Travis, the district’s TAG fourth- through eighth-grade campus, where preference for siblings and long waitlists led to a recent board policy change. The waitlist wasn’t exhausted, yet three non-Dallas ISD students still were admitted last year.

All of these schools have waitlists. All have policies that require qualified Dallas ISD students to be admitted before outof-district students, even if those suburban students’ scores are off the charts.

Yet none of them follow their own rules.

Booker T., which didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, is the worst offender, both presently and historically.

When Booker T. reopened as an arts magnet in 1976, suburban students weren’t just welcomed with open arms, they were recruited. It was year five of the district’s court-ordered desegregation efforts, and to say that busing wasn’t popular with certain sectors of the community would be an understatement.

The district had seen some success mixing races at the then-new Skyline magnet school, which enticed white, black and brown students with its air-conditioned building (the only one in Dallas ISD at the time) and a chance to be part of something historic. Then-superintendent Nolan Estes thought the success could be replicated, so he proposed four new, career-focused magnet schools in 1976 that would be centrally located downtown.

Booker T. had been the only Dallas school for black children until 1939, and it was still essentially segregated when the district turned it into an arts magnet for dissimilar black and white students who shared an interest in the arts. The other original downtown magnets have faded into history, but 40 years later, Booker T. still stands.

At the time, the district’s goal for creating the magnets was explicit: They were “designed to achieve desegregation by attracting students of different ethnic backgrounds to schools where unique academic and vocational programs will be offered.”

And when it came to students who lived outside district boundaries, Dallas didn’t discriminate.

A September 1977 Dallas Morning News story laments that only 17 suburban students had enrolled in the district’s magnet schools. The story notes that then-trustee Brad Lapsley, a Woodrow Wilson High School graduate, “saw the magnets’ specialized curriculum as a way to lure Anglo students from the suburbs into Dallas’ voluntary desegregation program.”

Total number of slots claimed by students from outside of DISD for the past 14 years, after desegregation ended in 2003: