DO DISD’S SMARTEST KIDS LIVE IN EAST DALLAS?

THE DISTRICT’S PREMIERE MAGNET SCHOOLS ARE CLOGGED WITH NEIGHBORHOOD KIDS. IS IT BECAUSE THEY’RE THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST? THE TRUTH IS MORE COMPLICATED.

Story by Keri Mitchell | Photos by Rasy Ran

East Dallas is a unique area of the school district, one where families take great pride in their neighborhood public schools and simultaneously take full advantage of the other options Dallas ISD makes available. A good chunk of students at the district’s top magnet schools come from our neighborhood.

The most extreme case is at Uptown’s William B. Travis Academy & Vanguard for the Academically Talented and Gifted where, last year, students from East Dallas’ Lakewood and Stonewall Jackson elementaries claimed onethird of the seats.

The sought-after magnet school for DISD fourth- through eighth-graders offers rigorous academic curriculum that aims to “address the unique social and emotional needs of the gifted child,” according to its website. Travis opened in fall 2000, and since then, its popularity with neighborhood parents has skyrocketed.

Travis was the final Dallas magnet school to open during the school district’s court-ordered desegregation process, which began in 1971 and lasted 33 years. At first, it had the racial makeup the law required: roughly one-third white, one-third black and one-third Hispanic.

That makeup began to change after 2003, when Dallas ISD was released from federally mandated desegregation. The district, as part of its promise to the courts to continue to diversify its magnet schools, devised a new admission process that accepted the top applicants from six different areas of town.

Areas later gave way to learning communities, which gave way to high school feeder patterns, but the admission process for magnet schools today essentially is the same as it has been since desegregation: The top 30 percent of applicants are accepted to each magnet school according to their GPA, test scores and admission exams, and then the district awards the remaining 70 percent of spots to each high school attendance zone’s top applicants.

Such a system should yield a roughly even number of students from each area of town at any given magnet school. It doesn’t.

If qualified students from a particular high school zone don’t apply or decide not to attend, those vacant TAG spots go to the next-highest-ranking students from the pool of district-wide applicants, says Keisha Crowder-

Davis, the district’s director of postsecondary success, who oversees the magnet schools.

“I tell everybody, whatever is in the pool is what’s going to come out,” she says. “If we have more students applying from the Bryan Adams feeder pattern, for example, then you can almost bet that more Bryan Adams kids are going to come out of that.”

It’s evident from the numbers