THE LITTLE SCHOOL THAT COULDN’T

IS A MAGNET SCHOOL ENOUGH TO CHANGE A NEIGHBORHOOD’S OPINION OF DISD?

By ELISSA CHUDWIN Photos by DANNY FULGENCIO

It didn’t matter that Sudie L. Williams Elementary’s test scores improved or that its deaf education program attracted suburban students. It didn’t matter that an army of neighborhood volunteers — the majority without schoolage children — coordinated fundraisers and raved about its charismatic principal, Michael Jackson.

Sudie Williams’ progress hadn’t reversed its low enrollment. At least, not in the school’s current iteration.

The Dallas ISD school, tucked between affluent Pomona Road homes and Bluffview Park, ends its 66-year run as a neighborhood public school in June. It reopens this fall as Sudie L. Williams Talented and Gifted (TAG) Academy, a magnet school for high-achieving children in grades 4-8. Students who didn’t test into the magnet were rezoned to K.B. Polk Elementary, a school 1.5 miles away that also houses a TAG program for fourth- and fifth-graders.

Sudie Williams wasn’t performing poorly, says DISD Trustee Dustin Marshall, who represents Preston Hollow, but it wasn’t well-known among many homeowner families.

“We haven’t done enough as a district to educate homeowners nearby about all the great things going on at the school,” he says.

About 850 neighborhood children zoned to the public school attend private schools such as The Lamplighter School and St. Monica Catholic School, according to DISD data compiled in 2016. Sudie Williams’ enrollment was a fraction of that number — roughly 205 students were enrolled during the 2017-18 school year. The school lost 28 percent of its total population this past year when 60 students who lived at the nearby Gates of Bluffview apartments were forced to move elsewhere after the apartments were razed.

The apartments’ gentrification was the catalyst for the school’s conversion, says Dorie Cranshaw, a Briarwood neighbor who has volunteered at Sudie Williams.

“It’s like a mobile. Move one thing, and everything else moves around it,” Cranshaw says.

In December Dallas ISD announced that Sudie Williams was one of three schools citywide that would be converted to a magnet school. The decision upset volunteers and parents alike, so much so that nearly 200 people crammed into Sudie’s auditorium to protest the abrupt decision during a community meeting.

“I don’t want to be dishonest or dismissive,” said Stephanie Elizalde, DISD Chief of School Leadership, during the December meeting. “[Our decision] was based on the data. We talked to our principals. We did not go the community.”

DISD’s decision wasn’t as sudden as it seemed to the community. Sudie Williams is representative of a larger problem looming over the district: Affluent white families are opting out of public school, and DISD has yet to figure out the formula to coax them back.

Sudie Williams has been at half-capacity since the 1990s. Even before then, in 1981, DISD considered closing the school as part of a revamped desegregation plan, according to Dallas Morning News archives.

Melissa Johnson served as PTA president when her children attended the school between 1991 and 2004. Enrollment then was between 210 to 250 students, but a number of students still lived in homes in the Bluffview and Shorecrest neighborhoods, Johnson says. There also was more diversity

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