Inside Dallas ISD

The students and teachers of J.N. Ervin Elementary will immediately notice several improvements to their campus when they come back from the summer break. More than 50 residents and employees of the pharmaceutical company AbbVie volunteered on Wednesday morning to beautify the school and add resources to the library. “For AbbVie, it is the core principle of why we exist: to serve our communities that we support,” AbbVie General Manager Lisa Peiser said. “It is inspiring. It motivates us to do more. And it makes us proud to work for a company that supports something like this.” This effort is…

At 17, Da’Shayla Foard is an internship veteran. The incoming senior at Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School is scheduled to start her second internship with the City of Dallas on Monday. She’s among dozens of Dallas ISD students who were selected in the Dallas Mayor’s Intern Fellow Program. Foard was among several interns who gathered at VolunteerNow to buy clothes on Tuesday. Representatives from the hiring companies met with the students to advise them on how to build a professional wardrobe. “Everyone wears gray and black and white,” she said, while holding a pair of maroon slacks. Foard…

To commemorate National Infrastructure Week on May 20, engineers from AECOM and Dallas Water Utilities hosted a “pop-up” classroom event focused on infrastructure and STEM programs at  CityLab High School. The event took place on Big Thought’s Dallas City of Learning Mobile Tech XPerience (MXP), a retrofitted RV equipped with the latest technology to bring accessible STEM learning directly to youth. Students had a chance to be an engineer for the day and participate in interactive STEM activities alongside AECOM engineers and clients as they learned about infrastructure design. This program is was to spark interest and curiosity in STEM…

For the past 10 years, Dallas ISD has partnered with the American Council of Engineering Companies of Dallas (ACEC Dallas chapter) for two great opportunities for students. Bytes for Kids is sponsored by the Texas Engineering Research Forum and organized with ACEC Dallas. The program focuses on encouraging elementary students to do their best in science and math, and provides awareness to careers in engineering. Each fall an engineer comes to speak to fifth-grade students about the world of engineering, and challenges them to give their all with the promise of iPads for four top students in May. Each six weeks for every…