Inside Dallas ISD

Dallas ISD is a hotbed of history, from the people who’ve passed through district classrooms, to the students who’ve graduated, to the very buildings standing in the district’s 324 mile radius. Within that radius is Sunset High School, named for the neighborhood in which it was built, the Sunset Hills Addition of Oak Cliff. The school was built in 1925 when Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States, Ford produced its first truck, F.Scott Fitzgerald released “The Great Gatsby,” and the average family household income in the U.S. was, give or take, $5,200, according to a recent edition of…

A spider has appeared in Mrs. Arellano’s second-grade classroom at Arthur Kramer Elementary School, and her students are freaking out. After the spider is dealt with, the panic quickly turns into questions or, as they are called in the International Baccalaureate-candidate school, “wonders,” about the spider. “Where does the spider live?” “What does the spider eat?” “How long does a spider live?” Because Arthur Kramer Elementary is involved in the IB program, which helps put students in charge of their own learning, Mrs. Arellano encourages the students’ “wonders” about the arachnid. (For the record: Spiders live almost every habitat on earth;…

In an effort to fill bilingual teaching positions that can help meet students’ needs, Dallas ISD has recruited approximately 50 teachers from Spain. Marco Antonio Iglesias Rodriguez, a fourth-grade teacher at Herbert Marcus Elementary, is one of those teachers. Watch the above video to learn how teaching in Dallas ISD differs from teaching in Spain, why he was drawn to teach in the district, and how Dallas as a city is different from North Spain.

Damien Gonzalez, an automotive student at W.H. Adamson High School, is standing in front of a Lamborghini Diablo, and he really wants the car. Gonzalez was one of about 45 automotive students from Adamson who went to a Mecum Auction held Sept. 17 at the Dallas Convention Center. The Dallas ISD students attended the auction thanks to donated tickets from Mecum Auctions, which bills itself as the world’s largest collector car auction. Timmy Martin, the automotive instructor at Adamson, said the event taught students about the car restoration process and gave them an inside look at a car auction. Students from…