Inside Dallas ISD

Hugo Duran couldn’t contain himself when he got the biggest news of his life. He learned he had just been selected as part of the High School Aerospace Scholars program and would spend a week this summer studying under the guidance of some of the nation’s top engineers and scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I was in physics class, and I jumped out of my chair screaming,” Duran said. “Everyone was looking at me, and I didn’t even care because it was so much hard work trying to get into the program—something that I really wanted to do.”…

The 1 For All program recently announced the 40 winners of their First Amendment Challenge, including Rosa Rodriguez, a journalism and Spanish teacher at Sunset High School. Each awardee received $1,000 in recognition of their outstanding lesson plans and student projects. The challenge asked high school teachers across the country to share the ways they teach about First Amendment freedoms, and encouraged innovation and creativity in the classroom. The American Society of News Editors’ (ASNE) Youth Journalism Initiative coordinated the challenge. “I love teaching journalism and facilitating media production,” said Rodriguez, who gained hands-on journalism experience as a reporter in…

Retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Davis has been named Director of Army Instruction of the Year by the U.S. Army’s Cadet Command, which is based at Ft. Knox, Kentucky. Davis is the director of Army Instruction for Dallas ISD’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program. His commendation is one of 12 national awards of excellence presented by the U.S. Army Cadet Command, which is responsible for the Army’s junior and senior ROTC programs. On the Cadet Command website, Army officials said the awards recognize the recipients’ “contributions to training excellence and their roles in furthering the Command’s dual missions…

Think back to your eighth-grade business, marketing and finance class. Well, that might be a bit difficult for some because, chances are, you didn’t have one. However, as school districts today develop more rigorous, engaging and relevant curriculums, middle school students like those in Dee Coyle’s eighth-grade business/marketing/finance class this past school year learned how to run a business. With words like entrepreneur, disposal value and depreciation being the center of class discussions, “it’s kind of like teaching a foreign language,” Coyle jokes. Coyle is a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher at Harold Wendell Lang Sr. Middle School. In…