Inside Dallas ISD

Science teacher Dana Clark is an education trailblazer. She’s traveled the world in search of knowledge to bring back and share with the students in her classroom at Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School where she’s taught for 10 years. Clark has studied sea turtles in the Amazon of Peru, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, to study climate change, and this summer helped to map the seafloor around Alaska as part of a seafaring expedition sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The adventurous teacher says she enjoyed every moment and that she’s used the experiences to enliven…

Can you interpret the formula Q=cm∆t? Do you have even a clue? If not, you might ask yourself if you’re smarter than a sixth-grader since the formula is the basis of a middle school science fair project. For Vanessa Padilla, a sixth-grader at Henry W. Longfellow Career Exploration Academy, this group of letters and symbols is central to the science project “Heating Up” she will present this weekend at the city’s Divisional Science Fair. Her project examines the lowest specific heat of copper, brass and iron, and the equation represents the relationship between heat and temperature change. Padilla’s interest in…

Dallas ISD’s recruitment team is laser focused on repeating last year’s record of opening the school year with zero teacher vacancies. Thanks to a yeoman’s effort by the team, the 2014 school year launched with a qualified teacher at the helm of every classroom, no mean feat for a district with more than 10,000 teachers. In an effort to keep that winning streak going, Human Capital Management has launched a newly revamped recruitment website and increased state, national and international recruitment efforts, progress that has placed it ahead of the curve to fully staff district classrooms for the coming school year. “We…

Attracting the most talented staff, getting them interviewed, hired and working behind a desk or in front of a classroom is one of the main missions of Human Capital Management. Perfecting the system of recruiting and training talented new hires for an organization of 20,000-plus employees is no small task. In search of methods to increase efficiency, the Board of Trustees created the Star Employee Commission, which comprises human resource experts from area corporations including Presbyterian Hospital, The Container Store and Texas Instruments. Their charge: to recommend improvements to the district’s human resource function. One of the commission’s central findings…