Inside Dallas ISD

Stockard Middle School guitarist Joseyline Umana will have her song, “The Pressure She Carries,” featured at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s 43rd annual Words & Music Night. “My song is about my feelings, being under pressure, and always trying to be my best,” says Joseyline. She is one of 11 students selected to be featured from the United States, Canada, and Australia. Joseyline, a seventh grader, is a member of Stockard’s Modern Band, a class that teaches music standards through popular music and instruments such as guitar, bass, and drums. This year, teacher Beth Poquette Drews teamed up with…

Rosemont Lower hosted a ceremony on May 19th to honor their fifth-grade students who completed four years of the “Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES)” program. Rosemont was the first Dallas ISD school to implement the FLES program, in 2018. Since then, nine campuses have adopted the program, offering language-learning opportunities for one or two languages – including Chinese, German, Korean and Spanish – in each participating school. “When the students are learning any language, it opens those pathways in their brain for language-learning skills,” said Amy Anderton, director of the Dallas ISD Department of World Languages. “Frequently, if…

And the OVERALL REGIONAL WINNER IS … Travis Vanguard for the Academically Talented and Gifted! With 77 Dallas ISD schools and two Richardson ISD schools (RISD) competing, Travis Elementary’s team, which received the most points, was named the 2022 Regional Lone Star Challenge champion of this Texas-sized-academic competition held at Skyline High in early May. After spending an entire year examining Lone Star Challenge study materials and reading the novel “Breaking Stalin’s Nose,” all 623 students were ready to test their expertise as they filled Skyline High’s Mayo Gym. The competition is the baby sibling to the Academic Decathlon and…

Born in Fiji, Lily Maminabulewa was five years old when she moved with her family to Northern California. Leaving at such a young age, she remembers little about that time except saying goodbye to her grandmother, who was “very emotional” for reasons young Lily did not yet understand. The eldest of five children, Maminabulewa was the first in her family to graduate from college. She is quick to note that she does not fit the mold often assigned to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “People just assume, ‘Oh, you’re Asian, you’ll be a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer!’…