Inside Dallas ISD

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!’…

Trevor Cunningham, an exemplary student in the Health/Medical pathway at Career Institute East at Lincoln High School, is determined to be a successful registered nurse and to help deaf and hard of hearing people like himself.  Trevor admits that one of his greatest challenges has been collaborating with other students, but his determination to help others has helped him overcome every obstacle to fulfilling his aspirations.  “I stay motivated because I like helping people. I am determined to be successful, and I want to help deaf and hard of hearing people,” Trevor says. His best advice is to “just be…

For more than ten years, Somyung Kim worked in the financial industry, excelling at her job and enjoying it. But all the while she knew that something was missing. Kim had grown up in Daegu, South Korea, as older sister to one brother in a large and close extended family. She attended college there, but as a self-described “fearless college student,” she decided after her sophomore year to “come to America to explore.”  An economics major, Kim secured an internship in Florida with a leading hotel chain.  Later, she studied in Georgia on an exchange program before graduating from her…