Inside Dallas ISD

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced that four Dallas ISD students are among this year’s National Merit $2,500 Scholarship winners. They are: Vedant N. Tapiavala – School for the Talented and Gifted (Townview TAG) Rithika Ganga – School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Townview SEM) Maanas K. Sharma – School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Townview SEM) Arjun Vikram – School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Townview SEM) The winners are the finalists in each state judged to have the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills, and potential for success in rigorous college studies. The number of winners named in…

Christopher Jenkins, reset center coordinator at Ann Richards STEAM Academy, has seen what can happen to young people when they lack a system of support. As a former parole officer for the State of Texas, he realized that his parolees all shared a similar story:  “The majority of them grew up with a mom who gave them the world, but Dad was absent, and they didn’t have a support system. They all shared that most of their issues began in school where they lacked any desire to gain a successful education and began acting up.” In his last year as…

Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary, which recently moved to a brand-new campus, hosted its school garden inauguration on Friday, May 6th. Instructional Coach Rebecca Ajuluchukwu launched the garden project earlier this school year when students returned to campus for face-to-face learning after months of at-home classes. “During the pandemic, I had a lot of free time on my hands and really started investing in my own garden at home,” Ajuluchukwu said. “When we got back to school, I realized that we had a lot of social-emotional changes with the students, and thought ‘if gardening brings me a lot of passion, it can…

Learning how to code and perfecting his programming skills outside the classroom led Sam Hooper to serve his community as a leader, a role model, a tutor and a developer of educational software, all while in high school.  The 18-year-old School for the Talented and Gifted (TAG) senior teaches programming to his classmates, developed an app that helps third- through eighth-grade students review math concepts, and has become an acclaimed coder, earning first place in the UIL State championship for two consecutive years. “I got to learn a bunch of stuff that I wanted to learn and also got to…