Inside Dallas ISD

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…

Dallas ISD has partnered with The Holdsworth Center to build on the inspiration, tools, and resources needed to grow our leaders. One avenue of this partnership is the Campus Leadership Program (CLP), a two-year program in which campus teams will build stronger leadership muscles while working toward excellent and equitable outcomes for all students. The curriculum is centered in three areas: Developing Personal Leadership, Growing & Empowering Others, and Creating Change. Campus leaders will: Learn from expert faculty and guest lecturers. Collaborate on a Problem of Practice that leads to results that impact students. Develop new problem-solving methodologies by practicing…

Kendall Stafford, senior Teen School Board representative for Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, has been on the board since her junior year. As a student in the theater conservatory at Booker T, her concentration is on stage management, playwriting, directing and design. “I’m really focused on the technical aspect and production aspect of theater, but I like to dabble in everything,” she says. Once in college, Kendall would like to study cultural anthropology, because, as she describes it, “The major allows flexibility for an emphasis on arts, information, history, and culture, all meshed together…