April 2024

Fifth-grade students, representing 33 campuses, had the opportunity to share their hearts through words at a recent districtwide poetry slam competition at Skyline High School. The competition brought students together for the chance to be this year’s poetry slam champions as well as win scholarships.

The Reading Language Arts Department partnered with the Roland Parrish Foundation, which funded the $10,000 in scholarships, to make this competition happen. First place went to Iker I. from Felix G. Botello Personalized Learning Elementary School, second place went to Max R. from William B. Travis Academy/Vanguard for the Academically Talented and Gifted, and third place went to Camila G. from Arturo Salazar Elementary School. 

The first-place winner received $5,000, second-place winner received $3,000, and the third-place winner won $2,000. The students will be able to use the money to attend any college or trade school of their choice. 

“It propels a little bit of the students’ futures—[lets them] think, ‘Hey I was successful in this, and I can be successful in other things,’” said Linda Flores, curriculum coordinator in the Reading Language Arts Department.

The way it worked was the Reading Language Arts Department got the word out to schools to let them know that there was an opportunity for the students to be creative and get their ideas out, but also have a chance to win scholarship money, Flores said. 

“For the students, this is important because it’s a creative outlet that they may or may not have the time to do when they are in school,” Flores said. “For the teachers, who are passionate about poetry, it’s an opportunity for them to run with it and to share their passion for poetry on their campus.”

Students were instructed to write a poem on the theme of “Rhythm of My Life,” which could be something significant in their life or something that they felt would relate to that topic. Flores said that having the competition during April, which is National Poetry Month, was intentional. 

Every campus then hosted their own campus poetry slam to select two top winners for their school, with some schools having up to 20 participants. Campuses then submitted a video of their top two winners performing their poems, and the reading department judged the entries in a preliminary competition, using a rubric to determine who were the top 10 finalists.  

This was the first in-person poetry slam competition, because in years past, it had been a virtual event, according to Flores. All the campus winners were invited to come to the poetry slam finals at Skyline, and the reading department had a student and parent reception before the competition started, and all the students received a certificate onstage. 

“We wanted each one to have their moment to shine onstage,” Flores said.

The feedback received from campuses, students and families was positive and the reading department plans to continue hosting the in-person event next year. Campus coordinators were very thankful and excited for their students to get honored in front of their parents and their peers, said Flores. To see a short video of the highlights, visit here. For more information about the poetry slam competition, email linflores@dallasisd.org. 

 

 

 

When families from other countries come to Dallas ISD to register their children for school, the first place they visit is the Margaret and Gilbert Herrera Welcome Center, known informally as the intake center. When families walk in the door, some of the first faces they see are team members Teresa Gonzalez and Herlinda Godoy. 

As administrative assistants both wear many hats, performing duties such as checking documents and making sure the families have everything they need to enroll in the district—from making IDs for the students, to making sure they are placed in the correct school. Often working through language barriers, they show families how to use a cell phone or how to send an email. They use resources such as the district’s Translation Services team and online tools to communicate with parents, when they speak languages other than English and Spanish.

They, like other administrative professionals, often perform many tasks that help students and other team members be successful. Their contributions and talents will be celebrated nationally on April 24 for Administrative Professionals Day. 

Gonzalez and Godoy also help with different needs by getting other departments involved, such as when receiving students who require special services or working with the nurse who helps make sure the students have all of their immunizations in order to begin their journey in the district.

The two administrative assistants shared that the main thing they keep in mind is to have the heart to listen, to be patient and to have a heart of service to help people. They are resourceful and embrace the Core 4 tenets. 

Having worked together for 10 years, they know when to step in and help each other out without skipping a beat. Godoy has been working for the district for 29 years and Gonzalez has worked for the district for 27 years. 

 

What is an accomplishment that you’re proud of?

Godoy: I’m proud of what I am right now because I was once a newcomer. I remember when I registered my daughter when she was in pre-K. I didn’t know any English, so it was very hard for me to fill out the documents and forms, and I was doing it by myself. So being here and helping families makes me proud to be here. When we see three or four families living in one apartment it takes me back to when I first arrived from my native country of Mexico, because I was living through similar circumstances. 

Gonzalez: I started school here since kindergarten, but my dad came first to the United States from Mexico. And with seven kids, I think what he accomplished is what newcomers are trying to do. He was fortunate to be taken under someone’s wing who helped him and guided him. All seven of us siblings have had the chance to be here in Dallas ISD as students, and we’ve had a good life. And whenever I help people, I think about my mom. My mom really never learned English. I think about this, and all of these things make me feel good. 

 

What drew you to  the education field?

Gonzalez: When my son was in pre-K, he didn’t want to school. So I got involved with being in the PTA and being a volunteer. Team members at Edward Titche Elementary School, where I was volunteering, would ask me to translate, and that’s when the principal asked me to get more involved. 

Godoy: When I was in Mexico, I was a pre-K teacher. From the time I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher, because I had great teachers in my life. When my parents moved to Jalisco, I attended a school for teachers there, and I started teaching the little ones. So when I came here to the United States with no English, my daughter was in second grade and her teacher told me I needed to become a teacher there because she saw the way I worked with the students as a volunteer. I went and talked to the principal who said they needed bilingual team members and I started as a teacher assistant. 

 

Do you have a favorite memory of working for the district?

Gonzalez: When I was at Casa View Elementary School, I was a teacher assistant and what really stands out with me is the principal would call me over the intercom and would pull me to interpret for families. That’s how I met the principal there and we’ve become very good friends over the last 24 years. In fact, she’s my daughter’s godmother. I know that I needed to expand my Spanish, especially when I was asked to interpret for parents during Admission Review and Dismissal meetings. That’s what stands out for me, where I was needed. And working there gave me the foundation to work here.

Godoy: I was a TA but I became a community liaison at a school and I remember in my first year there I wanted to do something big. So that year we were invited to go to a circus. I took the whole school with 17 buses and the circus came for us at the school, and we were following them in a caravan. From the school in East Dallas, we went to Reunion Arena where the circus was taking place. It was so fun and the kids were so happy. When we came back, they were so impressed with that. I always remember that experience because everyone expressed such joy. I will never forget that moment.

 

At N.W. Harllee Early Childhood Center kindergarten students are looking to the future. When kindergarten teacher Zaria Wynn was teaching her students about what is recyclable, the students started wondering about why stuff was being thrown away instead of being recycled.

This discussion led Wynn to team up with Michelle Touchet, the school’s library media specialist, to start a recycling  program with the students. Touchet had worked on the green team and recycling program in a previous campus, so the two began to work collectively on this project after spring break.

This relatively new endeavor at the school has already turned into a schoolwide collaboration. Once Wynn and Touchet took on the task, Touchet reached out to her local city council representative to get a blue recycling bin through the city of Dallas. The school received one the next day.

“The idea about getting the blue residential rolling cart on campus was so we could teach our little ones how to use the city’s recycling system so they can hopefully teach their parents,” Touchet said. 

The students started out with paper only. Students and teachers began to place the leftover paper in the blue bin located in the main hallway downstairs.The students also began to notice that there was an opportunity to recycle materials in the cafeteria.

“There’s quite a bit of plastic that’s generated in some of those prepared meals,” Touchet said. “And so the kiddos have noticed things that  have a triangle on it, and they put it in a pile and make sure it’s clean.” 

One of the goals of the program is to start a compost project in the future once the logistics are worked out, Touchet said.

This semester Touchet and Wynn, along with their colleagues, are working on teaching the students about what can be put into the recycling bin, as well as what you can do with the items before you put it in the recycling bin. Students are learning the concept of reduce, reuse, and recycle.

The work that Touchet and Wynn are doing is the kind of action encouraged during Earth Day, which celebrates the planet and highlights ways of protecting health and the environment. This year, Earth Day falls on Monday, April 22. 

“The 5-year-olds in Wynn’s class have done some projects with categories and had to determine what could be reduced, reused or recycled, and she’s really done a great job in her classroom of setting up this kind of environmental mode,” Touchet said.

According to Touchet, they are  working on trying to get a consistent receptacle system in the classroom, so it’s easier for the students to take charge of it. At the end of the day, they pick up the bins and boxes from the classrooms and dump them into the blue rolling cart from the city. Touchet described it as a campus collaboration in its nascent stages. She also added that the facilities manager and a community member are helping out with these efforts. 

Because it’s a residential  recycling bin, they can’t put it out in front of the school, so a neighbor that lives right across the street is allowing the school to put the blue bin in front of his house on recycling day. 

“Our motto here at Harllee is ‘where greatness starts early,’  and I think that the great citizens of the planet contributing to keep things clean and protecting our environment is, at best, greatness,” Touchet said.  

 

By special contributor Anne Howell, demonstration teacher at Dan D. Rogers Elementary School

 

For bus driver Tamara Franklin, creating a welcoming and cheerful atmosphere in her vehicle is all in a day’s work, which for the past two years, has meant adorning her special education bus to match seasonal holidays and special events.

 

“I started last Halloween,” Franklin said. “I decorate my home, and I saw that some drivers put stickers around, so I thought ‘I’m going to decorate the whole bus!’”

 

That year, students entered the bus the next morning to find spider webs, skulls and a ghost inside.

 

“They were so excited,” she said. “They got to look around–their eyes lit up. And their parents got to see and they thought it was the neatest thing that their kids got to experience this.” 

 

Hundreds of bus drivers like Franklin in Dallas ISD make a difference in students’ lives every day as they ensure they get to school and back home safely. Their work and efforts are celebrated on April 23 during Bus Driver Appreciation Day. 

 

Franklin’s Halloween decorating was such a hit that she has expanded to also decorate for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and spring, and, this year, she welcomed students back to school by decorating for the first day of class. 

 

“Now I decorate my bus more than I decorate my house. Even the high school students want them,” Franklin said. “They say the bus looks plain without them.”

 

In addition to the holiday decorations, Franklin highlights student work. 

 

“I had a high school student who loved to draw,” she said. “You could tell him anything and he would draw it. I put up his drawings. The whole top of the bus was pasted with his drawings. You could see it made him feel good that someone appreciated his work.”

 

Her decorations have inspired other bus drivers to decorate as well. 

 

“Now we have a little friendly competition between a couple of friendly coworkers,” Franklin said. “Sometimes we would sneak on to the other person’s bus so we could see what she did and then outdo it.”

 

“I started posting videos because a coworker inspired me to make it public and let people see what my bus looks like,” Franklin said. “At first it was just simple, and now it has turned into a lot more.” 

 

Franklin has been a driver for over 20 years. Originally from Germany, she joined the U.S. Army at 18, and after marrying, she moved to Dallas, her husband’s hometown. Because she loves to drive and wanted to drive big vehicles, she started a career driving for DART. After a while, she tried an office job, but returned to her passion—driving. She wanted to do something more fulfilling, so she decided to join Dallas ISD as a CDL bus driver. 

 

“I knew I wanted to work with kids,” she said. “They are so joyful, fun, and carefree. There are so many children that don’t get the kind of love and attention they should, and I want to do that for them. I hope that the little things I do for them let them know there’s someone out there that cares for them.” 

 

Special education Monitor Kamesha Carter also contributes to the decorations on Franklin’s bus. 

 

“We should make them feel welcome,” Carter said. 

 

Franklin agrees: “The bus is the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see before they get home. The decorations just make a happy feeling on the bus.”

 

Students confirm the decorations make a difference. 

 

“When I see the decorations, my happiness goes up,” said fourth-grader Lenny P. “Then my day is better.”

 

Fourth grade student Kaycee J. finds the decorations inspiring: “When I see them I feel like I should be kind because others are kind to me to do this [decorate] for me.”

 

For Franklin, going the extra mile for students is no problem.

 

“I love my job. I really do,” she said.

When Myles Bennett, a first-grade teacher at Dan D. Rogers Elementary School, told her mother how wonderful it would be to someday teach at her school, she never imagined that it would come true.

“We used to think about what it would be like to be at the same school, and we laughed about how there’d be two Miss Bennetts,” said Sandra Bennett, Myles’ mom and a fourth-grade teacher at Dan D. Rogers. The two English as a second language teachers are known as “Bennett fourth” and “Bennett first” according to the grades they teach. 

Both recently were recognized by the district in the annual Winners Circle event, one as the school’s Campus Teacher of the Year and the other as a Teacher of Promise. 

“We didn’t realize that significance until we were both invited to the ceremony. So, we thought ‘I would have taken you anyway,’ and she would have taken me anyway,” Sandra said. 

“I was really excited for my mom,” Myles said. “It’s been a long time coming, and I think, honestly, I’m just so proud of her and proud to be her daughter.” 

Attending the ceremony with them was their principal, Marissa Limon, who has been a colleague of Sandra for years and who has known Myles since she was in middle school. 

Myles, who is in her third year of teaching, is a product of Dallas ISD, having attended Mockingbird Elementary and Henry W. Longfellow Career Exploration Academy and graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts. 

“I grew up volunteering at Dan D. Rogers, and would come and help out in events, such as the fall carnival and the wax museum—a project that my mom does in her class,” Myles said. “I was very familiar with the community here, and with my mom being a teacher, I saw the impact that one can have on the lives of the students, and it really inspired me to become a teacher.” 

Her mom, Sandra, who has worked for the district for 25 years—15 of those at Dan D. Rogers— has seen the impact a teacher can have on students. A few years ago, some former students found her on social media and about 16 of them took her out to dinner.

“It’s about the relationships that you build,” Sandra said. “I’m getting to see what Myles is looking forward to.”

There’s students in Myles’ class who are in first-grade and who have siblings in fourth grade. Sometimes a fourth-grade sibling might come up to her and mention something that they heard they were working on, such as learning about the colonies. 

“It’s cool to see just how connected we can be in that way,” Myles said.  “It’s nice to share families, while we share [our own] family,” she said, referring to her mom. 

Myles and Sandra often find moments to connect during the day. They describe themselves as “early birds,” arriving at the school early every morning. Sandra brings yogurt or something similar for Myles’ breakfast, and they both get to FaceTime with Sandra’s other daughter, who is studying in England. The time zone difference and that space before the day begins is perfect for the two siblings and mother to have a few moments before the students enter the building and the school day begins. 

Besides being co-workers, this dynamic mother-daughter duo worked on the curriculum for a chapter book, for students in first grade through fifth grade. The book is titled “Closet of Dreams,” and it just came out a couple of weeks ago. They also wrote a teacher’s guide for the book that has suggested activities for teachers to do with their students, Sandra said. Sandra focused on the content, while Myles focused on the technical aspects of it, such as making it aesthetically pleasing and easy to access. 

Through this work, both Myles and Sandra continue to be inspired by the families and students that they serve in their school, which they describe as the best in the district.

“I think about the general impact, and I kind of zoom out and think about how I am somebody who is showing up for these kids every day,” Sandra said. “I work with the kids to help them realize their potential and their confidence in themselves, just as I am as well.”