DISD Superintendent Mike Miles

In a key win for the district's embattled administration, Dallas Independent School District trustees voted tonight to fire two principals and as many as 400 teachers, over the often heated objections of employees and activists.

It was the culmination of months of debate and protests over Superintendent Mike Miles' reform efforts, which included placing some teachers and principals on "growth plans" and forcing those considered least effective out of their jobs. But in the end, the vote for the firings -- which passed 7-2, with Trustees Bernadette Nutall and Carla Ranger voting against -- seemed to indicate that Miles still has plenty of support on the board that hired him last year.

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For some senior year offers boundless educational opportunities.

For some Dallas ISD students, the senior year of high school is immensely valuable. There are mountains of college credits that can be accumulated free of charged through AP, IB, and dual-credit courses, and the mechanically inclined can enroll in vocational programs like Skyline's aeronautics cluster.

But what of the rest? For them, 12th grade is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to school and learn absolutely nothing.

Thankfully they now have the state's permission to blow it off entirely.

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Today is a key moment in the battle for school reform in Dallas, as a list of school principals to be fired goes before the school board. (Check back tonight for the body count.) The main opposition to the reform effort has come from southern Dallas black leadership allied with the district employees who may be about to lose their jobs.

Last week, the Dallas Citizens Council joined the Dallas Regional Chamber (of commerce) in an open letter to Dallas school board trustees, urging them to stick with the program of school reform designed and executed by school superintendent Mike Miles. So, blah-blah-blah, right? Local business persons want better schools. How is that news? Oh, man, you have to know how crazy this town is before you can even get the answer.

See also:
"Mike Miles versus the World," this week's cover story by Jim Schutze

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Police don't make a habit of blasting out the names and faces of 17-year-old crime suspects, but the Irving Police Department made an exception for Travis Lekas. The Nimitz High School student was arrested Monday on charges that he drugged a fellow student and forced her into prostitution.

According to police documents, the scene went down like this: Lekas took a 15-year-old classmate to his Irving trailer on April 29 and plied her with booze, weed, and Xanax. He kept her high and confined to the the house for three days, inviting men to have sex with her in exchange for cash and drugs. He also allegedly tried to pimp out other girls from Nimitz, as well as Bowie Middle School.

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Clearly, shirt-tucking doesn't damage everybody's self-esteem.

Dallas ISD trustees still haven't decided what to do about the roster of principals whose jobs could be on the chopping block. The matter has now been delayed twice, thus sparing trustees from making an extremely controversial decision until after this weekend's election.

At their meeting Thursday, trustees did manage to find time for a minutely detailed discussion of student dress code. Leggings, it was agreed, aren't to be worn as pants but are perfectly acceptable as undergarments. Skirts should come no higher than the girl's fingertips and should sometimes be longer since, as one trustee pointed out, some girls have very short arms. Earrings on boys? "They should be banned," Bernadette Nutall decided. "Boys should not be wearing earrings."

"What about the gauges?" Adam Medrano wondered. "A lot of kids have the gauges where they're stretching their ear." Someone else mentioned straws, which kids sometimes use in place of actual jewelry. Both would be banned under the policy.

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Twitter

We learned a little bit more yesterday about Jeff Bliss, the Duncanville High School student whose blistering classroom rant against uninspired teachers seems to have struck a nerve. He's 18, but he's only a high school sophomore, having dropped out of school for a year. He's new to, and not yet very good at, Twitter. His mom is proud.

See also: Watch a Duncanville Teen Deliver a Blistering Classroom Sermon on Lazy Teachers

We also learned something about Duncanville ISD, which has dealt with the situation in a surprisingly measured way. They initially released a statement reading, "We want our students and teachers to be engaged, but the method by which the student expressed his concern could have been handled in a more appropriate way."

Superintendent Alfred Ray reiterated that sentiment in an interview with Fox 4.

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Via.

Village Fair is Dallas ISD's alternative school, where the district sends those students deemed too disruptive or unruly to function in mainstream classrooms. That it experiences its share of discipline problems is a given. But even there, the iron rule of Texas education applies: Don't mess with the STAAR test.

Police drove the message home this morning when they arrested a 15-year-old girl for doing just that. According to a police report, the girl was in detention when, at about 10:20 a.m., she demanded to leave. The teacher refused and told the girl to cut it out. When she didn't, the teacher radioed for help.

A teaching assistant arrived and led the girl into the hall. The girl then stopped, refusing to budge. "I ain't going no-fucking-where," she yelled. "Call security."

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Illustration by Dan Zettwoch

See more incorrect ways to have sex here.

This year, a group of parents and administrators at the Dallas Independent School District embarked on pretty much the most thankless task there is: finding a new sex ed curriculum for the district's students. The job is thankless in large part because no matter what they do, someone's going to get pissed off. Also a problem: the Texas education code, which requires sex ed to emphasize abstinence as the first and best choice. The state's health code is also problematic. It still erroneously says that homosexuality is a "criminal offense," and that students must be taught that gayness is "not an acceptable lifestyle choice."

All of this adds up to an environment that doesn't really lend itself to teaching sex ed in a particularly forward-thinking fashion (if that's your thing). In this week's cover story, we outlined DISD's hunt for a new sex ed curriculum, as well as a few details on their current frontrunner, a program from Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas called Worth the Wait.

The program, which is in the process of changing its name to Wellness and Sexual Health, promises medically accurate information on condoms and STDS, as well as all the state-mandated emphasis on not getting it on before marriage. Worth the Wait was created by an OB-GYN named Patricia "Patsy" Sulak, and it does indeed have a bit of accurate information on STD rates, contraception and the like. There's also a lot of emphasis on drugs, smoking, obesity and a bunch of other things those crazy teenagers typically get up to.

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In another era, Jeff Bliss' phillipic against lazy and uninspired teaching would have been witnessed by a few classmates and quickly forgotten. But this is the age of cell-phone cameras and YouTube, so we get to see the full sermon the Duncanville High School student directed at Julie Phung, his world history teacher.

The video clip doesn't provide much context for Bliss' outburst, but the speech, whatever preceded it, stands on its own. It's what every bored and disaffected public school student has always wanted to say but dared not to.

Bliss preaches:

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Prosecutors recently dropped charges in one of the high-profile cases that spurred SMU to take a long look at its often baffling handling of sexual assaults. Last night, a week-and-a-half before another student is set to go to trial on charges that he raped a classmate in a dorm room, the university publicly released the recommendations of its sexual assault task force.

The creation of the task force was partly an act of damage control by SMU President Gerald Turner, since having students' mugshots splashed across local media in connection with rape allegations doesn't exactly bolster a school's reputation. But it also seems to have been a serious and comprehensive effort to reform.

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