Tom McNatt has spent his entire career at Robert E. Lee Elementary. Right out of college, he was hired as Lee’s seventh-grade coach, and stayed on as the physical education teacher when the older grades moved out of the elementary.
Even so, to this day everyone knows him simply as “Coach.”
“I had no idea what his name was the first couple of years I worked here,” confesses Lee’s librarian, Angela Brown.
When former students visit the school, Brown says, many times the first words out of their mouths are: “Is Coach still here?” The fact that the answer is “yes” — and that any staff members who have spent less than 10 years at the school are considered “newbies” — speaks volumes about Lee’s continuity.
And it’s not only the teachers who stick around; after 75 school years, some of Lee’s students are second- and even third-generation pupils.
“You get to see the kids grow up, and you get to see the kids that, after they grow up, they bring their kids back,” McNatt says. “It’s a pretty stable neighborhood. Most of the families that are here, stay here. Most of the kids who start out here, finish here.”
That likely will be true for Murphy Stegall, who entered kindergarten this year at Lee, even though his mother, Kimberly, never intended for him to attend public school. The Stegalls live in Lakewood Heights and are one of the many young families who have moved into Lee’s attendance zone during the past five to 10 years. A good portion of them, however, aren’t sending their children to Lee, choosing instead to apply to private schools or try to transfer into Lakewood and Stonewall, Lee’s next-door (and more highly touted) elementary school neighbors.
Stegall tried to get Murphy into Dallas International School, but he was still on the waiting list by the time classes began last fall, so she says she reluctantly sent him to Lee. Within a week, she says, principal Alicia Zapata knew her son’s name, and Murphy quickly felt right at home. Two months after school started, when Dallas International called Stegall to inform her of an opening, she responded: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Describing Lee as “like a private school in a public school setting,” she cites a recent school day when Murphy was coughing during Coach McNatt’s class, but pleaded to run laps anyway. McNatt responded: “Nope, I don’t want your mom to get me.”
“They pay attention to the little things about my little person, and that makes a world of difference to me as a parent,” Stegall says.
Robert E. Lee was built around the time that GIs were returning from World War I. The historic campus was designed by architect Mark Lemmon, of Lemmon Avenue renown, who fashioned the Dallas ISD administration building’s façade in a similar manner. When the school celebrates its 75th anniversary this month, it hopes to have some of Lemmon’s original lithographs on display.
Lee staff members also are scrambling to spruce up their campus before the celebration. Thanks to the help of Dallas master gardener Susan Flanagan and the White Rock Kiwanis Club (including one member who attended Lee the year it opened and can still sing the school song from memory), daffodils and tulips are springing up around the perimeter and in the courtyard.
Those aren’t the only signs of new life on the campus. The turnover in the neighborhood has given rise to the relatively recent formation of the Greater White Rock Area Early Childhood PTA, targeted mainly at future Stonewall and Lee parents. When Laura Legg helped to form the group after her son’s birth three years ago, she was one of only two parents who lived within Lee’s boundaries. Interest in the school has grown since then, however, and members have taken it upon themselves to essentially act as a cheerleader group for Lee.
Their original hope was to improve the school, Legg says, but as parents grew more familiar with Lee, they began to see some of its distinct advantages, such as “how outrageously well-educated the staff is.” One of the pre-k teachers has her doctorate, for example, and another is an adjunct faculty member at three area colleges. They also were surprised to learn that the vast majority of teachers are bilingual, including a kindergarten teacher who speaks as many as eight languages, Legg says.
“He has his students say good morning to me in three different languages,” she says.
Last year, Lee earned its first state-designation as a “recognized” campus, joining the ranks of neighbors Lakewood and Stonewall. And the school also has a low student-teacher ratio, 18 to 1, with some classrooms having as few as 15 students. These factors are enough to attract quite a few outsiders: 30 percent of the students are transfers, including a number who are dropped off en route to the Dallas ISD administration building on Ross.
Despite all of this, the campus currently operates at only 45 percent capacity. Though the school can hold more than 500 students, roughly 250 fill its classrooms. The entire second floor, except for a lone computer lab, is vacant.
“We need people to have more babies and bring them,” says principal Zapata, only half joking. “I think that because we back up to Lakewood and Stonewall, we get missed. I’ve said that it’s a well-kept secret, but since we’re getting smaller and smaller, we need to let people know.”
Apartment complexes have given way to townhouses in recent years, which is one reason for the decrease in Lee’s population. Another is that children who were bussed into the school from near Northwest Highway are now attending newly constructed Park Lane Elementary in their neighborhood.
Perhaps district administrators believed that the wave of young families moving into Lee’s attendance zone would balance things out, but it hasn’t made a substantial impact on the school’s population.
“Over a couple years, I concluded we’ve got all these new houses going up, but it was abundantly clear that these kids weren’t going to Robert E. Lee,” says Vince Murchison, a Stonewall parent who chairs his school’s site-based decision making committee. “It was reported that one block had 23 school-age children, and none of them went to Robert E. Lee.”
Coach McNatt came to the school when it had roughly 250 students and has watched its population rise to nearly 600 then fall to where it stands today. As everyone knows, he says, the neighborhood has undergone quite a turnaround, with $60,000 homes escalating to $300,000 homes.
“Most of the $300,000 homes send their kids to private school,” he says.
The widely held belief among neighborhood parents is that very few English speakers attend the school, says Legg, emphasizing that it’s not true. Many bilingual children are part of Lee’s student body, but very few speak no English, she says. And though Lee became a recognized school last year, the school’s history of not being able to achieve high scores on the state’s standardized tests might make some families wary.
For whatever reason, many parents have a negative perception of the school and simply feel uncomfortable sending their children to Lee, says Steve Swift, who lives just blocks from the campus and has a son entering kindergarten this fall. For various reasons, he and his wife, De, plan to send their son to Peak Academy.
“There’s no effort on the part of the school to reach out to the community. And that’s going to have to happen,” De Swift says. “The school can be a great school, but if nobody knows about it, it’s just going to be the conventional wisdom that’s Lee’s a bad school.”
What could change the mind of parents such as the Swifts is whether Lee adds a dual-language program (making all students bilingual and bi-literate) and expands its pre-kindergarten by allowing neighborhood families to pay tuition and join (currently pre-kindergarten is offered only to low-income families who qualify for free tuition). Both programs have been implemented at other Dallas ISD schools, and the Greater White Rock Area Early Childhood PTA has been pressing Zapata and DISD Area Four superintendent Emilio Castro, who oversees the school, to add them at Lee.
“These programs have been proven,” Legg says.
Programs like these could make Lee competitive with not only private schools but also neighboring elementary schools, says Tammy Hooker of the Greater White Rock Early Childhood PTA. And it’s more than just parents of young children who should be concerned about improving the school, Steve Swift says. A quick visit to the Dallas Central Appraisal District website shows a clearly defined line where the Stonewall district ends and the Lee district begins — in the form of property values, he says. That’s not the only reason to want a good school in your neighborhood, he says, but it’s one more reason to invest in Lee, which he and his wife say they plan to do no matter where their children attend school.
“We feel like it’s a little diamond in the rough,” De Swift says. “It just doesn’t have the same perception that maybe Lakewood or Stonewall Jackson has.”
“Yet,” her husband adds.
Grasping 3- and 4-year-olds by the hand and pushing toddlers in strollers — sometimes all the way from their nearby homes — prospective Lee parents filed into the school’s auditorium on the evening of its recent pre-k and kindergarten round-up. Dallas ISD Trustee Jack Lowe took the microphone as the night’s special guest speaker, and he encouraged parents in the audience to get involved in their neighborhood school.
In a prior phone conversation, Lowe mentioned that pockets of the district were showing middle class growth, noting that “it’s sort of chicken and egg — does the middle class come in when it gets better, or does the middle class come in and make it better?” In Lee’s case, he says, two factors are at work: space and interest.
“That is a place we ought to put a little attention,” Lowe says. “To me, it sounds like an opportunity to attract more students into a half-full school.”
What’s getting ready to happen at Lee is similar to what happened at Stonewall Jackson, says Judy McMillan, who has lived on McCommas for 32 years. Her children attended Stonewall, and after her youngest graduated from Woodrow three years ago, McMillan began volunteering in Lee’s library. It wasn’t so long ago, she says, that Stonewall was a school of only 200, with half of those being deaf education students.
But as a community of retirees slowly turned into a community of young families, the school began to grow and eventually earned its current reputation among parents as a highly sought-after DISD elementary school.
McMillan says she immediately saw the correlation when she arrived at Lee. Robert E. Lee may have some areas in which it’s lacking, she says, but it’s off to a good start, and now it’s up to neighbors to see it to the finish.
“I’m always a believer in you make your own school work,” McMillan says.
