School district officials are annoyed with City officials, City officials are irritated with school officials, and 1,600 kids are caught in the middle.
This is the all too unfortunate result of the DISD’s attempt to buy land for a new elementary school on the old Merchant’s Bank site on Ross Avenue. What has happened is that people who should be on the same side, and who should want the same things for our neighborhood, are starting to bicker among themselves.
Frankly, it’s so aggravating that it’s almost enough to make me move to the suburbs.
City officials, led by Councilman Chris Luna, insist that the DISD’s decision to build a relief school on the vacant bank site at Ross and Henderson prevented a major grocery store chain from anchoring a new, spiffy strip shopping center that would have been built on the 8.4 acres of land.
School officials claim they chose that site because it was the only one available, and that the City was less than helpful in putting the deal together.
“We don’t have the luxury of hoping some retailer is going to move in,” says Sandy Kress, who represents a portion of our neighborhood on the school board.
Meanwhile, the 1,600 students – fourth through sixth graders who are bused from Fannin, Bonham and Ray elementaries to other schools throughout East Dallas – will have to wait another year before they get their new building.
It will take at least that long to construct the new school, assuming the school board OK’d the land purchase at the end of January as it was scheduled to do.
About the only thing the two sides agree on is that the Merchants Bank land, which has been the focus of condemnation proceedings for about a year, is not an ideal choice for a school.
It cost $2.2 million, a bit more than the board wanted to pay, and it’s located next to a bar on one of the busiest intersections in the area in a neighborhood that is, on its good says, blighted.
Yet, says Kress, the DISD had little choice. The federal judge overseeing the district’s desegregation plan urged the district to move forward with the relief school.
Parents were unhappy with the current situation, which promised to get worse. The school-age population in the area between Ross and Central Expressway is one of the fastest-growing in DISD, and there are already plans to build a second relief school.
“The City kept telling us we should build the school somewhere else,” Kress says. “Well, we kept asking them to show us where, and they never did. All they did was tell us there were vacant houses that could be torn down, crack houses that we could condemn.
“Well, we are not in the neighborhood reclamation business, no matter how desirable that may be.”
That, says Luna, isn’t true.
Luna, whose district includes the school site, insists that DISD never planned to do anything other than to build on the Merchants lot. He points out that there was a lot of land – albeit in small parcels – that could have been condemned and then packaged for the new school, saving the land for retail development.
That’s why, Luna says, the City Council rezoned the land to accommodate the strip center late last year.
“This area is under-served by retail, and everyone knows it,” he says. “We had a major grocery store ready to do the contracts. (Luna declined to identify the chain.) This could have been a win-win situation for the City and the district. But the DISD was obstinate in not working with us.”
See what I mean by aggravating?
Apparently, we can’t even decide where to build a school without stepping in politics and getting it all over our shoes.
On the one hand, DISD’s track record in dealing fairly with the community is hardly awe-inspiring. On the other hand, neither is that of the major grocery store chains we have dealt with – or at least that’s what it seems whenever I drive past the boarded-up Sears, which Fiesta swore it was going to redevelop.
Fortunately, there has been a dose of perspective, supplied by Fannin first-grade teacher Stacey Dunham.
“These children deserve a new school,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where it is, or how the district gets the land. It’s not asking too much that these kids get a new school.”
