Eduardo Mata Elementary
Tracie Fraley, the executive director of the Woodrow Wilson High School feeder pattern, says that plans to turn Eduardo Mata Elementary into a community-wide Montessori school next fall have been years in the making. However, changes to both Mata and its sister school, Mount Auburn, are up for a vote at the April 24 DISD board meeting, and could be overturned by trustees less than four months before the start of the 2014-15 school year.
The April agenda states that the board is voting not on the Montessori program itself but on “grade configuration changes.” Since it opened in 1997, Mata has been a school for fourth- and fifth-graders who first attended other neighborhood schools through third-grade. Mount Auburn is the only remaining school that sends its students to Mata, however, so currently Mata’s 650-capacity campus has only 226 students enrolled.
The April agenda proposals are to turn Mata into a pre-kindergarten through sixth-grade Montessori with a seventh- and eighth-grade fine arts academy as well as to turn Mount Auburn into a pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade school with a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) curriculum.
These same proposals were on the February board agenda, but were pulled just before the meeting. Fraley was told that she had administrative authority to make the changes without needing board approval. So she moved full speed ahead — creating interest forms for parents, scheduling informational meetings and making plans to hire and train Montessori teachers — only to learn that DISD trustees Lew Blackburn, Elizabeth Jones and Bernadette Nutall requested that the Mata and Mount Auburn proposals be reinserted on the April board agenda.
Blackburn, Jones and Nutall have not responded to multiple requests for comment within the last week.
Trustee Miguel Solis, who represents Mount Auburn on the DISD board, believes the April agenda items are unnecessary. Adding a Montessori curriculum to Mata and STEAM curriculum to Mount Auburn are program changes, he says.
“Typically, programmatic changes are made by the administration,” Solis says. “Ultimately, I believe that is where this type of decision should remain.”
Solis was elected to the Dallas ISD board last November, and says he has “worked diligently” to inform himself on the Mount Auburn/Mata proposals since then. A January meeting he organized with DISD staff to inform the Mount Auburn community about the potential of a STEAM academy at Mount Auburn indicated “strong support for the program change,” Solis says.
“Furthermore, Superintendent [Mike] Miles’ administration has begun talks of expanding these types of schools and others (what I refer to as 21st century schools) across the district,” Solis says. “I welcome that discussion because I believe we need to give our students and their families as many options as possible.”
Mata and Mount Auburn students go on to attend J.L. Long Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School, represented by Trustee Mike Morath. He supports the changes, citing “solid data” for Montessori curriculum as well as reducing school transitions.
Morath also says it is “unclear” whether the changes need board approval, and added a policy change to the April board agenda that would clarify how the board weighs in on grade configurations. Most DISD schools are organized into pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade, sixth- through eighth-grade, and ninth- through 12th-grade; the new policy, if approved, also would allow the superintendent to reconfigure a campus into pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade or sixth- through 12th-grade without needing board approval.
Nutall, whose district includes Mata, indicated at a December community meeting that she supports the Montessori curriculum at Mata but also believes DISD needs to address school boundaries. Though Mata is at 34 percent capacity, nearby Lakewood Elementary is at 155 percent capacity.
Overcrowding at some neighborhood elementary schools and under-utilization at others is one of the reasons for the Mata proposal. Fraley said at the December meeting that there hasn’t been much interest in changing school boundaries, so this approach provides a more holistic alternative.
Fraley also is a proponent of giving parents more choices in which school they choose to send their children. Read more about this in the May edition of Advocate, and follow our ongoing coverage of these issues on lakewood.advocatemag.com.
