From Amelia Earhart to Career Institute West: A new chapter for West Dallas schools

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As a child, Patricia Stephens walked past the Amelia Earhart school every day.

She lived just west of the school on Gallagher Street, in the Westmoreland Heights neighborhood, but in the late ’50s and ’60s, only white students could attend Amelia Earhart. So Stephens and other Black children in West Dallas walked to George Washington Carver, where the new Dr. L.G. Pinkston High School now stands. 

Dallas ISD closed Carver in 2017 then tore it down, along with Sequoyah Junior High, which Stephens attended before graduating from Pinkston in 1967. Earhart, where Stephens’ children were allowed to enroll in the early days of court-ordered desegregation, was torn down this past year. 

The original need to build all three of these schools was a direct result of government-designed racial segregation, both for housing and for schools. The City of Dallas, when planning the West Dallas “low-rent housing site” in 1952, separated white, Black and Latino residents into three distinct sections. Dallas ISD built Carver, Sequoyah and Earhart in anticipation of both the population influx and the legal imperative that white and Black children should not be in classrooms together.

This legacy was acknowledged by West Dallas trustees Joe Carreon and Byron Sanders at the recent groundbreaking for the new Career Institute West, which will be constructed at Westmoreland and Gallagher, where Amelia Earhart opened nearly 70 years ago.

“We know that the story of how West Dallas was built has not always necessarily been positive, has not always been just,” Sanders said. “That’s why I’m so proud that the citizens of Dallas backed the concept — backed the robust, bold plan — to come out and make significant investments in this community.”

Sanders then referenced his conversation before the ceremony with Stephens, “one of the legends who actually helped us to be here today,” and the site’s history as a whites-only school.

“Here we are today, about to build an institution that will be for all of West Dallas, regardless of your background, regardless of your socioeconomic status, regardless of where your mama came from or your daddy came from,” Sanders said. “Regardless of all of that, everyone is going to be able to be here at this institution, and that is something to celebrate.”

Stephens, now 76, has lived in West Dallas since she was 3. Back then it was “very rural,” she says, “no running water, no paved streets, no ice, no gas — we had to use wood-burning stoves, kerosene lamps; the ice man brought the ice in and the water man brought the water.” 

Not only could Stephens not attend Earhart; she “couldn’t walk through the white neighborhood” as she traveled to Carver each day. In 1976, 20 years after DISD opened Earhart to white students, a desegregation court order turned the school into a Montessori “vanguard” for students of all races.

“If  you was real smart, the kids got to go there,” Stephens says. “I don’t know but one young lady [from West Dallas] that went there as an elementary age student.”

The mixed-race Montessori program lasted seven years at Earhart until soil testing in the wake of the RSR lead smelter lawsuits caused an outcry among white families commuting to West Dallas, and in 1984 the district moved the program to L.L. Hotchkiss near White Rock Lake.

Earhart most recently housed the Dallas Environmental Science Academy (DESA) magnet middle school, after DISD moved it from Sequoyah in 2011. DESA is now housed at the Garcia STEM school, home of the “old Pinkston,” as alumni call it.

After more than a decade of closing, opening and shuffling schools in West Dallas, Career Institute West is the last major change Dallas ISD has slated for the neighborhood, paired with a promise from Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde “to help our students truly, truly climb out of generational poverty and into the middle class.”