Another West Dallas school shuffle will reopen Thomas Edison campus as West Dallas Junior High
Five years ago, West Dallas residents learned their neighborhood would become home to a new Dallas ISD magnet school model — a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) school. In addition to taxpayer funding, the school would benefit from millions of dollars and added support from a partnership between DISD, Toyota USA Foundation, and the SMU Simmons School of Education.
This would be the school for West Dallas seventh- and eighth-graders, who had been moved to the historic L.G. Pinkston High School when Dallas ISD closed Thomas Edison Junior High School. Instead of sharing the space with ninth- through 12th-graders, they would share it with elementary students.
West Dallas also lost a comprehensive elementary school when Amelia Earhart was consolidated with Eladio Martinez. The Earhart campus now is used by students from DISD’s Dallas Engineering and Science Academy (DESA), a magnet school for sixth- through eighth-graders, since moving from the historical Sequoyah Middle School campus, which was demolished to build the new Pinkston.
But at some point over the past year or two, the plans changed. DISD Trustee Joe Carreon says he and his fellow West Dallas trustee, Maxie Johnson, worked together to create a new plan that would respond to the West Dallas community’s true desires.
“In a very real way, one of the reasons I ran is because both in the West Dallas and in the Northwest Dallas community, parents were not being heard,” Carreon says.
An updated plan for West Dallas schools
In the new plan, DESA students will move to the old Pinkston high school, which now houses the West Dallas STEM School. The campus will host two distinct schools with aligned models, similar to the Yvonne Ewell Townview campus, Carreon says.
The Amelia Earhart campus will be demolished to make way for Dallas ISD’s Career Institute West.
And Thomas Edison Junior High, which housed Thomas Jefferson High School students while they waited for their new campus after a tornado destroyed the former one, and currently houses George Peabody Elementary students as their new campus in Oak Cliff is constructed, will not become the career institute, as originally planned, but instead become the junior high for West Dallas seventh- and eighth-graders. Students will begin attending classes there in fall 2024.
This is what West Dallas parents and community members want, Carreon says.
“The cry to me was, ‘We want to reclaim and restore our history,’” he says. “We didn’t want to be erased in the way we felt erased by so many other things happening in this zip code.”
West Dallas Junior High facility to honor Sequoyah and Thomas Edison
On a recent weeknight, a small group of West Dallas community leaders and Pinkston alumni gathered in “the old Pinkston,” as alumni tend to call it, to see the most recent renderings of the improvements to the Thomas Edison campus, which will be renamed West Dallas Junior High.
West Dallas Junior Community Meeting Renderings by Dallas Free Press on Scribd
The entrance of the campus will reflect the history of West Dallas middle schools with tributes to Sequoyah and Thomas Edison.