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Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Title VI Complaints Filed with the Federal Education Department, Dallas, Texas
Against Dallas Independent School District (DISD)
April 21, 2015 (Replacing those filed March 25, 2015)

Education is the great equalizerit should be used to level the playing field, not grow inequality.
That means all students regardless of their race, zip code or family income should have equal access to
education resources---whether its effective teaching, challenging coursework, facilities with modern
technology or a safe school environment. Arne Duncan, October 1, 2014
Dallas ISD, through its policy of using a Title I comparability formula based on teacher staffing, has
increased inequities in regular education funding of Dallas public classrooms and disproportionately
negatively impacted at-risk, special education (SPED), Limited English Proficiency (LEP), minority, and
low income students on its Title I neighborhood campuses. The huge disparities in equal access,
accompanied by illegal supplanting of federal and state compensatory education dollars and misuse of
High School Allotment funds, egregious lowering of regular education funding, inequitable teacher and
principal staffing patterns, lack of comparability of student services and safety on campuses, lack of
effective special education services, lack of access to certain magnet school programs, discrimination in
hiring practices that directly impact equal protection guarantees of students, lack of research-based
professional development and support for teachers in failing schools, and unequal access to safe
schools, all document unconstitutional sourcing between Title I and non-Title I schools and between
magnet and neighborhood campuses.
The harm to at-risk, SPED, LEP, and low income and minority children in Dallas ISD was demonstrated by
a 58% increase at the end of the 2013-2014 school year of Dallas ISD schools on the annual the Texas
PEG List of failing campuses and is demonstrated through campus climate surveys demonstrating
inequities in safe schools. PEIMS documents detailing inequities in funding and illegal supplanting of
state compensatory education funds as well as undocumented levels of High School Allotment funding
are available on the Texas Education Agency (TEA) web site,
http://tea.texas.gov/financialstandardreports/ .
Teacher staffing patterns which dump the least qualified teachers into the most vulnerable DISD schools
are available for public view on the MyDataPortal designed by Dallas ISD, https://mydata.dallasisd.org/ .
In addition to inequitable funding patterns between magnets and neighborhood schools and inequitable
distribution of experienced teachers, Dallas ISD central staffing patterns demonstrate preferential
treatment for Teach for America and Broad candidates whose resumes are thin compared to better

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qualified candidates who applied for central administrative positions. These employment decisions
violate the equal protection rights of both job seekers and students in Dallas ISD who are negatively
impacted by a lack of credentials and experience in central administrative staff. In addition to hiring
preferences for non-credentialed candidates who lack campus administrative experience, the current
Superintendent has kept many top level leadership positions vacant, leading to a complete lack of
accountability for the Superintendent.
Inequities in access to comparable levels of principal leadership for all students were demonstrated in
the last round of principal appraisals that identified only principals in magnet, vanguard, and early
college campuses as the most effective according to the Superintendents rubric. The use of a Teacher
Excellence Initiative (TEI) which ties annual teacher compensation directly to easily-manipulated and
subjective spot observations and student test scores violates the equal protection rights of students by
increasing high rates of teacher churn on the campuses of Dallas ISDs lowest performing campuses.
Results of initial principal choices of teachers for Distinguished rank demonstrate a bias in teacher
appraisal that consistently rewards teachers based on the demographics of the students they teach. This
bias will be the source of increased compensation for teachers based on their ability to move to the
most stable, high achieving campuses.
Finally, in a school district that is violating state law regarding legal use of state compensatory education
funding and is grossly underfunding its Title I campuses, the proposal for choice schools promises to
further segregate at-risk, LEP, and SPED students on failing campuses while continuing lack of
appropriate resourcing to serve these students on their neighborhood campuses. Dallas ISD has not
equitably and constitutionally resourced its existing campuses. Opening choice schools in order to
further segregate high risk LEP, SPED, and poor students away from the targeted middle class is
unconstitutional.
Complainants ask for immediate relief from both the serious inequities in regular education funding on
Title I campuses and relief from discriminatory hiring patterns which negatively impact student
achievement. Complainants also request federal investigations into the lack of appropriate special
education services which directly impact campus safety and racial disparities in student suspensions and
achievement. Complainants request support rather than overtly punitive conduct toward teachers on
failing campuses rated Improvement Required, a suspension of the current principal rating rubric, a
suspension of the Teacher Excellence Initiative, and a suspension of discussion of choice schools until
gross, illegal and unconstitutional inequities in sourcing of Dallas ISD campuses and students are
corrected.
Compared to Austin ISD and Irving ISD, both of which focused local and state tax revenue on classroom
instruction, the number of failing schools in Dallas ISD grew significantly in 2013-2014. Both Irving and
Austin decreased the number of IR, or failing schools, and decreased their PEG list. This comparison

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suggests great harm to Dallas ISD students through the use of a Title I comparability model that
actually decreased equity in financial sourcing of regular education dollars.

I.

Violation of Title I Comparability and Violation of Equal Protection Guarantees


Through Illegal and Unconstitutional Supplanting of Title I Funds, State
Compensatory Education (SCE) Funds; Potential Misuse of State High School
Allotment Funds; and Potential Misuse of Teacher Vacancies for Revenue
Generation
"In recognition of the special educational needs of low-income families and the impact that concentrations
of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational
programs, the Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial
assistance... to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income
families to expand and improve their educational programs by various means (including preschool
programs) which contribute to meeting the special educational needs of educationally deprived children"
(Section 201, Elementary and Secondary School Act, 1965).

Dallas Independent School District (DISD) includes several magnet school schools that are legacy
desegregation campuses created as a result of a federal desegregation order beginning in the seventies
and ending in the late-nineties or early 2000. Magnet high school programs located at Townview and
Booker T. Washington and inclusive of the TAG Elementary and Middle School and vanguard campuses
no longer serve the purposes of desegregation. Added to these magnet programs are Montessori
schools and single sex campuses of Irma Rangel and Barack Obama serving grades 6-12.
Some of these choice campuses with heavy student filters for entrance are rated as the best public
schools in the state of Texas and nation because of high participation and pass rates on Advanced
Placement tests and other tests of academic achievement.
These elite campuses require either auditions or a student screening process that include grades,
standardized test scores, interviews, and parent engagement. Through this screening process, a small
percentage or in some cases no DISD Limited English Proficiency (LEP) or students served with special
education services (SPED) are admitted to these campuses. The choice campuses also admit a much
smaller percentage of at-risk students than failing secondary campuses with up to 88% of students
defined as at-risk.
DISD neighborhood secondary schools rated as failing or Improvement Required (IR) by the state of
Texas contain twice the district average of SPED students and high percentages of LEP students whose
campuses receive much less in regular education funding intended to provide the mandated state
curriculum and resources for that curriculum. While the campuses receive additional special education
dollars and ESL dollars, students served by these supplemental services for the most part are

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mainstreamed in regular education classes that in neighborhood Dallas ISD schools are funded at much
lower levels of regular education dollars per student than surrounding districts and magnet schools
within DISD.
This Title VI civil rights complaint has as its foundation unequal student access to comparable learning
opportunities based students at-risk status, LEP status, and special education services compared to
learning opportunities provided non-LEP, and non-SPED and low percentages of at-risk students who
attend Dallas ISD magnet, Montessori, vanguard, choice, and non-Title I campuses. These inequities in
access include violations of federal Title I comparability statutes, violations of use of state compensatory
education monies, questionable use of a PEIMS code for High School Allotment funding, and constant,
high teacher vacancies at low performing Dallas ISD schools.
The outcomes of these questionable accounting practices and refusal to adequately staff low performing
schools full of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students include huge increases in the surplus fund of the District,
leading to claims of a Dallas Miracle which may have been the basis of a contract extension for the
current Superintendent of Schools in 2014, availability of funding for pet projects of the Superintendent,
and increased funds for increased layers of central administrators, many of whom lack credentials or
previous experience in their roles.
The instructional outcomes for what amounts to a shell game of financial inequity in Dallas ISD included
a 26% rise in failing schools, with most secondary schools labeled failing remaining on the list of
Improvement Required Schools for consecutive years.
While Dallas ISD claims that it follows Title I comparability guidelines through a teacher staffing system
and a Title I comparability system, the complainants will bring pervasive evidence of intentional
inequitable levels of funding as measured by the amount of per student regular education funding
available on Title I neighborhood campuses compared to magnet and non-Title 1 campuses loaded with
not only non-comparable levels of regular education dollars, but also unexplained levels of high school
allotment dollars. While complainants were initially concerned about the huge gaps in regular education
funding between magnets and neighborhood schools and the gap between non-Title I schools and lowfunded Title I schools, examination of state records of planned and actual spending on campuses
pointed to possible illegal supplanting of Title I Part A State Compensatory Education funds and possible
illegal supplanting of the line item code for High School Allotment funds. The majority of the illegal
supplanting of State Compensatory Education dollars for regular education dollars took place in the last
three years. There is documentation provided by state PEIMS records of a possible $10 million dollars
supplanted out of state compensatory funds out of just five DISD schools that showed the very lowest
levels of regular education funding. Other schools also showed a pattern of illegal supplanting of SCE
funds.

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While there is evidence that High School Allotment funds had been dispensed in the past in a manner
that violated Title I comparability laws, there is also now the appearance of fraud in High School
Allotment funds that appear to be supplanting regular education funds in an attempt to free millions in
regular education dollars for other purposes than classroom instruction.
Parent and community member complaints have also surfaced that regular education funding levels on
some neighborhood secondary high schools have fallen so low that supplanting of Title I funds by using
those funds to provide core academic teachers is open knowledge. This practice is a violation of federal
law:
It is expected that services provided within the district with state and local funds will be made available
to all attendance areas to all children without discrimination. The instructional and ancillary services
provided with State and local funds for children in project areas should be comparable to those provided
for children in the non-project areas, particularly with respect to class size, special services, and the
number and variety of personnel.
Title I funds, therefore, are not to be used to supplant State and local funds which are already being
expended in the project areas or which would be expended in those areas if the services in those areas
were comparable to those for non-project areas.1
Comparability statues were further refined in 2002:
The current statute, reauthorized in 2002, provides that a local educational agency may receive [Title I
funds] only if State and local funds will be used in [Title I schools] to provide services that, taken as a
whole, are at least comparable to services in [nonTitle I schools] (ESEA Section 1120A(c); see Appendix
B for the full text of this section.2
The potential reasons for the illegal schemes to supplant regular education funding with Title I Part A
SCE funds, with Title I funds, and with High School Allotment funds might be related to central
administrators mission to not only grow the surplus fund of the DISD to $500 million3, but also to fund
constant new and expensive initiatives such as Personalized Learning that lack pedagogical models and
transparent budgets, the increased testing required for a teacher merit pay system of the
Superintendent, the doubling of the number of academic coaches and administrators in the District
along with above market pay for central administrators, and costly high churn in central administrators,
teachers, and principals. On the revenue side, the District does seem to reap some benefits from
exceptionally high teacher turnover since 416 teaching positions were vacant on April 6, 2015. The
teacher salary schedule described in the 2014 annual budget also defines the huge percentage of novice
1

https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/title-i/school-level-expenditures/school-level-expenditures.pdf
https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/title-i/school-level-expenditures/school-level-expenditures.pdf
3
http://www.dallasisd.org/cms/lib/TX01001475/Centricity/domain/78/2013-2014/cbrc_021714.pdf
2

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teachers in Dallas ISD as well as a pay scale that is below market. Both of thesehigh percentages of
novice teachers and below market starting paygenerate higher revenue in the District by cutting
teacher compensation but also cut equity for students in teacher allocations since most of the teacher
churn seems generated by low performing campuses. The constant churn on these low performing
campuses create schools filled with novice teachers.
In order to determine comparable funding resources for comparable learning opportunities for all Dallas
ISD students, public records known as PEIMS (Public Education Information Management System)
documents located on the web site of the Texas Education Agency were examined. These PEIMS records
documenting actual per student spend on campuses are the official records. Analysis of these records at
schools that were severely underfunded in 2013-2104 in regular education dollars showed a pervasive
pattern of illegally supplanting Title I Part A SCE funds. This illegal supplanting is not a function of
teacher salaries since campuses containing both high percentages of novice teachers and normal levels
of experience were part of major supplanting of regular education funds.
Using Regular Education Funds as Measures of Equity
When Channel 8 veteran, investigative reporter Brett Shipp queried the DISD Superintendent, CFO, and
Trustee Mike Morath in March and April of 2015 regarding the huge disparity in regular education funds
per student between non-Title I Lakewood Elementary and extremely low income Stevens Park
Elementary, Trustee Morath clarified the District position by explaining the regular education funds are
for regular students and many campuses in Dallas ISD didnt have many regular students.
Trustee Morath only a year earlier led the attempted hostile takeover of the Dallas Independent School
District in part to attempt to remove duly elected Trustees who asked too many questions in Board
meetings. Those Trustees have also been targeted by the Superintendent of Schools for harassment and
bullying.4 Unlike Trustee Morath, the targeted Trustees were well aware that Regular Education funds
(from property taxes from DISD taxpayers) must fund the mandated state curriculum for all students
outside special education students in the state of Texas.
From the analysis of PEIMS documents that present evidence of possible widespread fraud in
supplemental funding, there is legitimate cause for concern that Trustees were openly harassed by local
media5 who also colluded in the attempt to silence any Board member who asked legitimate questions
about funding of pet projects of the Superintendent while funding of DISD classrooms continued to
shrink. As will be seen in the analysis of PEIMS documents, Trustees did not ask enough questions
regarding local expenditures of tax funds, perhaps because of pushback from the Superintendent,

http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/education/2015/02/11/dallas-isd-probe-clears-nutall-ofwrongdoing/23220245/
5
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/06/whos_to_blame_for_all_those_to.php

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Trustees Morath and Solis, and local bloggers who were funded by corporate interests interested in
removing voting rights from Dallas taxpayers6 or by advertising revenue based on explicit sex content7.
Unlike Trustee Morath who again appeared in Austin during the current state legislative session and
tried again to promote a charter model that removes elected board members from asking questions
regarding the use of local taxpayer funds, professional educators have no nomenclature for describing
any category known as regular students. Educators and certified administrators know that regular
programming must be provided all students at every grade level from the regular education funding per
student. In Dallas, these regular education funds are provided by local property taxes. There is no
regular student taught from regular funds.
Since students across Dallas ISD campuses are so diverse with some campuses serving extremely high
populations of LEP students, other campuses serving double the district percentage of SPED students,
and some campuses focusing exclusively on Advanced Placement courses provided through regular
education dollars, complainants chose to compare regular education funding per student in order to
compare access for all students to the core curriculum required by the state of Texas. The mandated
curriculum as well as enrichment in the form of Advanced Placement courses and electives in the fine
arts are funded through local property taxes in Dallas ISD and appear on the PEIMS records as PIC 11.
The core curriculum and all academic electives, including those now required for HB5 endorsements,
must have their source in regular education funds provided through property taxes generated by Dallas
taxpayers. Title 1 and State Compensatory Education funds cannot supplement, or replace, regular
education funding. In some high schools in Dallas ISD, it appears that in the presence of special
education funds, regular education funds are cut dramatically even though most special education
students in some schools will appear in regular education classrooms.
By federal law and state law, all students must have equal access to the required state curriculum and
the academic electives necessary to earn endorsements under HB5. Career and Technical Education
(CTE) electives are paid for from state foundation funds. In Dallas ISD, due to faulty and sometimes
fraudulent DISD funding patterns, some Title I campuses had almost $2,000 less per student to use for
instruction in the state mandated curriculum. This huge differential has a small relationship to teacher
experience on different campuses. Even the more extreme differences in teacher experience levels
from campus to campus rarely account for more than 10% of the regular expenditures differential
from campus to campus.
While some corporate education reform critics may term the focus on regular education funding as
attempt at cherry picking a data point, the regular education funds provided by Dallas taxpayers must
6
7

http://learningcurve.dmagazine.com/2015/02/18/to-suggest-the-coggins-report-vindicates-nutall-is-absurd/
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/06/whos_to_blame_for_all_those_to.php

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by law provide the state-mandated curriculum for all students except those in special education. Since it
is impossible to determine the level of special education services necessary for students by examining
campus special education funding, Title I comparability is better determined by comparing the level of
funding provided for most students for the majority of their school day which outside Career and
Technical electives is provided by regular education dollars. State ESL funds supplement the regular
education funding for some students but are not a point of comparability for magnets and other schools
that dont serve many or any LEP students. At the secondary level, regular classroom teachers, funded
legally only through regular education dollars, also provide instruction for both special education and
LEP students. Attempting to use ANY supplemental funding to determine comparability across campuses
that have no SPED or LEP students because of discriminatory filtering for acceptance provides a
convenient cover for violations of true Title I comparability.
While some DISD high school students may be enrolled in Career and Technical Education (CTE)
coursework, CTE consists of electives. CTE funding does not measure comparability of resources in the
core curriculum.
This approach of focusing on regular education funds in isolation from special student services, ESL
funds, compensatory education funds, and CTE funding provided by state funding is an acceptable
framework for modeling Title I comparability:
When demonstrating compliance with the Title I comparability requirement, a district may exclude state
and local funds expended for the following:
language instruction education programs;
excess state and local costs of providing services to children with disabilities, as determined by the
school district; and
state or local supplemental programs in any school attendance area or school that meet the intent and
purposes of Title I, Part A (Sections 1120A(c)(5) and 1120A(d)).8
In focusing on widely disparate levels of regular education funding, illegal supplanting of Title I Part A
SCE funds is apparent in Dallas ISD campus funding along with concerns regarding the supplanting of
Accelerated Education funds which are also SCE funds. Title I Part A SCE funds should not be used in any
attempt at Title I comparability since these are supplementary funds that cannot be used as regular
education funds.

https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/title-i/school-level-expenditures/school-level-expenditures.pdf

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These state compensatory education funds, appearing on PEIMS documents as Title I Part A SCE funds
and as Accelerated Education may not supplant regular education funding that by law must provide the
state foundation program in Texas.
While the Department of Education would not typically audit state funding sources, the pervasive and
illegal use of these state funds to create a two-tier system of public education within Dallas ISD meets
the federal purview as well as both blatant and subtle violations of Title I comparability laws that have
as their basis supplanting of state compensatory education funds and high school allotment funds. The
machinations used to supplant federal and state compensatory funds appear so widespread for the last
three years and include so much state compensatory money, along with possible misuse of high school
allotment funds to provide another avenue of supplanting regular education dollars, that federal
assistance is needed to determine the scope of the illegal activity as well as the scope of civil rights
violations of Dallas ISD students.
In addition, the deep cuts to teacher allotments on some campuses may have provided excuses to use
Title I funds to buy core teachers. This practice is also illegal, but appears to have been done in order to
have adequate numbers of teachers in light of a school district that refused in many cases to adequately
resource its Title I campuses.

A. Supplanting of Regular Education Funds by Title I Part A SCE Funds


Comparing regular education funding at the elementary, middle and high school levels in Dallas ISD is an
accurate method of determining comparability of resources to serve the majority of students for the
majority of their school days. While critics may believe huge gaps in regular education funding are the
result of the percentage of veteran teachers on DISD magnet campuses compared to low-rated
neighborhood campuses, the gaps were so large between some non-Title I and Title I campuses that
teacher salaries could not provide an explanation for lack of comparability. 9
Teacher experience was also dissimilar when comparisons of extremely low-funded campuses were
compared with each other. One low-funded Title I campus compared to another at almost the same
level of low funding (with heavy, possibly illegal supplanting of SCE funds) showed widely varying levels
of teacher experience.
Instead of disparities in teacher experience, what became apparent in examining the lowest-funded Title
I elementary campuses was the persistent misuse of Title I Part A SCE funds over a three year period.
As Title I Part A SCE funds drastically increased, the level of regular education funding decreased just as
9

See second chart on page at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2015/03/title-i-complaint-updates-worsenumbers.html

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dramatically. As TEA spokesperson Debbie Ratcliffe responded when the head of SCE funding at TEA was
queried about this funding relationship on DISD campuses with the lowest level of regular education
funding, State Comp Ed funds are supplemental funds and shouldnt be used to fund the basic
program. When reviewing the use of Comp Ed Funds PIC 11 is not used.10
When the relationship between the sudden increase in use of SCE funds and the sudden decrease in
regular education funds on some DISD campuses that are provided on state PEIMS records PIC 11 is
examined, it is clear that massive supplanting of Title I Part A SCE funds took place and dramatically
lowered the regular education funding available on some Title I campuses over the last three years. The
amount of supplanting of regular education funds that took place generated millions of dollars for other
purposes outside the instruction of Dallas ISD students.
In what are the two most extreme examples, the regular education funding for A Maceo Smith High
Tech High and the Education Magnet at Townview were almost eliminated and supplanted with massive
amounts of SCE funds. The Education Magnet was also used to pay the utilities and food expenses for
several other magnets in what appears to be a fraudulent attempt to circumvent Title I comparability at
those campuses.
SCE funds are transferred to Dallas ISD each year from the Texas Education Agency based on the
percentage of DISD students in poverty. SCE funds that are apportioned to Title I Part A SCE accompany
federal Title I monies in order to strengthen Title I programs. These funds may not supplant the regular
education funding provided in DISD by local property taxes.
The purpose of the State Compensatory Education (SCE) program is to supplement the regular or basic
education program with compensatory, intensive, and/or accelerated instruction. The program
requires Texas public school districts and charter schools to offer additional accelerated instruction to
each student who meets one or more statutory or locally-defined eligibility criteria in order to reduce any
disparity in performance on assessment instruments administered under Subchapter B, Chapter 39 TEC,
or disparity in the rates of high school completion between students at risk of dropping out of school and
all other LEA students. 11
Instead, in the pattern discovered by huge inequities in regular education funding, Title I Part A SCE
funds were illegally supplanting regular education dollars on two magnet campuses and on several
elementary campuses serving high populations of LEP students. Supplanting regular education funds
essentially nullified the benefit of these SCE funds in supplementing the needs of campuses with high
percentages of low income students while removing millions in regular education dollars that could now

10

Email on April 7, 2015


http://tea.texas.gov/Texas_Schools/Support_for_Atisk_Schools_and_Students/State_Compensatory_Education/
11

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serve the purposes of special projects of central administrators or feed the surplus fund whose size
became a bragging point for Dallas ISD central administrators and several Board Trustees.
In fact, the surplus fund, which may have millions of dollars of what should have been regular education
funds intended for classroom instruction, now became so large in such a short time that it could now
serve the purpose of a bond program to expand available space at Lakewood Elementary School
according to Dallas ISD central administrators who developed a Bridge Plan to finance bond
improvements without the approval of Dallas ISD voters.
The districts financial strength has given us flexibility to make the best use of our reserves by serving as
a sort of collateral to access funding programs, said Terry. Having a stronger financial position allows
us to start addressing some of our pressing facilities needs now, rather than waiting for our next bond
program. Our efforts during the last few years to be fiscally responsible are paying off for our schools.12
Lakewood Elementary School, a non-Title I school with one of the highest levels of regular education
funding in Dallas ISD, was the beneficiary of the high level of funding of the surplus fund when
Lakewood was awarded the district money for a new wing out of a Bridge Plan that included monies
from the historically high DISD surplus fund in March, 2015. While many Title I schools had worse
problems than Lakewood in terms of overcrowding and decades of the use of portables to house
overcrowded students, Lakewood parents rallied around the Superintendent and were awarded a new
wing in addition to the higher regular education dollars in the planned budget for 2014-2015 ($5200 per
student) according the PEIMS records for planned campus budgets for Dallas ISD. The level of regular
education funding per student at Lakewood compared to non-Title I elementary schools in Dallas is
unexplainable.
At least one Trustee questioned the award of surplus fund money used as bond money for Lakewood:
Some parents, mostly from Lakewood Elementary School, applauded and cheered after trustees took the
wee-hour vote. Lakewood is scheduled to receive $12.6 million for an addition and renovations.
Several trustees voiced concern with the plan especially about the amount provided for Lakewoods
improvements believing it left out some of the neediest schools. I dont believe theres equity in it,
trustee Elizabeth Jones said.13
Lakewood Elementary had been compared just days earlier in a WFAA Channel 8 news investigative
report comparing the high level of regular education funding for Lakewood students, an elementary

12

https://thehub.dallasisd.org/2014/12/25/dallas-isd-poised-to-receive-latest-external-audit/
http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2015/03/dallas-isd-trustees-approve-129-5-million-improvement-planafter-lengthy-discussion-negotiation.html/
13

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campus with the lowest level of elementary school poverty and highest percentage of white students in
the Dallas ISD.
Using a comparability formula for instructional resources that subtracts Stevens Parks Pre-K program
and bilingual funding, along with its remarkably high supplanting of regular education dollars, Lakewood
was allotted a total of $5056 in classroom instructional dollars compared to a total of $3479 for Stevens
Park, a high poverty, high LEP elementary school south of I30. The source of differentials in regular
education dollars between these two schools cannot be explained by the high number of veteran
teachers on the campus of Lakewood compared to Stevens Park, formerly an IR campus.14

Source of the Increased Size of the District Surplus Fund


None of the corporate reform Trustees Morath or Solis, or Dallas media, questioned the fact that the
surplus fund of Dallas Independent School District, a district with one of the highest student poverty
rates in the state, had grown so substantially during a time of state cuts to the foundation program. The
same school year that Skyline High School was so underfunded that Skyline had to use almost an extra
million dollars from the High School Allotment fund to keep its doors open (funds whose source are not
apparent from public records since the state did not award DISD the amount of High School Allotment
funds that were channeled through that PEIMS code), the Superintendent and central staff were loudly
proclaiming their happiness with the financial state of the District on the taxpayer-financed Hub
intended to be a public relations vehicle for the Superintendent:
Dallas ISD closed the 2013-14 school year with a record amount in its fund balance: $342 million, up from
$37 million in 2007-08. A rising fund balance and consecutive clean audits signal that the financial issues
experienced by the district six years ago are history. Dallas ISD is stewarding taxpayers money wisely.
We have taken major steps forward during the last few years to improve our financial condition and
operation, said Mike Miles, superintendent of schools. Our financial team has done an outstanding job
in putting in place strong internal controls that align with state practices. The teams careful
management of district resources has put us in position to be in the best financial condition in school
district history.

14

See second chart on page at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2015/03/title-i-complaint-updatesworse-numbers.html

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Indeed, in many corporate education reform circles in Dallas, this feat of rapidly increasing the surplus
fund was known as The Dallas Miracle.15 One blogger, financed by the group who advocated a
mayoral takeover of Dallas ISD, called for an extension of Superintendent Mike Miles contract.16
With the support of the President of the Dallas School Board, Miguel Solis, (a former employee of the
Superintendent and employee of Ken Barth) and without the available student achievement data
showing a 26% increase in the number of Dallas failing schools, the Superintendent received an early
contract renewal in July of 2014, perhaps due mainly to the Dallas Miracle.
When the annual PEG list of failing schools in addition to the added high schools rated Improvement
Required were released to the public after the renewal of the Superintendents contract, the list had
grown substantially. Indeed almost a third of DISDs campuses are on the Public Education Grant (PEG)
list of campuses rated lowest in the state, but this increase in failures was never correlated to the high
number of middle and high school campuses that were severely underfunded during the years leading
to the Dallas Miracle.
As shown below, Dallas middle schools and high schools on the Improvement Required list were
severely underfunded compared with Title I campuses in bordering school districts with the same level
of revenue and compared to Austin ISD which funded its IR campuses with almost double the resources
available to Dallas IR campuses.
Perhaps as a result of a floor on regular education funding before the addition of supplementary
funding, both Irving ISD and Austin ISD saw a decrease in schools on the annual PEG list of 2015-2106.
Austin ISD in particular used a high regular education floor before adding heavy amounts of state and
federal compensatory education dollars to its failing campuses and spent almost double the amount on
its IR schools that Dallas ISD allotted during the same period.

15

https://thehub.dallasisd.org/2014/11/26/88/
http://learningcurve.dmagazine.com/2014/06/25/the-dallas-miracle-how-data-show-mike-miles-deserves-anew-contract/
16

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Dallas ISD schools that were underfunded are some of the lowest rated schools in the entire state of
Texas and the chart above includes the total campus spend for each school. After the 2012-2013 school
year with Browne one of the lowest rated IR middle schools in the state, Dallas ISD cut its total
expenditures funding even more, to $6162 per student in its planned PEIMS budget for 2013-2014 with
a regular education funding of only $3631 per student.
Frisco ISD has no Title I campuses, but it is apparent from the low funding provided Dallas ISD middle
schools that students would have been provided more dollars for classroom instruction if they were able
to move to a school district with a focus on instructional excellence and equity rather than a district
whose Trustees and the media were focused on building a huge surplus fund from possible illegal
skimming of classroom dollars from the campuses of low income LEP students.
Spruce High School, with its constant failing ratings, teacher churn, and principal churn, had $2300 less
dollars in regular education funds before adding compensatory education dollars than did Frisco High
School. Frisco High School students also had the advantage of CTE classes in every category available at
a district Career Center. Austin ISD awarded its failing IR LBJ High School $2,000 more in regular
education funds than did Dallas ISD for Spruce High School.
For Brown Middle School, rated one of the worst and lowest performing in the state of Texas, to be
provided a total student funding of $6392 while a middle school in Frisco receives a thousand dollars
more per student is inexplicable.

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Hector Garcia is also an Improvement Required middle school in Dallas ISD and it is also underfunded.
DESA is a magnet middle school in Dallas ISD, and as such, receives more funding than failing middle
schools loaded with huge percentages of SPED students.
Austin ISD put an increased floor of regular education spending on its failing campuses and added
thousands to the floor to almost double the funding available on Dallas ISD failing campuses.
As a result, Austin ISD is making progress in lowering the number of its PEG list campuses while those on
the PEG list in Dallas ISD continue to increase.
It is hard to believe that stripping adequate and necessary resources from these schools was not a
strategy to increase the surplus fund in Dallas ISD. Frisco ISD and Austin ISD were undergoing the same
pain from state budget cuts as was Dallas ISD, yet their regular education dollars were not removed
from their schools. Dallas ISD in its 2013-2014 budget pulled an additional $15.7 million dollars off its
campuses even though DISD has historically contained some of the worst schools in the state,
especially at the secondary level and even though DISD schools have a slow rate of leaving IR status.
In viewing the following chart illustrating gross supplanting of state compensatory funds through the
PEIMS code for Title I Part A SCE funds, it is apparent that millions in regular education funding were
illegally supplanted with SCE funds over a period of three years.
This supplanting creates several problems. Title I Part A SCE funds should never be used in any Title I
comparability formula since these funds may never be used to supplant regular education funding.
Regular education funding must be adequate on its own, with addition of special education funds, to
provide instruction in the state-mandated curriculum for all students. Instead, over a period of three
years, Dallas ISD removed millions in regular education funds that may have then made their way to the
surplus fund.
Second, these schools were deprived of supplementary funding on top of the regular education dollars
provided by local taxpayers because of massive supplanting of SCE funds.
When taxpayers from Lakewood Elementary peruse PEIMS records, they may see no disparities. In fact,
Steven Park appears to have more programming money per student than Lakewood. This is untrue.
Lakewood does not have a Pre-K program and Lakewood should not be receiving SCE funds, and the
SCE funding for Stevens Park cannot be used for comparability for access to the regular education
program at any school. Removing the funding for Pre-K and SCE funds shows a huge discrepancy in
funding with the non-Title I campus favored by its high, unexplained District allocation.
The Dallas Miracle seems to have been based on the removal of constitutional guarantees of
adequacy and equity in funding the campuses of Dallas ISD where the lowest rated schools filled with

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SPED, LEP, and at-risk students had not only the necessary funding removed, but constitutional
guarantees of equal protection compared to magnet schools and schools of choice and non-Title I
schools.
This same Dallas Miracle earned awards for the CFO of Dallas ISD and was the basis of an early
contract renewal for the Superintendent of Schools, yet not one financial officer or central administrator
who had to have been well aware of the gross supplanting of regular education dollars has ever
contacted local, state, or federal officials regarding what the PEIMS records clearly indicate: fraud in the
use of SCE funds. Even after a Channel 8 investigation into the lowered regular education funding of
Stevens Park, the Superintendent, CFO, nor District financial analysts have apprised the public of
potential fraud in SCE funding.
Instead, Trustees are annually given budget slides that presented a picture of comparability of spend
and staffing across campuses in Dallas ISD. At $2,000 per student difference in regular education
funding, it is not possible for comparable access to occur across Dallas ISD campuses.

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Regular education dollars saved were computed by using the 2014-2015 regular education amounts for
each school as the baseline that could have been used regular education funding for 2011-2012 through
2013-2014. Millions of dollars of regular education funds were supplanted from only 5 schools.
The use of Accelerated Education SCE dollars is problematic at High Tech High since it is a magnet that
filters students for admission and DISD high schools actually full of at-risk students did not receive this
funding. It may be that federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) were the actual source of these million
dollar grants, and if so, these funds were not supposed to serve the purpose of regular funds for the
instructional program. SIG monies may not supplant regular education funds but PEIMS records indicate
that may have occurred in $20 million worth of SIG grants awarded HG Spruce, Roosevelt, North Dallas,
and High Tech High. In each case, regular education funds dropped when large sums in Accelerated
Education appeared. In the case of Spruce, regular education funding dropped to only $2200 a student
which is unheard of at the high school level. No high school in Texas full of at-risk students can be
operated on $2200 in regular education funds without supplanting from other funds.

B. Creating Inequities and Supplanting with the High School Allotment Funds
In a similar scenario to the sudden appearance of millions of dollars of Title 1 Part A SCE funds appearing
to crowd out regular education dollars on some DISD campuses in the last few years, the High School
Allotment fund was used to backdoor classroom instructional funds into certain magnet and choice
schools, a trend that intensified under the current administration. Three thousand dollars per student
were added at the TAG magnet at Townview while TAGs per student cost of utilities and maintenance
disappeared, perhaps reappearing at the Education Magnet.
These violations in Title I comparability are also gross violations of Equal Protection guarantees of most
neighborhood high schools that did not receive special treatment in the form of $3000 per student in
high school allotment funds.
Since the magnets for the most part do not admit SPED or LEP students who are heavily segregated in IR
high schools, the back door supplanting of regular education funds with large sums of funding from the
High School Allotment are violations of Equal Protection guarantees for high school LEP and SPED as well
as at-risk students in DISD who did not have the availability of those funds on their campuses in addition
to the higher funding in regular education dollars afforded magnet campuses.
This violation of Title 1 comparability formulas flew under the radar at TAG as did similar violations at
the School of Engineering Magnet. These violations of Title 1 comparability also appear to have taken
place at Obama, Rangel, and some other of the high school magnets, but in the extremes that occurred,
it appears that the scheme to supplant state or federal funds for regular education funding was growing
from the successes already encountered by supplanting large sums of Title I Part A SCE funds in place of

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regular education monies. As this supplanting grew, millions of dollars in regular education funds could
have been moved to grow the historically large surplus fund.
As demonstrated below, under the current Administration, the High School Allotment planned and
actual expenditures for 2012-2013 to the planned expenditures for 2014-2105 took a very strange turn
in that state funds that had traditionally ranged from $9.4 million in expenditures suddenly exploded to
$17.5 million in 2013-2014 with planned expenditures of $23 million in 2014-2015 according to PEIMS
records of planned budgets for 2014-2015.
It is impossible for actual state funding for the High School Allotment to grow in this manner without a
doubling of the number of high school students in Dallas ISD. A quick look at the DISD web portal,
MyDataPortal, shows that the high school population of Dallas public schools did not double during this
time, but the funds of $275 provided by the state of Texas for every DISD high school student (based on
Average Daily Attendance) that appeared in the High School Allotment fund for Dallas ISD was on its way
to gigantic increases.
A check of the TEA portal for state foundation funding describing enrollment and ADA along with the
state figures for Dallas ISD high school allotment shows a total for High School Allotment of $9,590,144
on November 17, 2014.17 How this fund grew on its own inside Dallas ISD is not explained in terms of
what monies from what source were added to it and why those funds were used to cover the entire
instructional program of the Early Colleges, an accounting trick that could have added $4.3 million to the
surplus fund or any other project deemed important by central administration.

17

https://wfspcprdap1b16.tea.state.tx.us/Fsp/Reports/CrystalReportViewer.aspx?rpt=6&year=2014&run=12602&c
dn=

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These unexplained increases in High School Allotment were used to back-door instructional funds to
magnets and to cover the entire instructional expenditures of the Early Colleges in 2013-2104.
These increases in the total funds that appeared in the High School Allotment budget added insignificant
amounts to two failing high schools, Lincoln and Pinkston, but raised the amount of classroom monies
available to the magnets and Early Colleges significantly.
The purposes of the High School Allotment are clear.18
Purpose:
The High School Allotment (HSA) was created by the Texas Legislature in 2006 to:

prepare underachieving students to enter institutions of higher education

encourage students to pursue advanced academic opportunities

provide opportunities for students to take academically rigorous courses

align secondary and postsecondary curriculum and expectations

support other promising high school completion and success initiatives in Grades 6-12 approved
by the commissioner of education

Allowable Uses of HSA Funds


Districts may use funds for campus-level or district-wide initiatives for students in grades 6-12. Allowable
uses include:

18

professional development for teachers providing instruction in advanced academic courses such
as Advanced Placement (AP)

hiring of additional teachers to allow for smaller class sizes in critical content areas

fees for students taking dual credit classes and ACT/SAT tests

academic support, such as AVID and AP strategies, to support at-risk students in challenging
courses

credit recovery programs

activities supporting college readiness and awareness, including transportation for college visits

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None of the stated purposes of the High School Allotment would have gerrymandered the lowest
performing high schools out of their fair share of High School Allotment funds, nor do the stated
purposes for the money include increasing disparities between magnet campuses that have few or no
LEP or SPED students and IR campuses with double the district percentages of these students.

Dallas ISD central budget administrators violated the civil rights of LEP and SPED and at-risk students
through a pervasive pattern of loading high school campuses with few of these students with huge
additions of instructional resources and funding while eliminating equal learning opportunities on
neighborhood campuses that received much less than their fair share of High School Allotment funds
and serve high percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students.
The High School Allotment was never intended to be a method of circumventing Title I comparability
formulas, but that appears to be the purpose when adding $3,000 a student to a magnet school, a fact
not reported to the Board of Trustees in annual budget overviews describing comparable spends per
student on Dallas ISD campuses.
In addition to this blatant civil rights violation of Equal Protection, there appears to be yet another
example of inequities in funding providing a red flag for DISD financial protocols that seem to remove
regular education funding from Dallas classrooms for other purposes. That district financial personnel
were not aware of the fact that the High School Allotment fund contained increasingly huge sums that
were not the result of state monies is not believable, yet no one has come forward to explain the
misdirected funds or their source other than to state than $19 million in high school allotment funds
would have to be recoded. Funds that were misallocated cannot be simply recoded.
No Board agenda has contained any mention of communicating this fact with the Board of Trustees
along with a statement regarding how these funds were misdirected or their source.
The Dallas high schools with lower than their equitable allotment of High School Allotment funds had no
method of expanding Advanced Placement course offerings or offering a wider scope of academic
electives to meet the endorsement requirements of House Bill 5.
In addition to losing out on millions in High School Allotment funds, these Title I neighborhood high
schools are underfunded compared to surrounding traditional public school districts bordering Dallas
ISD. Students in these underfunded high schools that also had their equitable share of High School
Allotment funds removed did not have comparable educational services on their campuses compared to
the learning opportunities available on the magnet school campuses that were loaded up with High
School Allotment funds.
These magnets have a broader array of Advanced Placement courses, the most experienced AP
teachers, and much more funding per student in order to decrease class sizes.

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Advanced Placement scores, outside increased pass rates for native Speakers of Spanish in Advanced
Placement Spanish classes, remain extremely low when compared to student success at the magnet
schools.

Of the sometimes grossly underfunded campuses listed above, four high schools were rated
Improvement Required in the last round of state accountability ratings. As will be seen in the next
section of this Title VI complaint, many high schools in Dallas ISD were and are extremely underfunded
in the regular education funds provided them by the District. In addition, many campuses are under
extreme pressure with high levels of teacher openings that are not being filled in a timely manner, and
these understaffed schools are seldom magnet schools that do not serve LEP, SPED, or substantial
numbers of at-risk students.

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High schools that must meet the requirements of House Bill 5 have no sources of LEGALLY funding the
increased requirements in the academic core in order for all DISD high school students to have a chance
at pursuing endorsements that require academic electives beyond the requirements for graduation.
With the low levels of regular education funding for Dallas neighborhood high schools, the high school
allotment is the only source of funding enrichments. Supplemental state compensatory education and
Title I funds are intended to supplement the required state curriculum, not replace it.
The neighborhood high schools that were donor schools to the magnets have no options in
programming because of inequities in funding by Dallas ISD.
That opportunity is not spread equitably or adequately among Dallas comprehensive high schools and
results in another Equal Protection violation for the donor schools who had their fair share of high
school allotment dollars removed and sent mainly to magnet and Early Colleges who do not accept LEP,
SPED, or high numbers of at-risk students.

Skyline High School was one of the lowest funded high schools in the state in 2013-2014 at only $2500
per student in regular education funding. Skylines strange increase in high school allotment funds
seems to be an attempt to provide the school with necessary operating capital, not enrichment
activities. Since it would have been difficult to actually pull almost a million dollars in high school

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allotment funds away from only 20 other neighborhood high schools, it appears in the example of
Skyline that these funds were being used to keep regular education dollars off the books by bypassing
the regular education funds. The actual source of this extra million dollars at Skyline is unknown since
the Dallas ISD High School Allotment fund contains funds double the amount received from the state of
Texas.
While Skyline operates both as a magnet and neighborhood school, neighboring Allen ISD has a high
school of comparable size that was funded in regular education funds at $3387, or $887 more per
student than Skyline in 2013-2014. Even $800 more in regular education funding for Skyline would have
cost Dallas ISD $3.7 million in regular education funding.
Instead, Dallas ISD used what should have been state-provided high school allotment funds in tandem
with state compensatory education funds to dramatically lower its regular education funding of Skyline.
Other than the year HG Spruce used either a SIG grant or Accelerated Education funds to lower its
regular education spending to $2200 per student, these low rates of regular education dollars are
extremely rare.
Making comparison to non-Title I schools also points out a major weakness in using Total Program
Operating Expenditures for comparability purposes when comparing a Title I school to a non-Title I
school. Skyline received $3.5 million in Title I Part A SCE funds. This $3.5 million in SCE funds accounts
for much of Skylines classroom operating funds, leaving the question of how a major urban high school
was able to deliver the state mandated curriculum and any academic electives on $2500 a student.
Skyline was running almost half its instructional funding off high school allotment dollars and SCE
supplementary funding. Neither of these funds was intended for these purposes, yet they freed up
around $3.5 million that was spent in Allen, Texas at its major high school on its classroom instruction
funded through regular program dollars.
For the magnets, huge allotments of high school allotment funds were used to bolster extremely high
amounts of regular education funding. These high school allotment additions were not used to compute
Title I comparability.
In the examples of the Early Colleges in actual spending in 2013-2104, there is no known reason to
remove almost all regular education funding from these campuses and supplant with high school
allotment funds other than the use of regular education funds for some other purpose than classroom
instruction. The other purposes could include the growth of the surplus fund, above market salaries for
the growing layers of central management, or pet projects of the Superintendent such as the Leadership
Academy.

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In the examples of SCE supplanting added to a possible $19 million in recoding High School
Allotment funds, $31 million in SCE and High School Allotment funds may have been illegally used to
create $31 million in regular education dollars.
As will be seen the disparities in regular education funding of Title I Dallas ISD campuses compared to
surrounding school districts presented another avenue of skimming regular education dollars either
for the surplus fund, pet projects, or bloated central administration.
Aside from legal issues in misuse of funds, disparities in comparable access for LEP, SPED, and at-risk
students increased due to The Dallas Miracle which was used as the reason for early renewal of the
Superintendents contract.

C. Supplanting Title I Funds: Allocating Federal Dollars for Core Academic Teachers
Over the past years, due in part to state foundation cuts, Dallas ISD has cut around 350 high school
teachers from its campuses. In addition, by April of 2015, DISD listed more than 400 classroom teacher
vacancies which were concentrated on some of the Districts lowest performing campuses in addition
to the cuts that had already removed permanent teaching positions.
While state cuts were partially restored and increased property values began increasing per student
revenue over the last few years in Dallas ISD, neighborhood high school campuses have not witnessed
the return of teachers to many high school campuses that had extreme cuts in faculty.
In addition to being short 30 teachers or more from past years, campuses such as Sunset High School
also received much less in total programming dollars than comparable high schools in districts bordering
Dallas ISD. Underfunding middle and high school campuses were not results of being a property poor
school district. Dallas ISD is a property rich district with comparable per student revenue to Highland
Park ISD.
Reports from community members serving on Site Based Decision Committees document the use of
Title I funds to compensate academic core teachers because of the severe underfunding of campuses.

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This is a violation of Title I statutes and a violation of the Equal Protection Guarantees of students on
underfunded campuses.

D. Using Teacher Vacancies for Revenue Generation for The Dallas Miracle
Since the state cuts in 2011, there have been persistent reports that Dallas ISDs central administration
intended to lower teacher compensation by removing any compensation benefit for veteran teachers
along with removing the percentage of veteran teachers. Reports from the meetings between central
administration and the Citizens Budget Committee document concerns that Dallas ISD veteran teachers
were overpaid and too numerous.
In a disingenuous manner, teacher pay in Dallas ISD was benchmarked against teacher compensation in
Richardson ISD and Garland ISD with no context of the lower student revenue in these two districts
compared to Dallas ISD, nor was actual teacher workload compared between the two districts.
Richardson ISD teachers at that time had a daily load of students that was much lower than Dallas ISD
teacher loads.
Slides prepared for the Citizens Budget Review Committee for the 2014 Budget showed that since 2006,
Dallas ISD had offloaded almost 800 teachers and was spending by 2013-2104 less than the state
average on instruction in a district with one of the highest rates of student poverty in Texas in a city with
the highest rate of child poverty in the nation.
The current Superintendents administration magnified the drift toward taking instructional dollars from
the classroom when regular education dollars for campuses with high risk students were lowered and
supplanted with state compensatory education dollars and high school allotment funds.
When the current Superintendent was hired, starting pay for teachers in Dallas ISD was lowered while
the salaries paid the Cabinet members recruited by Miles had no ceiling or market comparables. One
marketing recruit from the Superintendents former district was given a $100,000 raise to relocate to
Dallas ISD and was gone after a year. Other cabinet recruits were extended the same favors while Chiefs
who stayed apparently determined their own raises by simply e-mailing the Superintendent.19 Raises
handed out to the top central administrators averaged increases in compensation of 14%.
As journalist Matthew Haag reported, Another hallmark of Miles tenure in Dallas ISD has been his
reliance on young, inexperienced employees in top administrative jobs. Six DISD employees age 30 or

19

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20141027-record-number-of-dallas-isd-administrators-makemore-than-100000-analysis-shows.ece

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younger make more than $100,000; no one that age made that much under former Superintendent
Michael Hinojosa.
In comparison, the average teacher salary in Dallas ISD was lowered due to what many considered to be
pressure to remove veteran teachers through bullying and non-renewals and the illegal preferential
hiring patterns of Teach for America recruits. The Superintendent made remarks to the media
concerning a preference for fresh and young teachers.20 Fresh and young TFA teachers did reach
critical mass during Miles tenure at failing schools such as Dade Middle School where chaos reigned
most of the 2014-2105 school year and where in violation of NCLB statutes, the failing minority school
with an exceptionally high percentage of special education students was staffed with a majority of
inexperienced TFA teachers.
In preparing the 2014-2015 budget, the current administration had skewed teacher salaries to a point
that 45.85% of Dallas ISD teachers were at $49,000 or below. That translated into almost half the
teaching force of Dallas ISD making much less than the starting salary for a teaching candidate with a
bachelors degree in Irving ISD at $51,000 in 2014-2105, a salary which also included free health
insurance. In April of 2015, when Dallas ISD teaching vacancies hit 416, Irving ISD, a much smaller
district, 22% the size if DISD, had less than 10 teaching vacancies. If Irving has the same proportion of
vacancies as DISD they would have had 92 vacancies, over 900% more than they actually have!
The previous two Chiefs of Human Capital had no former experience in their roles as head of Human
Capital before being recruited to Dallas ISD through the Teach for America pipeline that affords illegal
and unconstitutional preferential hiring to present and former TFA recruits. Former TFA Carmen Deville
resigned with a compensation package after being caught in a texting scandal that demonstrated
numerous violations in employment practices.
While the current Superintendent of DISD made huge claims to having solved the problem of teacher
vacancies that were severe during his first two years in office, those claims seem to have no substance
when looking at the actual openings that were available when the former head of HR possibly over hired
the wrong type of teachers at the beginning of the school year, leading to a $6 million dollar mistake
with no accountability.
By April of 2015, Miles administration had the same issue that has been problematic since the hiring of
former TFA Charles Glover who spent the first summer with the District recruiting Cabinet members
rather than teachers. Many failing and vulnerable schools had double digit openings that were never
filled during Miles first year.

20

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2012/10/some-credibility-issues-with-mike-miles-disdsuperintendent.html/

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The current school year has the same issues with the highest teacher vacancies occurring in schools full
of SPED, LEP, and at-risk students compared with few vacancies at magnets that filter out LEP and SPED
students.

Major inequities are clear in funding patterns that intentionally seem to limit the regular education
dollars assigned neighborhood high schools in Dallas ISD. Indeed, whether there are even adequate
dollars on the campuses of low-rated, comprehensive high schools in Dallas ISD in order to remove high
schools and middle schools from IR lists could be questioned.
The fact that TAG and Science and Engineering received thousands of dollars per student in High School
Allotment funds on top of high regular education dollars eliminates any comparability between the
magnets with low percentages of LEP and SPED students and IR schools with averages higher than
district percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students.
High numbers of teacher vacancies are common in Dallas ISD outside the magnet and vanguard schools
which seldom have more than a couple of vacancies during the school year.
The following chart defines the campuses with the highest number of classroom vacancies as of April 6,
2015.

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As with funding disparities between Title I and non-Title schools and between neighborhood and
comprehensive schools, teacher vacancies are disproportionately a feature of IR schools and schools on
the PEG list.
These disparities in providing classroom teachers to schools with high LEP, SPED, and at-risk student
populations is another violation of the Equal Protection rights of these students.

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The extremely high rate of teacher vacancies at failing schools disproportionately impacts LEP, SPED,
and at-risk students, depriving these students of comparable learning opportunities when compared
to magnet and choice schools in Dallas ISD and depriving students of the Equal Protection guarantees
given them through the United States Constitution. This pattern of extremely high teacher vacancies
at vulnerable schools has been persistent through the tenure of the current Superintendent.
That these high vacancies can generate revenue for the surplus fund is not in question and may be
documented through District records. That these high vacancies lower learning opportunities is
apparent when vacancies are compared between high risk schools and the magnet and choice schools.

Summary
Questions regarding equity and large differentials in campus funding between neighborhood and
magnet Dallas ISD schools were the original concerns of complainants whose children attend
underfunded high schools or middle schools or who are community members in neighborhoods with
underfunded schools. Few Dallas ISD Trustees seem capable of asking substantive questions regarding
equity of classroom funding in Dallas ISD, perhaps due to a climate of retaliation by the Superintendent
against those Trustees who question The Dallas Miracle or its source of funding during a period of
state cuts to public education. Indeed, parents in Dallas ISD cannot even ask questions about District
directives without retaliation against a proven principal for not shutting down the First Amendment
rights of parents.21
The Editorial Board of The Dallas Morning News, along with bloggers sponsored by those who support a
hostile takeover of public schools and alternative media funded through salacious advertising,
performed no analysis of the sources of funding of The Dallas Miracle. The huge increase in surplus
funds of Dallas ISD went totally unquestioned except for a few Board members who are regularly
demonized in most local media and are targeted by reform PACS, including those of the Dallas Mayor
and Ken Barth whose own child attended a magnet with the highest level of regular education funding.
When questioned by veteran, investigative Channel 8 journalist, Brett Shipp, about the huge regular
education funding disparities on Dallas ISD campuses, Trustee Mike Morath decided to speak in place of
the Superintendent and CFO and used the explanation that regular funds are for regular students. This
explanation by a Board member, who has repeatedly sought to remove duly elected Board members
who ask questions about the budget, is both laughable and shocking in its inaccuracy.

21

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20150416-disd-tells-popular-oak-cliff-principal-shewont-be-back-next-year.ece

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In this climate of fear of retaliation by a Superintendent who has twice been found to be the source of
retaliatory actions against duly elected Board members, few DISD Trustees also questioned gross
campus funding disparities that negatively impact SPED, LEP, and at-risk students disproportionately.
These disparities are unconstitutional and some have as their source potential illegal use of public funds.
Yet, no public discussion by the Board of Trustees took place regarding the increasingly high level of the
surplus fund while low performing campuses lacked basic teacher staffing and low performing campuses
churned through teachers and principals during the entire three years of the current administration.
Trustees were told these actions were all part of Broad-driven disruptive reform and the
Superintendent of Schools continued to be awarded financing for various pet projects that mostly failed
to accomplish results. The Dallas Mayor, along with his Education PACs, continued to support the
Superintendent and Board members who support disruptive reform.
Indeed, the Superintendent, aided by the President of the Board, Miguel Solis, may have profited by the
gross disparities in funding and illegal use of SCE funds that potentially grew The Dallas Miracle and
the surplus fund of Dallas ISD. The Superintendent was given an early contract renewal with a disregard
for increases in failing campuses. The sole motivation for the early contract renewal seems to have been
the unquestioned size of the DISD surplus fund. School Board President Solis called the Board to a
meeting in July, 2014, when the District was closed in order to renew the Superintendents contract. By
August 2014 the failing schools would have been public knowledge. Solis demanded the Board renew in
July 2014 before the increase in Improvement Required (IR) schools became public even though the
District had the test scores from the State documenting this achievement disaster.
Trustee Miguel Solis also led the machinations that allowed the Superintendent to receive a bonus
perhaps based on high school credit recovery fraud in September, 2014. This credit recovery fraud was
the basis of increased graduation rates.
President Solis also violated the law by not reconvening the Board in public session after the closed
session held on the Superintendents appraisal.
Closer examination and analysis of the level of Dallas ISD regular education funding, by law the only legal
funding for the state mandated curriculum for all students outside those served by special education,
appears to be capricious and arbitrary and unrelated to requirements for Title I comparability in services
before the addition of any supplemental state or federal funds. The absence of visible special education
support for students mainstreamed into regular education classes is included in this Title VI complaint in
a different section. While special education funds do legally supplement regular education funds in all IR
secondary schools that are loaded with high percentages of special education students, low levels of
regular education funding impact all students on IR secondary campuses including SPED, LEP and atrisk student since these students take the majority of their coursework in regular education
classrooms.

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An examination of regular education funding on Title I, non-Title I, and magnet campuses uncovered
severe, potentially illegal violations of state compensatory education funding that is Title I Part A SCE
funding intended to accompany and strengthen Title I funding. SCE funds were also misused on several
other campuses in order to generate millions in extra regular education funds.
State statutes prohibit the use of these funds to supplant regular education dollars.
SCE costs may supplement the costs of the regular education program and may be used for costs of
programs and/or services that are supplemental to the regular education program and are designed for
students at risk of dropping out of school. LEAs are prohibited from using FSP compensatory education
resource allocations for students at risk of dropping out of school to supplant resource allocations for the
regular education program. The term regular education program applies to basic instructional services to
which all eligible students are entitled.22
Ironically, the planned budgets for high school campuses in Dallas ISD for 2014-2015 as recorded in state
PEIMS records show no Accelerated Instruction funding that was mandated by House Bill 5 for all high
school students who failed any End of Course exam required by the state.
Because complainants also had concerns regarding the use of High School Allotment funds, an
examination of the removal of funds from high schools with high levels of poverty and the transfer of
these funds to magnet schools with high levels of regular education funding was analyzed. In the
analysis, it became clear that the High School Allotment funds contained many more dollars than were
available from state funding and seemed to be being used to totally supplant regular education dollars
at the Early Colleges while granting magnet schools immense instructional dollars compared to
neighborhood and IR high schools. This was the second instance of what appears to be substantial fraud
in sourcing campuses in Dallas ISD.
The third potential area of illegal activity is the use of Title I funds to compensate core academic
teachers because the level of regular education funding has fallen so low on some campuses that
supplanting with federal dollars seems to be the only choice.
Finally, hundreds of teacher vacancies since the arrival of the current Superintendent seem to be a
revenue generating feature for the surplus fund and other pet projects. That a school district would
allow 416 vacancies, mostly in low performing urban schools in the spring of the school year, is a
violation of the equal protection rights of these students with no teachers. These same students are the
victims of record-high churn rates in principals and teachers that seem to be part of the Broad-designed
disruptive reform of the present Superintendent.

22

http://www.esc20.net/users/0039/docs/CompedV14[1].pdf

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The Dallas Miracle, correlated to the extension of the Superintendents contract in a move led by
Board President Miguel Solis, is relevant to unconstitutional violations of Equal Protection rights of DISD
SPED, LEP, and at-risk students whose campuses were underfunded and who lacked equal protection in
the staffing of classroom teachers as evidenced by the 416 teacher vacancies in the spring of 2015.
These vacancies disproportionately impacted IR schools and neighborhood schools that do not filter out
at-risk, LEP, and SPED students.
Violations of comparability necessary for Title I comparability are also raised through an analysis of
teacher vacancies, high churn, and regular education funding patterns which decreased class size on
campuses with few or none SPED and LEP students while negatively impacting the campuses with high
percentages of these students.

Academic Harm to Students Dallas Miracle


1. Dallas ISD has 43 schools on the Improvement Required list from the Texas Education Agency
(TEA). There is no cutoff standard on passing STAAR scores under the current rating system. The
current system identifies the worst schools in the state for IR status. Most significantly, DISD has
three schools on the list that have been identified for four consecutive years23 when only 5
schools in the state have been identified for that distinction and the majority of IR schools in
Texas only maintain IR status for only one year. Pinkston, Roosevelt, and TW Browne Middle
School have three consecutive years of IR status, yet TW Browne was one of the lowest-funded
middle schools in Dallas ISD.
2. Only 6383 high school students in Dallas ISD Class of 2015 would have attended the normal
spring 2015 graduation if the state of Texas had maintained its standard of requiring the passage
of five End of Course exams and if the current dates had been maintained for receipt of the final
EOC testing return dates.
3. Attrition in high school students has climbed in the 2015 senior cohort with potential higher
dropout rates and lower on time completion rates, yet needed funds for Accelerated Instruction
at the high school level were not present on PEIMS reports indicating a lack of planning for
following HB5 which required first priority for high school students failing EOC exams.
4. The Public Education Grant awarded the worst performing schools in Texas indicated a
substantial increase in PEG schools for Dallas ISD in 2014 while most school districts noted a
decrease.

23

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/account/2014/multiyearau.pdf

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5. The number of students earning a 990 on the SAT declined, for the first time in history, by 195
students to only 1,017 students in 2014 while more students in Dallas ISD took the exam. 24
6. Measures of academic achievement declined across the District in 2013-2104, covered up only
by fraudulent graduation rates that were generated by illegal conduct in credit recovery
programs. 25
7. The minority achievement gap across the District is widening, perhaps due in part to The Dallas
Miracle of underfunding neighborhood high schools and violating Title I comparability when
comparing magnets, vanguards, choice schools, and neighborhood Title I schools. 26
8. While Advanced Placement pass rates have increased, rates have increased mainly at the
magnet schools. Comprehensive high schools in DISD with the highest percentage of African
American students have the lowest AP pass rates. Madison students passed only 3 tests of the
176 they attempted. Lincolns students passed only 2 tests out of 169. Students at South Oak
Cliff passed one test out of 174. Students at Carter passed 8 tests out of 344. Wilmer Hutchins
students, at an IR school, passed 6 out of 220 tests or 2.7%.
9. Comprehensive high schools with the highest percentage of white students passed the most
tests.
10. Magnet school students took 7300 AP tests and passed 41.8%. Schools with large numbers of
Hispanic native speakers of Spanish increased their pass rates in AP Spanish ONLY. Roosevelts
Hispanic students passed 15 AP Spanish tests while other Roosevelt students passed only 1 test.
The increase in passing rates at comprehensive high schools was driven mainly by increases in
AP Spanish, a test not considered a criterion of college readiness in a study done by Texas A&M.
11. ITBS reading scores have declined rapidly for African American students as have STAAR scores
released in April, 2015.
12. Student behavior problems, perhaps related to insufficient funding patterns, are rapidly
increasing in predominately African American middle schools with Dade Middle School an
extreme concern.

24

http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/06/sat-scores-drop-as-more-dallas-isd-students-take-collegeadmissions-test.html/
25
See second chart on page at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2015/03/title-i-complaint-updatesworse-numbers.html
26
http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/academic-progress-in-dallas-isd-2014.html

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13. Third grade Reading English STAAR scores fell in 2013-2014 as did third grade Spanish STARR, 4th
grade writing, and 8th grade science.

Inefficiencies Related to the Dallas Miracle


1. Costly churn in teachers and principals has skyrocketed during the years leading to the Dallas
Miracle. All research on high teacher churn shows it harmful to schools.
2. Churn has reached all the way into the executive cabinet members where most executive
positions remained vacant in the spring of 2015.
3. This costly, chaotic churn in teachers has been most pervasive on campuses with high
percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students where stability is most needed.
Remedies
Because there were no consequences to the top DISD Internal Auditor who was supposed to report
directly to the Board of Trustees when a scandal and illegal violations of federal, state, and local
employment laws were found in text messages from the Human Capital Management division of Dallas
ISD27, it is not assumed any credible audit can be done by the Dallas ISD even when Trustees receive this
Title VI complaint. The current President of the School Board, formerly employed by Ken Barth who is an
avid supporter of the current Superintendent, does not have a history of holding the Superintendent of
Schools accountable for substantial decreases in student achievement or the continuing scandals
surrounding the chaos in the school district.
The DISD Internal Audit office seems to be compromised if reports of firing of whistleblowers and
auditors who bring credible reports to the Board of Trustees are followed in local media reports.28 The
lack of any accountability for the Superintendents complicity in the HCM scandal speaks to a lack of any
accountability in potential, widespread fraud in the use of state compensatory education funds, potential
misuse of Title I to hire core teachers because of lack of adequate regular education funding, the misuse
of High School Allotment funds, and the lack of adequacy in funding DISD middle and high schools in
2013-2014.
Complainants are requesting fraud audits by the federal Department of Education also because of a lack
of a timely and legal response by the Texas Education Agency in the case of El Paso ISD where a former
27

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20150129-in-instant-messages-dallas-isdadministrators-poke-fun-at-race-and-age-disparage-coworkers.ece
28
http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/education/2015/01/30/darvilles-resignation-brings-questions-of-whatsuperintendent-knew-and-when/22618599/

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central administrator from Dallas ISD was sent to prison over misconduct only after intervention by a
state senator and the federal Department of Education. Political ties between TEA and school districts
can present conflicts of interest when school districts are allowed to audit or investigate themselves or
when job opportunities are exchanged between TEA and school districts under fire.
Because all of the potential fraudulent misuse of supplemental state and potentially federal funds
covered up gross violations of Title I comparability, complainants are asking for immediate intervention
in a series of federal audits of Dallas Independent School District.

Complainants are requesting:


1. An immediate fraud audit in the State Compensatory funds that were used to illegally supplant
regular education funding resulting in a violation of Title 1 Comparability for Dallas ISD for 20122014.
2. An immediate fraud audit in the High School Allotment funds that were used to illegally supplant
regular education funding resulting in a violation of Title I Comparability for 2012-2014.
3. An immediate fraud audit in Title I funding on middle and high school neighborhood campuses
with low regular education funding to determine how many core academic teachers were
compensated with Title I funds in violation of federal laws.
4. An audit into the source of funding that dramatically increased the High School Allotment funds
in the last three years in Dallas ISD.
5. An audit into the sources of the phenomenal growth of the surplus fund of Dallas ISD during a
period of lowered state funding and lowered property values in Dallas, Texas. In particular, it is
requested that huge teacher vacancies on low performing campuses and campuses serving LEP,
SPED, and at-risk students along with potential fraud in supplanting of Title I, State
Compensatory Education funds, and High School Allotment for regular education dollars be part
of the investigation of the growth of the surplus fund.
6. An investigation into the early extension of the Superintendents contract based on The Dallas
Miracle since there appears to be fraudulent misuse of state compensatory education funds,
high school allotment funds, and Title I funds in order to grow the district surplus budget which
was a major reason for the early extension of the Superintendents contract. Each of these
instances of potential fraud is also associated with gross violations of Equal Protection
guarantees for LEP, SPED, and at-risk students who had legitimate sources of campus funding

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removed while some campuses with no LEP, SPED, or at-risk students profited from the backdooring of High School Allotment funds into their schools.
7. An investigation into the process used for the Superintendents evaluation in 2014 where high
school graduation figures that included fraudulent credit recovery schemes were used to boost
the Superintendents ratings. An investigation into the Title I comparability formula presented to
the Board of Trustees.
8. An investigation into the gerrymandering of attendance boundaries for Lakewood Elementary
School in order to maintain a mainly white, middle class population that intentionally excluded
poor students based on the belief poor students would decrease property values.
9. An investigation into the effects of the chaos in Human Capital Management on the inability of
Dallas ISD to staff some of its lowest performing schools with adequate teachers in the 20142015 school year and in the two preceding school years.29
10. An investigation into the high regular education dollars allotted Lakewood Elementary School in
the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school year in relation to Dallas ISDs Title I comparability
formula.
11. An investigation into how regular education dollars were used in staffing Stevens Park
Elementary, Clinton Russell Elementary, Adelle Turner, Sunset High School, and Skyline High
School without using state compensatory education dollars or Title I dollars in place of regular
education funding. The same analysis is requested for the elementary, middle, and high schools
with the lowest regular education dollar funding in the year 2013-2014.
12. An investigation into the actual regular education teacher-student ratios at Townview compared
to those at the IR High Schools of Samuell and Spruce and neighborhood high schools Sunset,
White, and Molina in 2013-2014.
13. An investigation into why the 2014-2015 Dallas ISD planned PEIMS budget filed with the state of
Texas does not comply with House Bill 5 requiring Accelerated Instruction for all high school
students who failed an End of Course exam.
14. Complainants request a halt to the introduction of any more choice schools until
neighborhood schools are funded in a manner that allows every student in Dallas ISD access to
comparable educational services at all schools.

29

Dallas ISD Teacher Vacancy Report, April 6, 2015.

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15. Complainants are requesting a comparability analysis between the regular education funding
levels of Dallas ISDs neighborhood high schools and its magnet schools and a comparability
analysis of regular education funding levels of DISDs high schools and those of bordering school
districts with similar levels of per student revenue.

II.

Creating a De Facto, Systemic Method of Supplanting Federal Supplemental


Funding on Most Dallas ISD Title I Campuses: Violation of Equal Protection
Guarantees and State and Federal Law

Dallas ISDs current Title I comparability formula hides the fact that compared to Title I campuses in
bordering school districts, Dallas ISD Title I campuses and their students have been systematically
deprived of millions in regular education dollars through simply substantially lowering the amount of
regular education dollars before Title I, CTE, special education, and bilingual funding were added.
This systemic plundering of regular education dollars for other purposes rather than classroom
instruction essentially negates much of the impact of supplementary funding for Title I, bilingual
programs, state compensatory education funding, Career and Technology funding, and special
education funding. Lowering regular education dollars before adding federal and state compensatory
and special programming dollars does the most damage to special education, LEP, poor, and at-risk
students by removing the power of additional dollars for special needs students. The Dallas ISD Title I
comparability formula as well as the equity model developed by the current administration are
essentially reverse Robin Hood formulas for pulling out any floor on regular education dollars on Title I
campuses before supplementary federal and state dollars are added. Non-Title 1 campuses and
magnets and choice schools that admit almost no LEP or SPED or at-risk students have the highest
amounts of regular education dollars on their campuses. This practice assumes educating high achieving
students for the required state standards costs more than educating critical masses of LEP, SPED, and atrisk students found on the campuses of neighborhood, Title I campuses.
Dallas ISD has essentially violated both federal and state law by creating a two-tier system of non-Title I
and magnet and choice schools which were allotted in some cases almost twice the amount of regular
education dollars as the poorest Title I campuses in the District filled with the highest percentage of LEP,
SPED, poor, and at-risk students.
In addition to in-district legal and constitutional violations of equal protection and equal access, Dallas
ISDs current campus funding formula essentially created a de facto separate and unequal school district
of Title I campuses within Dallas ISD compared to both its magnet schools and compared to bordering
suburban Title I schools in districts that have similar levels of revenue and similar demographics.

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Dallas ISD has also violated the Texas state Constitution in refusing to provide an efficient system of
education within its borders since the classrooms of Title I campuses were financially violated while
state and local funding were used for many purposes other than classroom instruction. Dallas ISD is
not a property-poor district, yet the level of per student spending for regular education is much lower
than surrounding districts with the same level of tax revenues.
In effect, the current administration is short-changing Title I students of dollars necessary for
instruction in the state-required curriculum in order to fund projects that had no impact on student
achievement if the PEG list is examined for 2013-2014.
As a sample of the millions removed through a bogus Title I comparability formula relying on staffing
instead of instructional dollars, a comparison of regular education spending at the high school, middle
school, and elementary levels in Irving ISD were compared to Title I campuses in Dallas ISD. The data for
these comparisons were pulled from the public PEIMS documents available on the Texas Education web
site. The comparisons include planned campus budgets for 2013-2014.
Both school districts, Irving ISD and Dallas ISD, have similar levels of revenue, and student demographics
are similar on Title I campuses. While Irving ISD was able to bring an IR high school campus off the low
performing list in one year, Dallas ISD dramatically increased the number of IR high school campuses in
the same year while also under-funding neighborhood high school Title I campuses. Dallas ISD also has
many IR high school campuses that have lingered on the IR and AU state lists of poorest performing
schools for years.
As an example of the harm inflicted by Dallas ISDs current use of a sham comparability formula, Sunset
High School in Dallas ISD will be compared with Irving High School in Irving ISD. The two schools provide
an example of similar-sized high school campuses with similar demographics.
Irving ISD central administrators planned $3887 in regular education dollars for Irving High School for
the 2013-2104 school year. By state law, regular education dollars must be adequate to support the
state-required curriculum and learning standards for all students before the addition of federal and
state compensatory dollars. Irving ISD then added all supplemental funding to the $3887 in per student
regular education dollars for Irving High School, including $722 in state compensatory funding. Irving
High School, a very close match demographically to Sunset High School, received a total of $6655 in
per student funding aimed directly at the classroom.
Adding to this picture of inequity in funding is the fact that Dallas ISD received $149 million for state
compensatory education (SCE) in 2012-2013 as an indication of the size of typical SCE funds for the
District. Yet, SCE funds do not appear on Dallas ISD campus PEIMS reports in the category of
Accelerated Education for any high school in 2013-2014. As a note, while the District spent the legally

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allowable sum of $59 million in overhead administration from these SCE funds in 2012-2013, it could
have chosen to add to campus resources instead of funding central administrative positions.
A Dallas ISD evaluation of the 2012-2013 SEC grants states:
The purpose of the State Compensatory Education (SCE) program is to increase academic achievement
and reduce the dropout rate of At-Risk students through direct instructional services. The goal is to
reduce any disparity in (1) performance on state-mandated assessments, and (2) high school graduation/
completion rates between At-Risk students and all other district students. Texas Education Code (TEC)
29.081 defines the state criteria for identifying At-Risk students.1 Students who meet any of the criteria
are to be reported through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) in the fall of
each school year. Among the 13 criteria are students who are limited English proficient, students who
failed a state assessment, or students who were retained. The district is required to submit the district
improvement plan, two campus improvement plans, and the local evaluation of state compensatory
education strategies, activities and programs to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) annually.
An analysis of STAAR and TELPAS assessment results from the district pointed out the need to address
special population groups. Disaggregated student achievement data shows that the following student
groups need to be addressed in order to close the learning gaps: Hispanic, Limited English Proficient,
African-American, special education, and at-risk students. According to these data, there is a need to
provide supplemental staff and programs to support the social, emotional, and academic needs of low
achieving students, English language learners and other students considered at risk of academic failure,
including eliminating any achievement gap between males and females. There is also a need to target
training and support to ensure that all teachers are skilled in the use of research-based instructional
practices and cultural proficiency. To serve as first-level responses to learning difficulties, the campuses
will need to identify and develop proven, practical intervention practices and strategies ..30
Of the $149 million in SCE monies in 2012-2013, the District only spent $86 million on
programs/services for at-risk students while also under-funding by millions its high schools containing
high percentages of the targeted at-risk students: special education, LEP, and students who had failed
state required tests for graduation. Many SCE-funded positions were left vacant.
There is no evidence from the campus PEIMS reports for Sunset, for example, that SCE funds targeted
the at-risk population on Sunsets campus or any other high school campus with high attrition even
though there is evidence of increased attrition at the high school level over the past three years as well
as high rates of failure on End of Course Exams with the high attrition HIDING the actual failure rates

30

http://www.dallasisd.org/cms/lib/TX01001475/Centricity/domain/98/evaluation/13-14/ataglance/EA14-301-4SCE-AAG.pdf

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on EOC exams. Sunset High School received no compensatory state funds31 even though District
evaluation reports describe the majority of at-risk students in Dallas ISD, the students targeted by SCE
funding, are male, Hispanic, and LEP.
The District report on SCE funds for 2012-2013 clearly provides a picture of the District failing to hire
planned positions and using $50 million for administrative overhead while the formula used for Title I
comparability grossly understaffed the classrooms of DISD.
House Bill 5 of the 83rd Legislature will require that all school districts serve students failing EOC exams
with SCE funds before any other group. Whether Dallas ISD followed this law will be seen when the
public can view campus planned spending for the 2014-2015 school year in PEIMS records.
Yet, in neighboring Irving ISD, there was a plan in place to use SCE funds for the targeted population at
Irving High School. Irving ISD had one high school campus rating of Improvement Required or IR in 2013
and by 2014, the high school was no longer IR, perhaps because Irving ISD was not using a bogus plan to
strip regular education and SCE funds from its failing high school campus.
If Dallas ISD used SCE funds for credit recovery at its high schools, that program was exposed as a sham
in articles by The Dallas Morning News investigative reporters.
Because of DISDs formula, Sunset High School received only $2977 in regular education dollars and
received no accelerated instruction funding. Exactly where state compensatory funding went is not clear
from PEIMS reports. The total instructional, classroom dollars planned for Sunset High School, a
school with major dropout and student achievement issues, was only $4725 compared with $6655 for
Irving High School. Between lowering Sunsets regular education dollars and the absence of state
compensatory funds for a school high in at-risk students, Sunset students missed out on $1730 per
student in funding compared to its direct demographic peer in Irving, Texas in a school district that
has similar per student revenue as Dallas ISD.
That $1730 per student times the 2144 students predicted to enroll in Sunset High School equates to a
$3.7 million dollar difference in classroom and instructional funds available for the students of Sunset
High School compared to their demographic match in Irving ISD, a neighboring suburb with a high
poverty rate and high percentage of Hispanic and LEP students.
Placing a floor of $3800 in regular education funds would have given Sunset High School about $1.8
million in just added regular education revenue which could have significantly lowered class sizes in the
academic core.

31

There is no evidence of SCE funds being reported through the appropriate Accelerated Instruction category on
the PEIMS documents even though other school districts across Texas reported these funds correctly.

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In the same Dallas ISD Trustee district, belonging to Trustee Eric Cowan, Molina High School lost over a
million dollars and Adamson around $870,000 compared to the regular education dollars these schools
would have received in general education dollars in a school district with similar revenue located only a
few miles away. Those figures do not include missing SCE funding.
From only the neighborhood high schools of North Oak Cliff, a total in 2013-2014 of around four million
dollars was removed from classrooms of students attending DISD neighborhood high schools compared
to the regular education instructional dollars provided neighborhood high school students a few miles
away in a school district with similar revenue. While some corporate reformers harp on zip codes not
defining the educational outcomes of urban students, none of these reformers has compared regular
education spending for classroom instruction as dependent on the vagaries of zip codes.
Aside from the two-tier system operating WITHIN Dallas ISD where magnet and non-Title I schools
receive almost twice the regular education funding as some neighborhood Title I schools, Dallas ISD
cannot even demonstrate a comparable spend to similar Title I schools sitting on its borders that are a
demographic match to its neighborhood Title schools.
In Pleasant Grove, Samuell High School, which has been on the state unacceptable list for almost a
decade, is lacking over a million dollars in funding from the 2013-2014 school year if any equitable and
legal method of funding regular education dollars similar to the formula used in Irving ISD had been
applied rather than a mishmash of special education dollars and Title I funding.
Skyline High School lost $5.3 million dollars in regular education funding if its students had received the
same per student regular education funding that is available in Irving ISDs high schools. In addition,
athletic funding seems to have been moved off the campuses of comprehensive high schools and
transferred to magnet and Early College campuses to boost classroom instructional resources.
Regular education funding across all Irving ISD high schools was very similararound $3800. In Dallas
ISD in 2013-2014, the following schools failed to meet the $3800 regular education funding awarded
Irving High School even though these schools are also high LEP, SPED, and high poverty: Adamson, Bryan
Adams, Molina, Hillcrest, Thomas Jefferson, Kimball, Samuell, Seagoville, Spruce, Sunset, WT White,
Carter, North Dallas, Conrad, and Skyline.
In contrast, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, serving in reality as a
multi-county high school funded by local property taxes of Dallas taxpayers, was scheduled for $5775 in
regular education dollars and was awarded a third of a million dollars from the High School Allotment to
further increase its instructional resources according to PEIMS records for 2013-2014. Booker T.
Washington has one of the lowest levels of poverty in the district and the highest percentage of white
students, many of whom are from out of district. Booker T. Washingtons regular education dollars for
2013-2014 were twice that of Sunset High School.

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The only Dallas high schools that are high poverty that were awarded a higher spend than Irving High
School in regular education dollars are those neighborhood high schools with shrinking populations:
Pinkston, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Madison whose small student populations increased costs and were
part of I20/20. The increased regular education dollars at these high schools and the total instructional
spend was much less than the resources given IR schools in Austin ISD where central and campus
administrators put effective instructional plans and resources on campuses and decreased their PEG list
in 2013-2014.

The current Dallas ISD comparability formula used for 2013-2014 essentially
removed $19 million in regular education funds from Dallas ISD high schools
loaded with LEP and SPED and at-risk students if compared to similar student
populations in Irving ISD, a district with similar levels of tax revenue. Not placing
a ceiling on Title I high school campuses while providing a floor of $3800 in
regular education funding would cost the District $19 million a year based on
2013-2014 PEIMS records.
Complainants are not requesting a ceiling on campus regular education dollars for existing high
schools or ceiling for magnet programs which have had severe cuts in regular education dollars in the
past few years.
Instead, complainants are demanding a floor for regular education dollars for Title I high schools that
is comparable to a much more successful district, Irving ISD, sitting on the border of Dallas ISD.
Complainants are also requesting that the Department of Education monitor regular education
spending on Dallas ISD Title I campuses for the future in order to monitor compliance in regular
education spending across campuses.
Complainants are also requesting that Dallas ISD quit robbing other programs and grants, such as high
school allotment or the athletic budget, in order to fund its magnet and Early College programs. If
magnet programs cannot be run on comparable dollars to Title I comprehensive high schools, Dallas
ISD needs to develop honest, transparent solutions to that problem.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

Page 45 of 76

Information on Title I comparability presented annually to the Dallas ISD Trustees seemed to focus on
some attempt to equalize spending across Title I and magnet schools AFTER Title I schools received Title
I, CTE, bilingual, and special education funding. Using an equity formula that compares magnets and
neighborhood campuses after supplementing for special needs on Title I campuses filled with special
education and LEP students is not an equity formula but a perversion of equity; it is a Robin Hood
formula that removes regular education dollars from the most vulnerable students.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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It was never explained to the Trustees that comparability formulas should have provided equity BEFORE
any supplemental funding was added and that there should be no expectation that with a floor on
regular education dollars, comprehensive high schools would then have similar total instructional
spending per student. The poorest high schools with the largest percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk
students should have had much higher sums of financial sourcing than magnets with no LEP, SPED, CTE,
or at-risk students. The Dallas ISD formula proposes that teaching the mandated state standards and
courses to poor, LEP, special education, and at-risk students is much cheaper in regular education
dollars, which are supposed to totally fund the state-mandated standards, than teaching the same
standards to magnet students who have been carefully filtered for admission to magnet schools.
Dallas ISDs equity formula turns supplemental funding upside down and adds supplemental funding,
along with supplanting Title I funds, before reporting comparability to the Trustees. There is no evidence
that the Trustees were aware of or understood the perversion of equity in funding provided their
constituents. For central administrators to plead they did not understand federal and state laws
regarding supplanting federal and state monies is not a defense and is outside the boundaries of belief.

Middle school spending in regular education dollars in Irving ISD demonstrates another egregious
pattern in Dallas ISD of underfunding Title I campuses in terms of lowering regular education funding
before adding federal supplemental funding.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Dallas ISD neighborhood middle schools, especially those neighborhood IR middle schools filled with
high percentages of SPED, LEP, and at-risk students, are provided millions less in regular education
dollars compared to middle school students in bordering Irving ISD.
Dallas ISD neighborhood middle schools with the highest per student spend in regular education dollars
are located at Marsh, Franklin, Gaston, Long, and Walker and hover around $4100 a student. Zumwalt
and Edison had funding in the same range, but are much smaller schools.

Some Dallas ISD middle schools in the worst shape academically in the state are
funded at a $1,000 a student less than the average regular education spending
per middle school student in Irving ISD.
Spence Talented and Gifted Academy, housed in a neighborhood middle school, had its regular
education dollars lowered to $3201 while its Title I funding illegally supplanted the lowered regular
education spending for several years.

Dallas ISD Low Rated Middle Schools: Regular Education Funding


PEIMS Records for Planned Campus Budgets 2013-2014
School
# of Students
Regular Ed Dollars
$$
Browne Middle
1023
3631
O Holmes
837
3596
Boude Storey
727
3644
Dade
802
3702
Medrano
902
3255
Hood
982
3381
The only middle schools in Dallas ISD that approach the regular education dollars provided all
neighborhood middle schools in Irving ISD are Dallas ISD magnets and vanguardsschools of choice
where students are filtered for admission. DESA, for instance, is provided $4900 in regular education
funding.
The reason so many parents leave Dallas ISD schools after successful experiences at the elementary
school level may be found in the gross underfunding of neighborhood middle schools in Dallas ISD. For
the most vulnerable students, those in IR schools, no floor for regular education dollars means special
education funds are not supplemental, but used in part to provide the state-mandated curriculum.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Improvement Required (IR) middle schools in Dallas ISD are some of the lowest rated schools in the
state of Texas, yet these IR middle schools have been systematically grossly underfunded compared to
similar middle schools in Irving ISD and other school districts. Browne Middle School, according to
schooldigger.com, is at the 1.5 percentile of rankings in the middle schools in the state of Texas. Many
other IR Dallas ISD middle schools are in the lowest 5% in the state with their peer middle schools either
failing charter schools or schools operated by the Juvenile Justice System in Texas. Yet the bogus
equity model in Dallas ISD stripped millions out of these schools compared to demographically similar
schools in Irving ISD.
When Children at Risk, a Houston nonprofit, did its annual assessment of Texas public schools, the
lowest rated 11 middle schools in the state contained 7 Dallas middle schools. The weakest link in
Dallas public neighborhood schools appears to be under-funded middle schools with no productive
programmatic remedies.
Programmatic remedies require extra funding, yet the past three years of financial campus data
provides a clear picture of under-funded, failing middle schools in Dallas ISD.
Bordering school district, Irving ISD, with the same per student revenue as Dallas ISD, was able to
provide around $1,000 more in per student regular education funding than Dallas ISD. Placing a floor of
$4500 a student in regular education funding for comprehensive middle schools would cost Dallas ISD
$18,000,000 annually due to the extremely low funding documented in 2013-2014.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Providing a floor of even $4500 (less than the average for Irving ISDs middle schools) would
cost Dallas ISD around $18 million a year because every one of its middle schools is underfunded compared to a school district of Title I campuses sitting on the border of Dallas ISD.
Elementary schools in Dallas ISD also show an irregular, random funding of regular education
dollars with some non-Title campuses with the lowest level of poverty and LEP students
receiving the highest level of regular education funding.
Non-Title I elementary campuses of Lakewood and Stonewall Jackson are provided high levels of regular
education dollars along with some Title I funds. This practice entirely negates the entire point of
federal supplemental funding since other elementary schools must use Title I funds to catch up to the
level of funding provided nontitle schools.
Stevens Park, Clinton Russell, Truett, and Lowe Elementary Schools (all extremely high LEP schools)
were the victims of illegally supplanting Title I funds for regular education monies. Truetts regular
education funding dropped to $3135 while its Title I funding increased to $1098 to bring it up to less
than the regular education funding provided Lakewood and Stonewall Jackson at almost $4800 each.
Preston Hollow Elementary received almost $5000 per student in regular education funding while the
lowest funded elementary schools with the highest levels of LEP, SPED, poverty, and at risk students
had total program dollars much less than nontitle campuses with the lowest levels of poverty in the
district. Since Preston Hollow represents a small Title I school and Lakewood and Stonewall Jackson
represent non-Title large elementary schools, Plaintiffs are requesting a floor within 10% of the
regular education dollars at these schools to provide the floor for all elementary Title I campuses. A
spreadsheet follows this discussion showing how many campuses would be under-funded at a $4400
floor.
This floor also pushes Dallas ISD elementary school campuses toward the average instructional per
student spending in Irving ISD on its elementary campuses which is around $6100 solely for
instruction, not for operations or administrative costs.
From a competitive standpoint, most Title I campus students in Dallas ISD are at a competitive
disadvantage in the instructional resources afforded them compared with both nontitle campuses
within the Dallas ISD and compared to Title I campuses in bordering school districts with similar
demographics and per student revenue.
None of this under-resourcing of Title I neighborhood schools in Dallas ISD is the result of lack of
adequate financing for Dallas ISD compared to bordering school districts. This inequitable,
unconstitutional, and illegal campus sourcing scheme was deliberate, systematic, and systemic and
the sole purpose was the removal of tax dollars from classroom instruction for other purposes.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

Title I Campuses: Illegally Supplanting State Compensatory Education


Funds
Elementary schools:
Clinton Russell
Stevens Park
Truett
Lowe

Regular Ed $
2365
2854
3135
3103

SCE Funding
1604
1099
1098
1186

Page 51 of 76

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

Page 52 of 76

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

Page 53 of 76

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

Page 54 of 76

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Dallas ISDs funding formula consistently removes millions in regular education spending from
neighborhood Title I elementary school campuses before adding Title, bilingual, and other federal
funding.
This practice illegally removes any benefit from federal or state compensatory monies.

The justification for the requirement of a floor on regular education funding per student is
simple. Dallas ISD is showing a regression of student achievement over the past couple of years
when the Texas PEG list of failing schools is examined.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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During just the one year of comparison from PEIMS records for regular education campus
spending in 2013-0214, Dallas ISD Improvement Required Schools and low performing schools
increased from 54 schools on the Public Education Grant (PEG) list of failing schools to 71
schools in Dallas ISD, a 58% increase.
Austin ISD and Irving ISD, in 2013-2104, with effective classroom funding formulas that
focused local tax dollars on classroom instruction, lowered their Public Education Grant (PEG)
or low performing schools from 11 to 9 and 15 to 12 respectively..

Summary
Dallas ISD has failed to uphold constitutional guarantees of equal protection for its most vulnerable
students in developing a widely acclaimed funding model that was touted as a model of financial
equity. The truth regarding the lack of equity for LEP, SPED, at risk, and poor students is demonstrated
in the PEIMS public documents available on TEAs web site which provide a picture of illegal
supplanting of federal funds, of misuse of athletic funds, and underfunding of a majority of Title I
campuses. The gross, systemic lowering of regular education funds is apparent from even a superficial
scrutiny of PEIMS records.
Using the vendor ERG to declare Dallas ISD an efficient school district needs examination by the
Department of Education since ERG declared Dallas ISD was an efficient school district when the
District was illegally supplanting compensatory dollars and systematically underfunding Title I
campuses.
The harm done cohorts of students attending Title I campuses in Dallas ISD can be measured in the
increasing number of IR schools and the increasing length of the PEG list compared to Austin ISD and
Irving ISD which successfully lowered the number of IR and PEG schools by using a floor for regular
education funding of its IR schools.
Complainants are requesting a series of actions to correct the unconstitutional system of regular
education funding operating in Dallas ISD on Title I campuses filled with LEP, SPED, and at-risk
students. Dallas ISDs bogus Title I comparability formula has left Title I campuses with thousands of
dollars less per student in regular education funding than Title I campuses in a bordering school
district, Irving ISD. Complainants are not asking for ceilings on regular education spending on any
current campuses, but are insisting on a floor of regular education dollars.

An immediate floor will be set for high school comprehensive high schools for regular
education per student spending at $3800 in the 2015-2016 budget. This floor at least

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gives some comparability to the funding of high poverty campuses found in Irving ISD.
This floor without a ceiling will cost Dallas ISD approximately $19 million a year even
though Title I, neighborhood schools will still suffer gaps in regular education spending
per student compared to magnet campuses.
An immediate floor will be set for middle school students in regular education funding
at $4500 per student for the 2015-2016 budget. This will cost approximately $18 million
a year based on the PEIMS documents available for 2013-2104. All Dallas ISD Title I
middle school campuses are underfunded.
An immediate floor will be set for neighborhood Title I elementary schools for the
2015-2016 budget that matches within 10% the non-Title I campuses of Lakewood and
Stonewall Jackson. This will cost around $39 million dollars a year if no ceiling is
required for existing campuses.
These actions will occur for the 2015-2016 school year. Allowances will not be made
for large Dallas ISD campuses since large campuses have a number of security issues
not found in smaller schools. There is no intention of creating more inequities on large
campuses by overcrowding classrooms. Trustees will immediately develop a plan for
increasing regular education spending on Title I campuses to meet legal standards and
this plan will be presented in Town Hall meetings along with an admission of how
underfunded some Title I campuses have been in relation to non-Title and magnet
school campuses in terms of regular education dollars.
Principals will be given discretionary power over increased funding in regular education
dollars rather than having staffing patterns set by DISD central staff. This option will give
principals choices for their Title I dollars rather than having those dollars purposes
determined by the Superintendent.
If the state of Texas increases funding per student, part of the increased state allowance
will be used to decrease the gap in regular education funding between Dallas ISD Title I
campuses and magnet campuses so that over time the gap in regular education funding
per student decreases between Title I campuses and magnet and choice campuses.
Every school in Dallas ISD will post its latest audited and planned campus budget as
reflected in the PEIMS documents found on the TEA web site so that the public and
parents can monitor how students receive equitable financing across neighborhoods in
regular education dollars which are supposed to provide the instructional resources for
the TEKS. Dallas ISD central administrators have failed to provide either Trustees or the
public transparency on regular education dollars on campuses across the district and
huge gaps across campuses are not explainable due to teacher salaries.
Dallas ISD will be monitored so that funding for existing neighborhood Title I schools,
filled with LEP, SPED, high poverty, and at-risk students are not marginalized financially

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in the future with Title I comparability formulas that actually remove any supplemental
value for state and federal compensatory and programming funding.
Dallas ISD secondary schools regular education funding will NOT be raided in order to
provide full-day, PreK instruction. Dallas ISD secondary students on neighborhood
campuses have the same constitutional rights to comparable funding as magnet and
choice school students and a right to comparability with bordering suburbs in their
spending per student on regular education for neighborhood schools. Dallas ISD is a
property wealthy school district whose constant chaos and corruption seem to be the
foundation for its lack of classroom resources. Robbing secondary students to pay for
PreK is not an option.
Dallas ISD cannot plead lack of financial resources to bring constitutional and legal
compliance in campus sourcing of regular education dollars. Dallas Trustees might have
sessions with Irving ISD Trustees to educate themselves on efficiencies in the use of
public dollars so that local, state, and federal monies remain targeted at equity in the
classroom.
Dallas ISD may not supplement magnet school campuses with athletic donations
intended to provide backdoors to extra revenue hidden from comparability tests nor
may the district zero out expenditures for food and utilities on favored campuses nor
may the Dallas ISD use any other subterfuge in supplementing the funding of its magnet
school students. Transparency will light the road ahead and the public will be trained to
read the PEIMS records and the regular education spending per student on each campus
as an indication of actual equity.
Dallas ISD may not bring any new choice schools on-line before its unconstitutional
and illegal funding of Title I schools are remedied by creating floors for regular
education funding for neighborhood high schools, middle schools, and elementary
schools. There has been a pervasive lack of transparency or even a functional budget in
Dallas ISD when choice schools are added. If Dallas ISD choice schools are added in the
future, the Department of Education will monitor student populations to ensure that LEP
and SPED and at-risk students are not further segregated in low performing schools and
that per student funding is in line with Title I campuses.
Dallas ISD may not create choice schools that are funded at a higher level than its
existing Title I campuses in terms of regular education dollars. The budgets for new
choice schools will be fully transparent and brought to the Board of Trustees to be
discussed in Open Session. The skimming of regular education dollars off Title I
campuses seems to have provided the impetus and funding for programs that will
never benefit the skimmed students.

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Summary
The choice to use a teacher staffing formula for Title I comparability was made by central administrators
and presented to DISD Trustees as a model of equity. This comparability choice may have been made to
protect the much higher regular education student funding levels at magnet schools and non-Title I
campuses compared to regular education dollars at Title I campuses. It also provided a smoke screen to
lower regular education dollars in the presence of double the percentage of special education students
on IR campuses.
The District may respond that it is constrained by revenue and cannot create a truly equitable campus
funding model that contains a floor for regular education per student spending, but the Dallas ISD is no
more constrained than other school districts in Texas that follow the law and do not create two tiers of
public schools within their boundaries.
It is remarkably hypocritical for Dallas ISD to join other plaintiffs in demanding a more equitable system
of funding the public school foundation program in Texas schools while using a financial model that
increases sourcing inequities in its most vulnerable schools.
Complainants are NOT asking for an end to the magnet programs or decreases in funding for the magnet
programs or non-Title I schools.
Complainants are requesting a floor, not a ceiling, for Title I schools so that illegal and unconstitutional
supplanting of regular education dollars ceases and so that all Title I have comparative spends per
student in regular education dollars as compared to a neighboring school district that has lowered the
number of low-rated schools in its district with such equality. Title I, neighborhood schools educate
approximately 90% of students in Dallas ISD, yet they are the schools that were used to skim regular
education dollars away from the classroom instruction of most students. These campuses are also at a
serious disadvantage in recruiting and retaining high quality teachers.
Based on a comparative, neighboring school district, there is no need for a tax increase to develop an
equitable distribution of regular education dollars. Instead, the Dallas ISD must have a laser focus on
classroom instruction and must focus its local tax revenue on equitably funding its core mission which is
classroom instruction. Increasing property values in Dallas will provide increased tax revenue to provide
equitable levels of regular education funding and other sourcing across all Title I campuses.

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

III.

Page 60 of 76

The Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI): Violation of DISD Students Equal


Protection Rights and Teacher Due Process Rights

Dallas ISDs current Teacher Excellence Initiative violates equal protection rights of students on
neighborhood campuses filled with LEP and SPED and at-risk students and violates the due process
rights of both principals and teachers on these same campuses.
Evidence has already been brought of the illegal and unconstitutional funding of many neighborhood
Title I campuses in Dallas ISD. In addition to underfunding some of these campuses by millions of dollars,
the level of campus safety, the level of inexperienced teachers, the level of principal efficacy, and the
level of churn across campuses is not equitable compared to Dallas ISD magnet schools.
With illegal and unconstitutional funding disparities between IR high SPED and LEP campuses and
magnets with few or no SPED or LEP students, there is constant reconstitution on failing high SPED and
LEP campuses. This constant reconstitution affects teachers and principals, leaving little accountability
for the Superintendent or central staff for the disparities between magnet schools and IR schools in
funding, staffing, or programs.
Leading or teaching on high LEP and SPED campus, with a huge disparity in resourcing because of central
administrative campus funding decisions, is already a career risk since reconstitutions based on two
years of low state ratings can mean principals and teachers are removed and have either their contracts
non-renewed or they are fired. In Dallas ISD, these teachers, according to text messages made public in
a Human Resources scandal, are not welcomed for other teaching assignments. The onus and
accountability for the lowest state ratings rest on principals and teachers even though proof of
inequitable and illegal violations of supplanting of federal and state compensatory funds exists along
with high churn in principals and teachers.
The annual compensation, not merit bonus money, of Dallas ISD teachers is now tied to a system of
performance reviews known as the Teacher Excellence Initiative.
The Superintendent has admitted in an open, public budget meeting on February 16,2015 that he, the
Superintendent, would have to hold harmless teachers with good ratings on the TEI in order to
encourage them to move to IR campuses such as South Oak Cliff High School. This open admission of
the bias in the TEI violates due process for all teachers on all IR campuses and other Title I campuses
that have been shorted equitable funding by up to a million dollars in one year.
If the TEI is sensitive to gross differences in student demographics across Dallas ISD campuses and
thereby creates invalid teacher appraisals based on student demographics, the TEI is a direct violation of
due process for teachers. If the TEI cannot be used for all teachers under all circumstances and the TEI
has a punitive effect on teachers on IR campuses, the TEI directly impacts the equal protection rights of

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students on those campuses since the TEI will lower teacher pay on IR campuses as well as increasing
the career risk of teaching on those campuses. The TEI, where teachers essentially compete for their
salaries, assumes equity in inputs across Dallas campuses when in reality, evidence exists that there are
gross inequities in staffing, funding, and campus safety.
If teaching on an IR campus equates to lower teacher appraisals and lowered teacher compensation
for career educators, the TEI cannot be used in Dallas ISD.
The fact that campus contextual factors matter more than attempts to forecast student outcomes by
use of different Value Added Measurements (VAM) has already been litigated in the case of a former
DISD teacher from Kimball High School.
Former Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott formally ruled in 2008 that campus factors can
override the instructional expertise of individual teachers when Scott awarded back pay to a Kimball
High School teacher who was fired during a reconstitution of the campus for low test scores. The
pervasive chaos of the campus had more impact on lack of student achievement that efforts of teachers
as documented in Scotts ruling:
Good cause does not exist to terminate Petitioners term contract. The reason given for proposed
termination was the failure of Petitioner to demonstrate a pattern of academic achievement by her
students. The Findings of Fact establish that the schools environment not Petitioner was the cause of the
lack of achievement. Because Petitioners actions as a teacher are not found wanting, good cause does
not exist to terminate Petitioners contract. DOCKET NO. 071-R2-0708

Dallas ISD completely ignored the Commissioners ruling and continues to use the CEI as an accurate
measure of teacher effectiveness. The CEI is included as part of teacher evaluations in the TEI.
The DISD Classroom Effectiveness Indices (CEI) compares student achievement levels based on different
demographic characteristics in order to theoretically provide a level playing field for rewarding or
punishing teachers based on predicted student instructional outcomes.
The problem with all VAMS is that not one VAM in existence takes into account the context where
classroom learning takes place. There is no handicap for teachers in illegally funded schools where
safety is a problem or where teacher and principal churn is constant, weakening the entire school
according to a preponderance of research. High SPED and high LEP schools in Dallas ISD work from illegal
and unconstitutional disadvantages, but not one input measure of funding or staffing is included in the
TEI which will determine teacher compensation.
Because IR schools already represent a threat to any experienced or inexperienced teacher wishing to
build a productive career as a teacher, teacher and principal appraisal instruments must provide latitude

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for the context of different campuses, or teachers and principals suffer disproportionate consequences
for instructing children on campuses with high percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students.
The TEI gives a teacher compensation advantage to teachers in low LEP and SPED schools while
providing disadvantages to teachers assigned to IR and under-resourced Title I schools. The TEI
provides another reason for experienced and proven teacher talent to find safer campuses to build
their careers. In doing so, the TEI deprives the neediest students on IR campuses from the full advantage
of recruiting teacher talent that can be retained on their campuses and equal protection guarantees.
Plaintiffs request the federal Education Department bring a complete halt to any attempt at tying
teacher compensation in Dallas ISD to student output through the TEI. This request is based on the
illegal and unconstitutional sourcing of campuses in Dallas public schools and based on the inability of
all current VAMs to include the contextual variables of campus conditions that are as important as
teacher expertise and effort in determining student achievement outcomes.
In addition, the current superintendents public statement that high-rated teachers would have their TEI
rating essentially frozen if they transferred to IR schools is a public statement of the lack of validity of
the TEI.
The TEI does not include campus safety factors, constant churn in teachers and principals, quality of
campus leadership, forced micromanaging of professional practices, and lack of adequate resources on
many campuses. All of these factors are totally beyond the control of teachers, yet teachers are held
accountable for instructional outcomes.
The current attempts by the Superintendent of giving supplemental pay to high-rated teachers willing to
transfer to IR schools ignores the fact the current teachers on IR campuses might also be high-rated if
they simply transferred to non-Title I schools. That fact that the majority of the highest paid teachers in
the district under the TEI scheme will probably be located on non-Title I campuses is a violation of equal
protection rights of Title I students.

IV.

Audition and Recruitment of Out of District Students: Booker T. Washington High


School for the Performing and Visual Arts: Violation of Equal Protection
Guarantees of Dallas ISD Students

Dallas ISD students who attended Dallas public schools in the eighth grade are now in the minority (only
40%) at Booker T. Washington High School, an arts magnet school financed with Dallas ISD taxpayer
monies.
Dallas ISD has had dozens of openings for teachers in the arts since the arrival of the current
Superintendent. Dallas ISD has failed to provide adequate training in the arts in grades K-8 so that all

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interested students in Dallas ISD are prepared to audition at a public Dallas ISD school. Complainants are
requesting additional arts classes in all the cluster areas provided at Booker T. Washington in grades
K-8 in existing DISD schools, not as part of new choice schools, so that all interested Dallas ISD students
are able to successfully compete for admission at the arts magnet. As part of the regular education
funding that should be increased on most Title I campuses in order to provide equity, additional arts
programming, part of the academic core, must be provided all students.

V.

Lack of Effective Programmatic Remedies and Funding for IR Secondary Schools


and Violations of Equal Protection Guarantees

Dallas ISD is not a property poor district, nor does it lack the ability to recruit experienced
administrators, principals, and teachers who have a track record of practicing effective research-based
programmatic remedies and interventions. Dallas IR secondary schools contain on the average almost
twice the number of SPED and LEP students as other neighborhood middle schools, yet research-based
programmatic remedies seem absent from campuses which also suffer from discipline policies that are
exacerbating unsafe campus conditions.
Plaintiffs are requesting investigation into:

The underfunding due to blatant supplanting of Title I funds at Spence Middle School where lack
of psychological services may have played a role in a students suicide.
Unsafe campus conditions at Sara Zumwalt Middle School, Edison Middle School, Billy Earl Dade,
Boude Storey, and Marsh Middle School as documented in press stories and parent and
community complaints for relief.
Lack of appropriate student services and special education expertise, special education teacher
training and resources, and psychological services on all IR middle school campuses with
particular attention to Billy Earl Dade.
Increase in the size of classes for neighborhood secondary schools with large percentages of
SPED and LEP students compared to magnet schools containing a much smaller percentage, or
none, of these students.
Total, public transparency regarding campus climate surveys which should be available on every
DISD campus web site to warn parents and communities about unsafe schools.

Teachers in both high SPED middle and high schools report a lack of visibility of special education
services and personnel for students mainstreamed into regular classrooms.
While many IR middle and high schools seem to be supplanting special education dollars for regular
education dollars, and the supplanting also seems to be taking place on campuses with high SPED

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populations that have not yet been rated IR, classroom teachers report no intersection with special
education teachers who should be providing support for mainstreamed students. Special education
teachers are not present in regular classrooms to assist the large numbers of mainstreamed students.
This fact may play a major role in the large number of SPED-heavy schools on the state IR list.
Secondary classrooms have become crowded in many neighborhood schools where SPED and LEP
students attend school compared to much lower student/teacher ratios and smaller classes for nonSPED and non-LEP students in choice schools.
Dallas ISD classroom teachers have also reported an inability to differentiate instruction for SPED and
LEP students in secondary schools due to a cut in teachers collaborative planning period, the addition
of 5 hours of classroom instruction per week, lack of adequate training, overcrowded classrooms, and
lack of special education support personnel visible in regular classrooms.
Increasing class sizes in IR schools, which contain large percentages of SPED and LEP students, while
removing sufficient planning time and support for teachers may have played a major role in failure at
these schools. Collaborative planning time was pushed to an extended day for teachers and took place
after school, exhausting teachers and providing more reasons for teacher talent to leave for the
suburbs. These dysfunctional practices may stem partly from lack of equitable funding on these
campuses.

VI.

Complainants are requesting that campus climate surveys be posted for public inspection on
the web site of each public school in Dallas ISD in order to monitor schools that may need
assistance in developing better discipline policies for students.
Complainants are requesting an investigation into current special education funding patterns
than may indeed be supplanting regular education dollars, especially on campuses with high
percentages of special education students and low levels of regular education funding.

Lack of Appropriate Funding and Staffing to Decrease High School Attrition and
EOC Failure and Violations of Equal Protection Guarantees

Roosevelt High School in Dallas ISD seemed to be on a path to improvement TEA Commissioner Michael
Williams toured the school in the fall of 2012.

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The current senior class at Roosevelt contained 179 members as sophomores as reported on the DISD
web portal, MyDataPortal. On September 15, 2014, the senior class had dwindled to 75 seniors who
were enrolled at Roosevelt.
The latest End of Course exams, taken by students in December, 2014 with results reported in January,
2015, left 59 Roosevelt seniors able to graduate based on their passage of all five End of Course exams
required for graduation.
The next round of EOC exams will not take place until the spring, with results reported in early June, too
late for a timely spring graduation for Dallas ISD seniors.
As of the latest round of EOC testing, only 6383 Dallas seniors are eligible for graduation, almost a
thousand less than the senior class of 2014. Nowhere in any Dallas media outlet or at the Board level
has this severe attrition and failure of EOC exams been discussed in their impact on this senior cohort.
This senior cohort has been the recipient of three years of Broad-based corporate reforms.
Complainants are requesting an investigation into the missing students at Roosevelt High School and
the extremely high attrition rates for this 2015 senior cohort for Roosevelt, Conrad, Samuell, South
Oak Cliff, Lincoln, Pinkston, Spruce, Carter, North Dallas, Thomas Jefferson, Bryan Adams, Sunset High
School, WT White, Wilmer Hutchins, and Adamson. Combining high attrition and high failure rates on
EOC exams has left these high schools with at least 30% to 60% of their sophomore cohort absent
from a timely graduation in 2015 based on attrition rates since their sophomore year in addition to
high EOC failure rates.
While the Texas Legislature has lowered requirements for passing all End of Course exams, had the
Legislature not been in session, the effects of inequitable and inappropriate resourcing on these
Dallas ISD campuses would have punished and impacted disproportionately LEP, SPED, at-risk,
minority and poor students.
EOC pass rates have only been reported to the board as the percentage of current seniors who have
passed all five tests. This methodology leaves the impression that Dallas ISD pass rates are just a little
lower than the state average when in many cases, severe attrition in addition to failure on EOC exams
may result in IR status in 2015.
Some missing students may have transferred to other DISD high schools since Skylines class of 2014
grew itself out of possible IR status based on low graduation rates by increasing the cohort by 70
students from in-district transfers. Skyline itself is extremely under-funded, but the increase in students
eclipsed its high failure rates on EOC exams.

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The misuse of credit recovery in low performing schools in order to increase graduation rates has
already been documented in the senior class of 2013.
The attrition in the present senior class combined with high rates of EOC failure on IR campuses has
lowered the graduating class by almost 2,000 students compared with their numbers as sophomores.
Extreme attrition on many campuses is hiding the actual failure rates on End of Course exams.
Part of the under-resourcing of these campuses may be traced to moving state high school allotment
dollars from weak campuses to magnet schools as a way of circumventing Title I comparability
guidelines, but the majority of the problem seems to begin in under-resourcing regular education
dollars for teaching the academic core in most high attrition high schools in addition to the absence of
targeted plans for use of State Compensatory Education funds.
North Dallas High School had shown improvements with extra funding from a SIG that allowed an
increase in student services personnel and an increase in collaborative planning time for teachers. When
North Dallas returned to its previous low funding pattern, those necessary extra personnel disappeared
along with increased planning time for teachers. Student attrition at North Dallas may return it to IR
status because funding by Dallas ISD does not adequately resource the high school with a large
population of homeless students.
It appears that classroom financial cuts and cuts in student services personnel have damaged student
retention and achievement levels in high SPED and LEP populations. Supplanting Title I dollars and
underfunding regular education dollars may be the foundation for increased secondary attrition.
It appears that dropping collaborative planning periods, increasing class sizes, and underfunding high
school campuses that are not magnet schools has increased attrition and lowered graduation rates,
especially on campuses with high percentages of LEP and SPED students.

Complainants are requesting a full investigation by the federal Education Department into high
attrition rates on Dallas ISD high school neighborhood campuses. Since Pearson has purchased
the GED testing service in Texas, pass rates on the GED have plummeted. Many students in this
years 2015 DISD graduation class who are missing from a timely graduation may never receive
either a diploma or GED unless current graduation policies are changed by state legislators.
Complainants as requesting a review of leaver codes used at high schools reporting extremely
low levels of dropouts since attrition on these same campuses is severe. The leaver codes may
provide evidence of fraudulent reporting of dropouts as returned to home country or
transferred to private school when few options exist in Dallas for private schools.

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VII.

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A Disproportionately Negatively Impact on African American Students: Equal


Protection Violations

ITBS scores of K-12 students in Dallas ISD present a pattern of declining abilities in reading over the past
three years, a time of disruptive reform in Dallas ISD. Advanced Placement scores for neighborhood
high schools with a majority of African American students have the lowest pass rates of all high schools.
Special education placements are higher for African American students and research-based intervention
policies, such as PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Support) are almost nonexistent as a way of
socializing students back into productive membership in school communities with high numbers of
minority SPED students.
Failure on the STAAR Reading Test as captured in results available in April, 2015 show huge increases in
failure rates for 8th grade African American students on campuses where these students have the
highest percentages of enrollment.
Increases in the achievement gaps between African American students and other racial and ethnic
groups have been pervasive in past few years. Graduation rates have been negatively impacted in the
current senior cohort.
Complainants are requesting immediate, authentic comparability in a Title I formula based on floors for
regular education spending in an attempt to increase instructional capacity in schools where the
achievement gap is increasing. Complainants also request the Department of Education investigate
disparities in suspension rates between racial and ethnic groups since suspension rates appear to be tied
to race and the pass rates of Advanced Placement tests on comprehensive high school campuses show a
direct correlation to race.

VIII.

Principal and Teacher Staffing: Violations of Equal Protection of LEP and SPED
and At-Risk Students

From public information on uncertified and inexperienced teachers available on MyDataPortal, it is


overwhelmingly clear that magnets, vanguards, and some non-Title I campuses have the highest level of
experienced teachers, the lowest levels of teacher churn, and the lowest levels of principal churn.
These staffing patterns are a violation of No Child Left Behind statutes and equal protection guarantees
for LEP, SPED, and At-Risk students.

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While teacher churn across Dallas ISD has increased in the last couple of years, stripping away needed
classroom dollars for teacher recruitment, the process of filling IR and Title I campuses with high
percentages of non-experienced teachers who may hold no certifications has increased during the
current administration with a focus a disruptive education reform.
From the Superintendents appraisal of Dallas ISD principals in 2014, the principals receiving Exemplary
ratings, with the accompanying increase in pay, were all located on vanguard, Early College, or magnet
school campuses. This rating system and staffing system are a violation of equal protection guarantees
of LEP, SPED, and At-Risk and Title I students since principal talent should be staffed equally across Title
I and non-Title I campuses.
Complainants are requesting an investigation into principal churn rates, principal evaluations, and
teacher appraisals and staffing for lack of comparability between Title I and non-Title 1 campuses and
for IR schools with high percentages of SPED and LEP students.

IX.

Illegal Hiring Preferences and Illegal Promotion Preferences: Teach for America
and Broad

It is apparent from Dallas ISD employment portals that ask about Teach for America as well as Dallas ISD
hiring and promotion patterns that Dallas ISD is violating federal equal protection guarantees in its
hiring practices as well as violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Dallas ISD and the state of Texas may engage in no practices that create set-asides for TFA or Broadtrained candidates without violating federal employment and constitutional guarantees regarding equal
access for all job seekers. Since most Texas public schools are the recipients of federal funding, federal
employment laws and constitutional guarantees of equal protection cannot be violated at whim. No
Child Left Behind statutes that prohibit critical masses of uncertified and inexperienced teachers from
providing instruction for low income and minority children are ignored in Dallas ISD which practices an
overt system of preferential treatment in recruitment, hiring, and promotion for Teach for America and
Broad-trained recruits who many times lack any certification, credentials, or experience for their
assigned roles.
Complainants request an investigation into current employment and promotion practices in Dallas ISD
where TFA has been given unfair advantage in hiring and promotion. Reports of TFA candidates being
illegally recruited through job posting unavailable for the rest of Dallas teachers and other candidates
violate federal employment laws as well as constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Resumes of
candidates who applied for executive positions and had more experience, credentials, and previous
success in urban schools compared to the hired TFA and Broad candidates are available and provide
evidence of illegal, discriminatory hiring patterns in Dallas ISD.

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These illegal hiring patterns also remove equal protection guarantees from students since filling
executive level leadership positions with candidates with no previous experience or credentials in their
roles deprives students of the programmatic remedies that would be brought to the District through
hiring candidates with successful track records and credentials.
It also appears that a crony system of patronage may exist that provides political support for the
superintendent in exchange for executive jobs for candidates lacking credentials, training, or previous
experience in their leadership roles.
All of these practices are in direct violation of federal law.

X.

Effective Models of Funding and Interventions for IR Schools are Available

Austin ISD does have a slightly higher amount of per student funding than Dallas ISD and a lower level of
student poverty across the district, but Austin ISD does have traditionally low performing campuses that
provide close demographic matches to DISD low performing campuses.
Unlike Dallas ISD, supplanting of federal or state compensatory is not in evidence on current Austin
ISD IR campuses nor does Austin ISD take a punitive position in regard to its teachers. Austin ISD,
smaller than Dallas ISD, has 126 Board Certified teachers.
Austin ISDs campus funding model has been closely watched by the Texas Civil Rights Project and as a
result, failing campuses get the funding and community support they need to help them transition off
the list of IR campuses. Austin ISDs Public Education Grant (PEG) list has shrunk through legally funding
its failing campuses and using the collaboration of partnerships to help low achieving campuses. Dallas
ISDs PEG list continues to grow.
While Austin ISD inundates its IR campuses with a high floor of regular education funds in addition to
supplemental funding, Dallas ISD uses a reverse Robin Hood plan that takes resources from the poorest
schools while shuffling funding and its most experienced teachers to campuses with either low
percentages of Title I students or its magnet schools of choice.
Complainants request that public hearings are held to demonstrate to the public and trustees the
existence of legal and effective campus funding models and prescriptive remedies for failing campuses
as evidenced in the success of Austin ISD or Irving ISD.
Since the public can monitor the supplanting of federal and state compensatory dollars once they
understand how these dollars have replaced local monies in regular education funding, the existence of
PEIMS records on the Texas Education Agency web site needs to be explained to the Board of Trustees
as well as Dallas taxpayers.

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Increasing the number of schools rated lowest in the state of Texas is not inevitable for Dallas ISD if
research-based, programmatic remedies are used in conjunction with equitable and comparable
sourcing in monies and staffing between Title I and non-Title I campuses and between schools meeting
state standards and those in the Improvement Required category.
Summary
An examination of planned campus budgets for Dallas ISD for 2013-2014 proves that illegal supplanting
occurred on Title I campuses, that magnet school campus budgets were rigged to avoid Title I
comparability formulas in existence by the District, and that most Title I campuses were grossly
underfunded in regular education dollars when compared with a similar bordering ISD with similar
demographics and revenue.
There is no evidence that Dallas ISD Trustees knew of these illegal and unconstitutional violations of
federal and state law due to annual power point presentations where central administrators assured
Trustees that the District was operating under an equity model known as the Dallas Miracle.
(https://thehub.dallasisd.org/2014/11/26/88/ )
There is no way for central administration to escape responsibility for under-funding Dallas ISDs
campuses full of LEP, special education, and at-risk students to an estimated $77 million dollars in one
school year. All school administrators are trained on federal and state law regarding supplanting federal
and state monies. Not only that, but it is apparent from examining the records that campus budgets
were pulled from different buckets of funds by hand and revisited every year. The purpose seems to
have been to protect magnet programs through hidden sourcing while pulling as many regular
education dollars off Title I campuses as possible.
These regular education dollars could then be used to build the surplus budget and for special projects
of central administrators.
It is incumbent upon Dallas ISD Trustees to change the current Title I comparability formula to one
where regular education spending has floors on Title I campuses. The first revenue priority is legal and
constitutional funding of the classrooms where the majority of Dallas ISD students reside and where
LEP, SPED, and at-risk students are found in critical masses.
Pleading lack of funding will not work. Sitting at Dallas ISDs borders is a school district that does not
enjoy what should be the economies of scale found in Dallas ISD. The comparable district in revenue has
the same issues of high poverty and high LEP and at-risk students as Dallas ISD. The comparable school
district also seems able to maintain its physical structures for students in an efficient manner rather
than having seas of portables on overcrowded campuses.

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Dallas ISD must change its Title I comparability formula for the budget cycle of 2015-2016 to a formula
with a floor for its most disadvantaged students.
In addition to pulling around $77 million dollars in regular education funding off its Title I campuses,
Dallas ISD is also engaging in illegal staffing patterns on Title I campuses which are frequently
overwhelmed with high numbers of teachers with no teaching experience. Some of these same
campuses have lack of sourcing to deal with high levels of student misconduct.
IR Title I campuses also have a pattern of extremely high churn in principals and teachers and have the
reputation of being career enders for educators. These staffing practices violate the equal protection
guarantees of students on these campuses as well as NCLB statutes.
It is clear from the illegal funding and illegal staffing of Dallas ISD Title I and IR schools that the extremely
high number of schools on the annual PEG list is not solely a function of high poverty in Dallas schools,
but a function of illegal and unconstitutional spending and staffing patterns and lack of constitutional
comparability between campuses with low levels of SPED, LEP, at-risk, minority and poor children and
those with high levels of these students.
Sourcing in Dallas ISD funding, staffing, and programmatic remedies must follow student need, not the
need of central administrators and some Trustees for bragging rights to an historically high level of
surplus funds.
Continuing a pattern of chaotic, disruptive education reform that creates even higher teacher and
principal churn in IR schools removes constitutional guarantees of equal protection from campuses with
high percentages of LEP, SPED, and at-risk students.

We the undersigned hereby declare that the above is true and correct to the
best of our knowledge and we file this complaint with the U.S. Department of
Education in search of the above mentioned remedies. We want this 70 page
document, filed on 4-21-15, to replace the complaint filed on 3-25-15.:
1) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
2) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________

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Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________


3) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________

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4) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________


Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
5) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
6) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
7) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
8) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
9) Date: _____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________

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Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________

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10) Date: _____ Signature: _________________ Print Name: ________________


Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
11) Date: ____ Signature: __________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
12) Date: _____ Signature: _________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
13) Date: _____ Signature: _________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
14) Date: _____ Signature: _________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________
Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________
15) Date: _____ Signature: _________________ Print Name: ________________
Address: __________________________City/zip: _________________________

Title VI Complaints filed 4-21-15 (replacing those filed 3-25-15) against Dallas ISD

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Email: ____________________Phone:__________ Relationship: _____________

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