As the nation's eleventh largest school district, Dallas Independent School District serves more than 164,500 students who come from homes where 58 different languages are spoken. Operating with a $1 billion dollar budget, DISD employs 19,234 employees including 10,500 teachers in 218 schools.
24 Oct 2001
DALLAS—General Superintendent Dr. Mike Moses and Deputy Superintendent— Business Services, Dr. Larry Groppel, during a special board of trustees briefing on Thursday will present facilities needs assessments that will be used to determine how much to propose in a bond election in early 2002.
The special briefing will take place at 5 p.m. in the auditorium of the administration building, located at 3700 Ross Avenue.
"We feel like we are close to having some concrete numbers to present to the trustees and give them the stark realities of the shape our schools are in structurally," Dr. Groppel said. "Representatives from Heery International and the Facilities Needs Task Force have been working with our people to be ready for Thursday evening."
Heery International is the construction consulting company the district hired about eight months ago to make an objective assessment of the facilities needs of the district. Heery is not responsible for making recommendations about building new facilities. That work is being left to the task force, which has been meeting in the district for more than five years.
"We are confident that we will be able to present the board with tangibles on Thursday and make some preliminary recommendations about how many new schools we would build if we were able to address all of our needs," Moses said.
During a preliminary report last week, Heery informed the board that to make repairs to the district's buildings, with no new construction, would cost at least $933 million.
Groppel said his office has been working with Heery and the task force to combine the preliminary figures and the task force's recommendations into a plan for the bond election.
"We know the final figure of our needs is going to exceed our ability to pay to fix it all, even with a large bond election and better management of our tax dollars," Groppel said. "We're talking about a school district where more than half of our 218 schools were built before 1953, and we're talking about a district where one-fourth of our students—40,000 of them—go to school in portable classrooms, some of which are more than 50 years old. There are a lot of needs, and it is going to take a lot to fix them all."