14 Nov 2008
Ceremony Set for Saturday, December 6, at 2 p.m.
DALLAS–Dallas ISD officials, students, parents and community leaders will participate in the dedication of Francisco F. "Pancho" Medrano Middle School, 9815 Brockbank Drive, Saturday, December 6, at 2 p.m.
The Medrano Middle School dedication celebrates the last of new Dallas ISD schools opened as part of the 2002 Bond Program.
The three-story, 178,900-square-foot facility located in northwest Dallas has 39 classrooms and was built to accommodate 1,200 students in grades six, seven and eight.
Medrano Middle School is the first Dallas ISD school to use a geothermal heat pump system for it's heating and cooling. Throughout the school site—250 feet under the parking lots and playing fields—are almost five hundred looped pipes filled with water. The water in the pipes is heated from the earth's natural thermal energy and circulated into the building to heat pumps that distribute the heat in winter or convert the energy to cooled air in summer. This heat pump system will reduce energy costs by more than 30 percent.
Born in 1920, Francisco F. "Pancho" Medrano was an activist who worked for worker's rights alongside César Chávez and with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement. In 1965, Medrano took part in the civil rights march on Selma, Ala., led by Martin Luther King Jr. He also was instrumental in the process that helped to overturn Texas laws barring mass demonstrations.