Shock and disbelief were still on the faces of many who gathered last night in Lewisville for a candlelight vigil in remembrance of Ashton Ness, a 16-month-old boy who police say was killed by his father, Blair on Aug. 19. Motorcycle clubs, police officers, pastors and residents from across DFW…
Practice forgetfulness. Forget about the bitterness over the new statewide grading system for schools and school districts. Forget the whole debate over school reform in Dallas. For two seconds, do the good kind of forgetfulness. Now ponder this: The overwhelming objective evidence is that the Dallas public school system has…
The West End is about to get its latest infusion of innovation. It will soon be home to a smart park, serve as the focal point of a case study for smart city technology and connect to Victory Park via a newly illuminated path. The developments are all happening in…
John Jay Myers has owned The Free Man Cajun Café in Deep Ellum since 2011. Despite its proximity to concert venue The Bomb Factory, the small but booming café is in a block protected from the gentrification affecting its rowdy neighbors on Main and Elm streets. Myers, a Louisiana native, brought…
Put yourself in John Carney’s shoes. He’s got to wonder if he and his clients have some special thundercloud or mark following them around. Two years ago the mayor of Dallas named and listed several of Carney’s clients as “high impact landlords” whom the mayor was targeting in a special…
The Observer asked Dr. Stephen F. Waddell, an experienced educator and leader in school innovation, for his take on Texas’ controversial new A-F grading system for public schools. See a longer bio and partial list of his bona fides at the end of his essay. This month school districts across…
Glenn Hunter’s reason for moving to Dallas from Oklahoma City was simple. “There was a life here,” Hunter says. Life, he means, for a gay man and his partner in the 1980s — an active, vibrant community centered then as it is now on Cedar Springs Road, whose gay-friendly clubs…
Gov. Greg Abbott and Dallas School board member Miguel Solis held dueling press conferences Tuesday at public school campuses barely a mile apart in East Dallas, Abbott calling for higher pay for teachers and Solis asking where the money is. Unspoken was a startling new theme shared by both sides:…
Just before the end of the school year in June, the students who run Prosper High School’s award-winning student newspaper Eagle News Online found themselves wondering if they could still run a newspaper worthy of the national awards they’ve racked up over the last few years. Prosper High School principal…
I’m from Dallas. I was late to see the 2015 movie Spotlight, about a sex scandal involving the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. I saw it last January in a suburban theater in the San Francisco Bay Area with my sister and brother-in-law, who are from Chicago. For me, it…
One moment please while I adjust my tinfoil hat. I hate it when the antenna tilts sideways like this. OK, got it. I am coming to you from my special broadcast booth high atop Mount Paranoia. And let me tell you something: Paranoia is a tough job, but somebody’s got…
Over the last couple of weeks, Sen. Ted Cruz has traveled Texas, coming home to answer the campaign challenge issued by Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic U.S. House member from El Paso facing the incumbent in November. Cruz hasn’t, as O’Rourke has, visited each of Texas’ 254 counties, but he’s made…
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott preemptively declared Hurricane Harvey a disaster last Aug. 23, chemical plants and oil refineries in the Corpus Christi area shut down before rain from the storm even started falling, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project. That minimized unnecessary air pollution caused…
Former Balch Springs cop Roy Oliver’s murder trial began, finally, on Thursday. Oliver’s trial, the most anticipated of a Dallas County police officer in decades, will close the loop on more than a year of investigations, protests and delays. On April 29, 2017, Oliver shot and killed Jordan Edwards as…
Beginning Saturday, riding Dallas Area Rapid Transit is going to be a little bit more expensive. Day passes are going up $1, monthly passes are going up $16 and DART’s two-hour pass is going away. The bump isn’t all bad news, though, as the transit system is also set to…
This is not a column predicting that the two cable-stayed bridges jointly called the Margaret McDermott Bridge over the Trinity River near downtown Dallas are going to collapse like the catastrophic bridge failure in Genoa, Italy, Tuesday. But it is a column noting disturbing parallels. First is bridge design. A…
Almost every school and every school district in Texas got a report card Wednesday, spelling out for parents, students and anyone else paying attention how the Texas Education Agency believes the institutions it oversees are performing. The new, Legislature-approved measures are easy to read and make it easier to compare…
Dallas City Attorney Larry Casto is resigning effective Aug. 31. Casto took over as city attorney from Warren Ernst in October 2016. During his time as Dallas’ top lawyer, he helped dig the city out of two legal holes, working with the Texas Legislature on a compromise to keep the…
Plano City Council member Tom Harrison, facing a recall effort for sharing anti-Muslim messages on the internet, appears set to serve out his term after all. Late Tuesday, state District Judge Mark Rusch ruled that the petition filed to recall Harrison earlier this year was insufficient.
Longtime Dallas tea-partier and President Donald Trump supporter Katrina Pierson has found herself in the middle of this week’s presidential mini-scandal, thanks to allegations made by former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault-Newman. According to Manigault-Newman, tapes exist of Trump using the racial slur “n——-.” In a taped conversation provided by Manigault-Newman to CBS…
The one thing everybody agreed on Tuesday is that the Dallas Police Department needs more cops. The fight, as Dallas goes through its annual budget process, is going to be over how to keep the officers already on DPD’s rolls in the city and how to add new officers at…
In the unlikely event that you actually get busted by Dallas police for riding an electric scooter somewhere you shouldn’t, chances are you’ll walk, or glide, away with a warning and a stern talking to rather than a ticket, Dallas Police Department brass said Monday. Giving out citations to scooter…
