From the very start, the effort to rebuild Thomas Jefferson High School has been mired in short-sighted politics and poor decisions that led to an embarrassing mea culpa last week from Superintendent Michael Hinojosa.
The Dallas ISD board of trustees was faced with signing off on rebuilding the school despite not having time to review the price tag nor significant changes to the construction plan.
In his apology, Hinojosa acknowledged that the administration’s commitment to keeping parts of the destroyed building standing versus building an entirely new school was at the root of so many of the delays and problems.
“The complexity of Thomas Jefferson was that we had part of the building we kept, part of it we tried to salvage, part of it insurance said we couldn’t salvage and so that created a much more complex situation to deal with,” Hinojosa said.
The DISD board unanimously approved the construction plan, though the price has soared from the $69.4 million approved last year to a nearly $88 million estimate presented last week. That figure could grow yet again through a 10% contingency cost versus the 5% the district normally applies to major construction.
Why? Because DISD still has a limited understanding of what kind of mess it will find when it opens up the ruined shell of the high school to try to get kids back inside.
From the very beginning, we urged the administration to start from scratch and build a high school that would stand as an emblem of what public education can be. But the resistance to what would have been the better solution for the district arises from fears that a new high school in a relatively wealthy area would be unfair to students in poorer areas.
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Yet sparkling new high schools like Adamson have been built south of the Trinity River while no new high schools have been built north for decades. And, of course, Thomas Jefferson also serves an almost entirely low-income and minority population.
Hinojosa probably avoided a difficult political fight by instead deciding to reconstruct the ruined high school. But his decision has had serious consequences. The original contract to rebuild the high school was withdrawn amid corruption allegations from trustee Maxie Johnson. If anyone at DISD is still trying to get to the bottom of that worrisome circumstance, we haven’t heard a word about it.
Now, the district has selected a new contractor, Beck, under a novel procurement process intended to speed up selection. That process itself led to criticism from board member Joyce Foreman and her worries may not be unfounded. Procurement is tricky enough without doing it at warp speed for massive expenditures.
At the end of the day, Beck signs are now posted at the high school, and it appears, at last, that dirt will be turned and that a reconstructed high school, along with a new K-8 school to replace Walnut Hill and Cary, will begin to rise.
We’ll take forward progress where we can get it, even if in this case there was a real cost to the dysfunction. But DISD needs to be better than this. The children it serves deserve the very best in terms of education and also in terms of leadership.
The Link LonkFebruary 02, 2021 at 03:03PM
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2021/02/02/the-terrible-rotten-messy-process-to-rebuild-thomas-jefferson-is-finally-finished/
The terrible, rotten, messy process to rebuild Thomas Jefferson is finally finished - The Dallas Morning News
https://news.google.com/search?q=rotten&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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