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Monday, January 8, 2007

Preston Hollow replaces principal responsible for segregation of students

By Alan Cohen

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Today, Dallas ISD officials named a replacement for Teresa Parker, the now former Preston Hollow Elementary principal that was found guilty by a federal judge of segregating students based on language and ethnicity. Preston Hollow's new interim principal will be Enid Rosenfeldt, who has previously worked as a principal in the school district. Despite being removed from her position, Teresa Parker was given an administrative position in DISD. District spokesman Celso Martinez tells the DMN, "She has 31 years of service and a lot of history and expertise, and we wanted to keep that."

Personally I take exception to Mr. Martinez' comment. Teresa Parker chose to segregate kids in the classroom, and that is all the evidence I need to prove her lack of expertise. I'm disappointed in the school district for keeping her in any capacity. What happened to all the talk about accountability in education?

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jcoop Anonymous

As someone who actually had Teresa Parker as a principal I would like to say that her removal is a genuine loss. My brother, sister and I had Mrs. Parker as a principal at Cabell and Preston Hollow Elementary schools. The system of assigning students to classes was in place long before Mrs. Parker was ever assigned to Preston Hollow, and never took place at Cabell. If people would take a closer look at other schools they would see the same kind of assignment not only in Dallas, but in Mesquite as well. Denying that DISD knew about it absolutely ridiculous due to the fact that board members and area superintendent's children went to Preston Hollow, and the superintendents visited the school regularly. If people would actually look at the scores for the school before they judged her they would see that she greatly increased the test scores of the school, in particular hispanic students. I have great respect for her and still regard her as one of the best principals of the DISD. It really is a shame that she's taking the fall for something thats been going on for years in numerous schools, and is being completely discredited due to one mistake.

1 year, 9 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

Alan Cohen Staff

Thanks for the thoughts "jcoop." I have never met Teresa Parker. I've certainly never had her as a principal. But given that you have, I think your perspective ought to hold a lot of weight with anyone reading.

As an outside observer though, it appears that her one mistake happened to be pretty big one. In fact, I can't think of too many mistakes that would be bigger for a principal than instilling a school with policies of segregation. That does NOT make Teresa Parker a malicious person - I have no doubt she was doing what she thought would be best for the children. It certainly does not excuse DISD if they made her a scapegoat for things they knew were happening. But it does, in my mind, show very poor judgement.

1 year, 9 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

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