Photography by Sylvia Elzafon.
Dallas ISD has over 100,000 students walking through the halls of its 230 schools every day. At most middle schools, students change classes eight times a day, making it easy for a student to slip through the cracks. Marsh Preparatory Academy seeks to remedy this by centering their school around connection and belonging.
Students at Marsh choose one of three academies: STEAM, MBA or Language and Leadership. Each academy prepares the sixth to eighth graders for high school and college in that career.
The STEAM academy partners with the Amazon engineering program Amazon Future Engineer to take programming and robotics courses, physics and algebra. These students obtain five high school credits before finishing middle school. The MBA, or Marsh Business Academy, provides courses in technology and career readiness to put students on track to go to W.T. White B-Tech High School, also obtaining five high school credits. The Language and Leadership academy allows students to take Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 along with other high school courses to prepare them to take advanced Spanish courses in high school.
“It really just builds this steady connection with the students in an academic way,” says Dawna Duke, principal of Thomas C. Marsh Preparatory Academy.
Photography by Sylvia Elzafon.
Every teacher at Marsh is encouraged to have a “plus one”; an extracurricular activity that they’re either starting from the ground up or supporting a district-funded program. Recently, two teachers took their plus one, a wilderness survival club, on a camping trip. For many of the students, it was their first time camping.
“Middle school is really a place where kids are still kids, but also turning into teenagers,” Duke says. “They’re in a place where they start asking questions and start exploring things. It’s the age where sometimes the parent isn’t the first person they go to anymore. So we really try to make our middle school space to be a place where every student is connected to a positive adult in their life outside of the home.”
Other plus ones include district-funded sports, a ‘Principal Panel’ where students meet and discuss the student experience with the principal and provide feedback on the school’s programs and a program that allows students who require reading intervention to read to area elementary schoolers.
“Our soccer team has been the all-city champs for the past three years,” Duke says. “That’s district, not just area. They’re completely undefeated.”
Because the school is at 95% low socioeconomic status, Marsh partnered with the North Texas Food Bank to provide a student pantry for those who are experiencing food insecurity.
“We really try to build joy into everything that we do,” Duke says. “We lead with joy, and that is something you can’t necessarily teach. It’s something that you hire for — people that are going to choose joy even when circumstances are hard — and that has really started to transform our building.”
CORRECTION: A correction has been made from an earlier version that misidentified Dr. Dawna Duke as Dawna Dukes. A clarification was also made to clarify that one of the teachers on the wilderness trip was male.
