East Dallas Community Schools

Description

About Us

In a neighborhood where fewer than 50% of high school freshman graduate as seniors, East Dallas Community Schools’ third-grade alumni graduate from high school at a rate of 94%, with 88% of those graduates attending college.

Although a number of successful schools exist in the Dallas area, EDCS has the only early childhood learning centers in Dallas that

1) serve multi-ethnic group of children from primarily low-income families,

2) educate children and their parents from pregnancy through third grade, and

3) do not screen children for enrollment based on their academic skills or abilities.

EDCS has earned the rank of Exemplary as well as Gold Performance acknowledgements from the State of Texas. EDCS students currently rank in the top 17 percent of students in all public schools in Texas, including the wealthiest school districts in the state.

East Dallas Community Schools (EDCS) is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization which operates early childhood learning centers with programs to meet the needs of children from birth to age nine.

EDCS was founded in 1978 for the specific purpose of proving that all children, regardless of race or income, can succeed in school when we start young and involve parents.

From its humble beginnings of educating a single class of eight children in donated space, the original East Dallas Community School campus has expanded to a 5 classroom campus serving one hundred inner-city children from primarily low-income families with daily classroom and outreach programs.

In August 1999, East Dallas Community Schools opened a second campus that replicates the academic programs and success of the original model. In 2009, EDCS opened its third location in the neighborhood north of Bachman Lake (one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas, just north of Love Field Airport).

Together, the three campuses of EDCS serve almost 500 children and their parents.

EDCS is guided by the Montessori philosophy of education. That philosophy is rooted in Dr. Montessori’s conviction (which has been confirmed by our experience at East Dallas Community Schools) that, unless severely impaired, "children naturally have the same drive to develop in a cognitive sense as they do in a physical sense. The desire of an elementary student to master equivalent fractions can be just as strong as the desire of the infant to crawl, unless the desire has been diminished by the circumstances of the child’s life."