If you found yourself around the geographic heart of Cottonwood Heights on the evening of May 21st, in the area the locals affectionately call the “D”s or “D streets”, you likely noticed the Texas size celebration. That celebration was officials, alumni, parents and hundreds of very proud K-6th Grade students honoring the fifty years that Dover Elementary has been educating Richardson children. There was a formal ceremony complete with student performances and nostalgic remarks and commendations by RISD Assistant Superintendent Bob DeVoll, Richardson City Council Member and neighbor Steve Mitchell, and Dover Principal Fernando Medina.

  As a 1961 Dover alum that proceeded thru Richardson High School as a student, and later as RHS Principal, Bob DeVoll told the capacity crowd about the early RISD elementary school that was opened in 1959 by former Superintendent JJ Pearce for 300 students in the quiet little community of 16,800. DeVoll recounted that there was no air conditioning and no library when the school opened and that, then, girls were not permitted to wear pants to school in Richardson. Mr. DeVoll recognized the decades of hard work and impact that schools like Dover make, and closed by reminding the attendees that “the school is the community”.




  Councilman Steve Mitchell, in attendance with his 15 month old daughter Abigail, spoke about his family moving to Richardson 45 years ago to attend RISD and recounted that he attended Canyon Creek Elementary in 1965. Mitchell congratulated the faculty and the students for their contribution to fifty successful years at Dover. Mitchell also thanked the faculty and students for their work maintaining the school as a servant of the neighborhood, and proclaimed that he looked forward to bringing his children to be Dover Dolphins in the future. Former PTA president Anna Crowdus and a team of students presented a wall mural of hand painted ceramic tiles that will be permanently displayed in the school. Principal Medina acknowledged all PTA participants and closed with visible enthusiasm about the future at Dover.

Following the ceremony, the school was opened for a 50s style sock hop and reviewing of all the year’s work. Each grade was responsible for collecting and displaying relevant and interesting pop-culture items from each decade Dover has been open. One pink poodle skirt wearing 3rd grader, who displayed her items from the eighties, giggled with her friends about “how old everything was then”.

  Tucked into the “D”s south of Dumont on Dover Drive, and upgraded several times thru the years to keep up with the ebb and flow of education techniques, air conditioning, ever changing interior fashions and security requirements, the school maintains the original mid-century architecture styling that is present in many of RISD’s well-maintained older properties. Dover alum and Reservation resident Ken Valiant, now a band director in Plano, told that he attended Dover when it opened in 1959 and reminisced that “the school looks, and is layed out, much like I remember it as a young student”. Thursday night the school was brimming with proud alumni and parents and, according to PTA officer Larry Breazeale, “Dover has never looked better”.



Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Cottonwood Heights, the neighborhood south of Beltline, straddling Waterview, is fairly well populated today with the TI and Collins employees whose children were members of Dover’s early classes. Some of those early students now reside in the area and have seen their own children or grandchildren enrolled. As with any neighborhood school that has been in service for half a century, there is no shortage of amusing stories about the people and fond memories of the place. Many were recounted Thursday evening among the silver haired guests.

Like many older schools Dover weathered the original teeming populations of a neighborhood charged with hundreds of young energetic families. Decades ago Dover transitioned thru the stresses of an aging neighborhood population, lower performance, and then an influx of refugees and immigrants from several apartment complexes that were shoe-horned into the school and its temporary portable buildings. In some years Dover served more than 600 children, speaking 29 different languages.

Today the portable buildings are gone from the west side of the campus but Dover Elementary serves the same neighborhood of 925 homes and one large apartment complex along the Coit Road corridor. That apartment complex supplies over half of the current Anglo, African American, Asian and Hispanic student body that tops out at approximately 500 children.

Recognizing that the school was burdened with some unfair but engrained stigmas from the past, and anticipating imminent changes among the real estate along Spring Valley, the neighborhood association collaborated with the RISD several years ago to challenge the school to improve performance and its attractiveness to a resurgence of young families beginning to replenish the close-in mature Heights neighborhoods. Then new Principal Fernando Medina and his supportive staff responded with an immediate infusion of order and discipline. Two short years thereafter the proud student body mustered a Recognized status for its improved performance.

Working to always improve, the faculty and students have continued to excel and recent preliminary reports indicate that Dover has performed exceptionally well in the 2009 TAKS testing. Well enough that the school is expected to officially receive the state’s highest status as an Exemplary campus. It is also rumored that the school’s most recent test scores will likely place the quiet ‘little campus that could’ among the top five elementary performers in the RISD.

Stigmas can be hard to erase; however time, commitment to excellence, hard work and exceptional performance combined with an influx of young families investing in the area with openness to the neighborhood school has proven to be particularly useful. Together the school and its stakeholders are fostering the necessary trust and an increasingly steady return of neighborhood children to the school. This revitalization will position Dover to supply another 50 years of solid service to the neighborhood staked down in the southwest corner of Richardson.

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Barry Hand is the President of the Cottonwood Heights Neighborhood Association and his seven year old daughter is wrapping up first grade at Dover.