The Museum School of East Dallas is here. Some parents are anxious about the future of Hexter Elementary & other local public schools.

Not everyone is a fan of a new charter school aiming to serve Far East Dallas students.

Since we wrote about it a year ago, The Museum School of East Dallas is open. It offers kindergarten through fourth grade classes in its first year but plans to eventually expand to serve pre-kindergarteners through eighth graders. And it has garnered some critics.

A letter signed by 32 East Dallas parents circulated earlier this year and expressed concerns of The Museum School’s impact. They say local Dallas ISD campuses are already serving the neighborhood well, and adding a new charter school to the mix “creates unnecessary harm and destabilization.”

The chief complaint lodged against The Museum School is “aggressively recruiting both students and teachers” from neighborhood campuses, specifically at Victor H. Hexter Elementary. This is especially a sore spot since the charter school’s founder and superintendent, Loren Colman, previously had her children enrolled at Hexter.

How many Dallas ISD teachers were hired? Two out of 10 total on staff.

Two is a low number, but parents point out that it’s 20% of the charter school’s instructors, to say nothing of the experience of losing their child’s teacher. Lindsay Staggs, one of the parents who signed the letter of concern, said in a July interview she felt devastated, furious, betrayed and hopeless when she learned that her daughter’s teacher was recruited to The Museum School.

“(The recruited teacher) was amazing for my daughter and amazing for her students, and the impact that such a talented and incredible teacher can have is just so accretive, and it’s like an investment that just keeps going,” Staggs says. “When you see the high impact of that, and then you start to hear, ‘Oh, they’re being paid more. The Museum School is offering them more compensation,’ and you know that a public school budget only has so many resources and a finite budget, hands are tied.”

Mya Baker, The Museum School of East Dallas board chairperson, denied that the charter school was “paying teachers a bunch of extra money” in a July interview.

“That’s not the case. We can’t afford to,” she says.

Baker was confident that nothing illegal or unethical happened.

“Your teacher you really liked left doesn’t necessarily mean there was predatory hiring practices,” Baker says.

Among its demands, the letter called for a “responsible recruitment policy and good-faith hiring commitment.”

Baker says specific schools were not targeted, and leadership didn’t ask teachers to break their contracts. Recruitment was intentionally started before educators would’ve had to commit to their districts to avoid encouraging contract breaking.

Parents also claimed that the school’s leader had directly poached teachers. Baker says one teacher had spoken to Colman about applying, and another from Hexter was referred.

Staggs’s experience led her to ask more questions. She says the letter was intended to spread awareness among parents and challenge the charter school to be more thoughtful and transparent.

“We are not opposed to innovation,” Staggs says. “We believe every child deserves access to high-quality education, but especially with how charter schools are managed, especially with the state of Texas and the funding involved, the community deserves transparency and accountability and a meaningful voice in how these decisions are made. And the more research we did about The Museum School, its application and the location where it ultimately landed, there’s a lot more questions than answers.”

Regarding location, the charter school’s application to the state, which was approved last year, anticipated the campus being located in 75228 for its first year. ZIP codes 75223 and 75150 were listed as alternatives, but the campus is currently located in nearby 75218 on Garland Road.

“We had planned to be in a different location, which would have created more funding opportunity for the school in the long run, and so actually, our final location is not ideal for us,” Baker says, explaining that three options fell through. “We were sort of between a rock and a hard place without any other facilities in our original planned ZIP code that could even accommodate a school.”

Granted, 75218 is listed in the application as a targeted ZIP code in some past instances, and the campus is very close to the intended area. Founding families were fine with the change as long as the school would still open, Baker says. Those from the ideal zone stayed with the school, and recruitment from there has been prioritized. 

Given this, does the change in location actually matter that much? It does to the local Dallas ISD parents. Two of them say they understand that the charter school wasn’t able to secure its intended location, but they wanted more transparency and community engagement from The Museum School.

For transparency specifically, parents took issue with the way neighboring schools were framed, specifically but not limited to The Museum School’s state application. There is mention about “poor” accountability scores in the 75228 ZIP code, including “two nearby schools consistently receive ‘Not Rated’ (NR) scores below 70 (‘D’ or worse).”

“While some families may settle for a B or C rating because that is all they have ever known, we insist that all students should have access to an A-rated education from kindergarten to eighth grade, building a solid foundation for high school, college, career and military readiness and success, and there are currently none in the community,” reads the charter school’s application.

Again, parents who signed the letter are content with their Dallas ISD schools and see this narrative as inaccurate.

“Leveraging the idea that there are not high-performing schools in our community for students to go to in order to sell the idea of this school is incredibly unfair to the staff and students at DISD who have worked tremendously hard to build great schools under tremendous pressure and constraints,” says one parent, who asked for anonymity for fear of being personally targeted. “There was a time when Dallas ISD was not serving kids well, and the conversation can be different if that’s the case, but that’s not the case right now. Not only is it unfair, it’s tinged with a lot of assumptions that public schools are somehow not good enough for some kids, and that is really upsetting.”

Baker clarified that the application was made with available data at the time, circa December 2024. These scores for campuses and districts are subject to yearly change.

The parents are concerned about the competition because they believe that it will cost their local Dallas ISD schools students and teachers, leading to closures. Baker doesn’t think the couple of hundred students at The Museum School by full grow-out could ever threaten Dallas ISD as a whole but didn’t dismiss fears of campuses closing as unreal.

“There have been charters and private schools and things in this area for a long time,” Baker says. “I think why we are sort of in this space right now where we feel tension with that choice is because at the end of the day, none of our public schools, charter or ISDs, are actually getting funded enough in the state of Texas.”

Both Dallas ISD and The Museum School are funded in part by the state based on their students’ average daily attendance. Less students, less money.

State lawmakers eventually allocated $8.5 billion in new funding for public schools, the first comprehensive funding package in years, in 2025’s legislative session. But public school leaders and advocates had to sweat for it as our representatives argued over voucher funding, ultimately using $1 billion of taxpayer dollars for families to pay for private education-related expenses.

It may be fair to say that Texas public school advocates want to protect what’s theirs, now more than ever. Staggs is concerned about The Museum School “siphon(ing) funds from our already constrained resources in our schools.” The anonymous parent predicted that children without engaged parents would be left behind in the wake of this charter school.

The parents say they don’t blame families or teachers for choosing The Museum School. But they don’t agree with the charter school’s existence and wish it would go away — to another neighborhood or through its leaders redirecting their efforts to Dallas ISD schools instead — though they know that’s unrealistic.

The Museum School of East Dallas, which Baker says is poised to be the only one of its kind in Texas, is here because some local families want it to be.

“I’m glad people love their local schools, but for some parents, they didn’t love their local school, and they didn’t love it enough that they got in a lottery and filled out an application with us and have been invested with us,” she says. “This isn’t just like, ‘Oh, we’re going to offer  the same thing across the street.’ We’re offering something really different for a lot of folks.”

It may be too soon to tell how The Museum School will impact nearby Dallas ISD campuses. Parents and the public are free to continue voicing their opinions about it, but the charter school is operating, as are other local schools, and that probably won’t change.

At least, not in this school year.