South Oak Cliff High School is known for their outstanding performances when it comes to the state football championship, but a decade ago the old campus was far from outstanding. So much so that about 250 students staged a walkout Dec. 7, 2015.
Today marks a decade since that protest. Then, SOC was in the midst of a major roof repair to the 1952 building. Students attended the walkout to raise concerns about continued leaks and temperature imbalances within the crumbling building, demanding for not just updates but a new campus.
In January 2020, that new campus opened complete with finishing touches of white, gold and black for the Golden Bears.
However, this year SOC reached another major milestone, a ‘B’ on the Texas Education Association’s 2024-25 Accountability Ratings released in August.
Willie F. Johnson has been principal of SOC for eight years, first returning to the campus after the walkout. He previously served the school as a teacher and a coach in the ’90s.
“At that time, the school wasn’t in great shape, but we made do,” he said. “And when you’re going through that, you really don’t have those high expectations. You just deal with what you deal with in a single day and make the most of what you have.”
However, Johnson highlights that despite these lows the environment was rich during his time as a teacher and coach.
“We’ve always had a rich history in athletics,” he said. “Academically, we were status quo, and we weren’t bad and we weren’t great.”
Johnson was brought back to SOC to lead the transition from the “dilapidated” building in 2017.
“Just imagine leaving home and coming to a place that was worse than where you left,” he said. “You got to understand at that particular time, the students had walked out for better conditions. And when you have a bad building, you have what? A bad environment.”
SOC was at an ‘F’ rating in the midst of moving the whole school during that winter for construction.
“I think it manifested to them what the outcomes were,” he said. “It was just lower expectations. When you’re going through such turmoil, I don’t think there was a laser focus on academics so that was the result.”
Within his first year as principal, Johnson said SOC moved from an ‘F’ to a ‘C.’ Later SOC was declared to be in a state of disaster by 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to TEA. But by this year, SOC rose again and reached just one point shy of earning an ‘A.’
Johnson credits that to the foundations he set in his early years as principal, such as the core beliefs of the campus that remain to this day.
“Our main purpose is to improve the academic achievement,” he said. “There’s no excuse for poor quality instruction. With our help, at risk students will achieve at the same rate as non-at-risk students. Staff will have a commitment to students and the commitment to the pursuit. That embodies everything that we want to do.”
Building on that work, Johnson said that it’s important to know why his students come to school to create that sense of belonging, such as investing in extracurriculars.
“They come because they want to participate,” he said. “So we have to make that attractive because that was the key to academic success.”
Setting academic expectations at not only minimal standards, but high standards helped with student motivation, he said.
“We went through that downtime, but now, look, we’re leading academically and we’re leading athletically. Return of the Mecca.”
