Photo by Victoria Hernandez.
One month has passed since members of The Dallas Carter High Coalition Project demanded the immediate removal of Principal Troy Tyson from David W. Carter High School. Today, Tyson continues to work on campus despite objections to his initial hiring.
“When he interviewed with the community — which was parents, staff, people appointed by the trustee to be on the interviewing panel — what was realized was he wasn’t a fit,” Stephen Poole said.
Poole is a Carter alumnus and active with the school’s Parent Teacher Student Association. He was a member of the interviewing panel during the Carter principal search in 2021. He said that despite other qualified candidates that the panel recommended, Tyson was hired.
“Basically, a parent who had a similar background as his, which is in engineering, he said ‘He’s not it,’” Poole said. “‘He doesn’t have a gray area. He’s black or white. He doesn’t take the time to hear. He has a thought process (of) ‘I’m doing what I’m going to do and I’m not listening to anything else.’”
Poole said the biggest issue now is the concern that Dallas ISD is keeping someone in place that has shown since his interview that he was not a great fit for the school.
Since Tyson joined the campus in 2021, the Texas Education Agency’s Accountability Rating for the Academic Growth of the school has gone down from a ‘C’ in 2022 and a ‘D’ in 2023 to an ‘F’ for both 2024 and 2025. Despite academic decline, the overall campus rating returned to a ‘C’ this year.
TEA Accountability Ratings Academic Growth for Carter High School. Graphic by Lauren Allen.
Poole said that before Tyson arrived at Carter, there were similar concerns during his time at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School.
“When he was at Roosevelt, the same behavior patterns that we were complaining about here at Carter, he was exhibiting,” said ReJohnna Lindzie, a former Carter High School teacher.
Lindzie taught English at Carter starting in 2023, where she noticed large turnover in her department. Specifically, she said that the biggest turnover was related directly to bullying, retaliation and unprofessional behavior from Tyson.
“I’m an upstander, so I’m not one that’s just going to be on the sideline quiet and see something that’s just completely unorthodox and wrong,” Lindzie said. “I push back on that. And because he has a pattern, which I witnessed myself, you can’t ask questions. You can’t challenge things. You can’t ask for some level of accountability, or you’re going to get targeted. And so I ended up being targeted. I did the things you’re told to do within the district to highlight that I was being targeted, but ultimately I was removed from the campus the first day back (this fall).”
Lindzie received an email reassigning her to Seagoville Middle School just hours into the workday Aug. 4.
Retaliation, like a sudden removal, is why Lindzie has joined parents, teachers, students and alumni to continue to raise their concerns about Tyson together through The DCHC Project. And raising those concerns has started to make change.
The Oct. 7 letter calling for Tyson’s removal last month highlighted the need to investigate violations of Title IX and Dallas ISD’s nondiscrimination policy. Specifically stating that “Each year, female athletes have routinely been discriminated against, with the girls’ track team and girls’ basketball team repeatedly denied equitable support, meals, and resources.”
Jason Whiteside, a parent of a student-athlete on the girls’ basketball team since 2023, said that he believes many of the girls got hurt because of the lack of access to training in comparison to boys’ basketball.
“They weren’t able to have athletics for a class. They weren’t able to lift weights, like shoot a machine. All that kind of stuff, but the boys get all this. And the boys team has athletics (class) of course,” he said.
On more than 20 separate occasions, Whiteside requested access for his daughter and her teammates to use the school shooting machines, weight room and training equipment. The answer from former coach Danielle Butler was that her hands were tied.
He later learned from Butler that she wasn’t even on the Carter campus during the day.
According to Lindzie, when Butler was recruited and hired, she was told she would have the head basketball coach position. Instead, Butler was put in a health position that she did not have the proper certification for. This meant the girls on her team were only able to access the gym when Butler came to campus.
“You still don’t have all day access to the gym to be able to have flexibility for the girls to come in when needed for an athletic period,” Lindzie said. “So, in other words, she didn’t get her certification in health, and they just moved her to a different campus, which made her job (as coach) more difficult.”
At the start of this school year, Carter hired a new head girls’ basketball coach that has gym access. However, only the boys’ basketball program had all of their assistant coaches in the athletics period while the girls’ assistant coaches weren’t allowed. The girls’ assistant coach was told initially she would have access, but was later told no by Tyson.
As of Oct. 21, after parents raised concerns of a Title IX violation, the girls’ assistant coach joined the athletics period.
“So what they try to do is say, ‘Well, they do have athletics,’” Poole said. “No they don’t. It’s still not equitable. You’re still doing what you’re doing to cover yourself because you had no plans on giving them athletics from the beginning of the school year, actually.”
With this step forward, The DCHC Project is still looking for someone new to lead the campus.
“If you have someone in place that’s invested in the community, invested in that school, athletics are going to thrive,” Lindzie said. “Academics is going to thrive. Our community’s going to thrive.”
When asked about Tyson, Dallas ISD said it does not comment on personnel matters. Dallas ISD did not respond to a request for comment regarding girls’ athletics at Carter High School. Tyson also did not respond to a request for comment.
