When the ‘Mayhem’ Stops

Outside a red brick house near Esperanza Road, in Far North Dallas, a bright blue Dobie Pre-K sign juts from a freshly trimmed yard. The school closed this year, but Astry Cuadra will let that sign drop on its own before she removes it from her lawn.

On any other first day of classes, the 32-year-old might’ve crouched behind the piece of corrugated plastic with the smiling yellow star and pulled her four children close. A new beginning carved from her own in this neighborhood three decades ago.

This school year is the Esperanza neighborhood’s first in more than half a century without J. Frank Dobie Pre-K School, one of five campuses Richardson ISD shuttered to help solve a projected budget shortfall. But it won’t sit empty. A public partnership between the city and the county aims to transform the 71,000-square-foot campus into a resource hub for nearby residents by early 2026. 

Still, it won’t be the Dobie Cuadra remembers. Her family’s new normal is at RISD Academy, half a mile away. “It's not the same,” she says. “In my heart, I was hurting.”

County leaders envision Dobie’s next phase as a path to meeting the needs of the entire community. The Esperanza Community Center at Dobie is expected to house a Richardson ISD-sponsored literacy center, a Dallas County Health and Human Services senior center, daycare and afterschool care, a Parkland medical clinic, a food pantry, pre-natal services, mental health services provided by MetroCare, English classes, and job training in fields such as plumbing and air conditioning maintenance. The county will operate the facility, while the city is responsible for developing an adjacent park.

“We’ve basically become the landlord for a bunch of nonprofits,” says Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman, “and it’s all to benefit the community.”

The Esperanza neighborhood is shaped like a right triangle bounded by Spring Valley and Coit roads immediately west of Central Expressway, near Dallas’ border with Richardson. About 12,000 people live here, a third of whom are children. It was once called Maham, named after the mile-long road that bisects the community. It has, for decades, sustained higher crime rates and deeper poverty than the rest of the city. It carried a phonetic nickname; most people who knew it called it “mayhem.”

Local governments were shocked into action by what they learned from studies conducted in recent years. Elected officials dealt with the obvious first. The name of Maham Road was formally changed about eight years ago to Esperanza, Spanish for “hope.” 

The community is 72 percent Latino, 42 percent of whom are foreign-born. Eighty percent of residents live in multifamily housing. Many families don’t own a car or only have one. Each day, residents haul bags of groceries and other essentials down Esperanza Road from the Fiesta Mart and nearby shops. As evening nears, parents venture from homes with toddlers in tow and babies in strollers. 

From 2017 to 2021, one city-sponsored study found the household incomes for families ranged from about $27,000 to $62,000, well below the county’s median of $87,680. About one-third of Esperanza households live on less than $25,000 a year. Sommerman says he has “no concept of how, under today's inflationary rules, we have someone living on $25,000 a year.”

“How do they take care of their kids?” he says. “How do they take care of their grandma? Where are they going for their healthcare?”

The disinvestment did not happen overnight. The neighborhood began as farmland, accented with a few single-family homes and gravel pits. In 1968, a small residential community formed alongside the construction of I-635 at its southern border. Texas Instruments engineers began moving into new dwelling units in the 1970s to be close to their work. Apartment complexes over the next decade began to line what is now Esperanza Road through the center of the neighborhood. The consultant study found that industrial jobs started leaving the area in the early 2000s, right as public infrastructure began to fail. Property values plummeted during the 2008 recession and living conditions deteriorated while tenants struggled to pay their bills. Absentee landlords took control. Community revitalization efforts were delayed, then halted altogether.

Dobie opened in 1968 as the first Richardson ISD school in the neighborhood. In the coming decades, it grew essential. The district and other organizations offered families food and diapers within the school’s tan doors. Parents dropped their kids off for a safe spot to play in the summers. It served a peak of 700 students from first through sixth grade before the population was split between three other elementary schools that opened within a mile of the older campus, says Sandra Hayes, RISD’s assistant superintendent for bond planning and implementation. It shrank to teaching only kindergarteners in 2004, then solely pre-K in 2019.

Its enrollment had fallen to about 400 kids when trustees approved its closure. Many families in the neighborhood have enrolled their 3- and 4-year-olds at RISD Academy, where Cuadra’s kids were re-directed, or Carolyn G. Bukhair Elementary, at the northern end of Esperanza Road. 

Cuadra cried when she heard whispers of the closure last winter. Why, she wondered, did Dobie have to be the school that got the axe? She walked its halls as a student. She worked community service hours here as a teen and guided her kids up its steps as a mother. Her sister worked here, and its educators were as much a part of the community as residents. Dobie, the heart of Esperanza, was common ground. Cuadra’s kids looked at her after they heard the news. “Mom, you went there!” they squealed. “I know,” she replied. “I know.” She keeps the sign up in her lawn as a reminder. 

Dobie provided positivity as Cuadra confronted obstacles early in her life. Her family immigrated from Mexico and settled into Esperanza when she was two. She lived with her parents and three siblings in three different apartments until they moved into the brick house off Esperanza Road in 2001. She attended Dobie, then RISD Academy. 

Her parents split when she was a teen, leaving her father to care for the kids. After her older sister left, Cuadra had to cook, clean, and try to keep her brothers away from the neighborhood’s quarreling gangs while her father worked. She walked an hour from home for night shifts at Cicis Pizza. It was a lot of responsibility for a teen, she says. Too much. She began to hang around gangs. She worked so many hours she fell behind in her classes. Her principal directed her to a counselor, and she joined a program that allowed her to graduate high school early—a lucky break, she says, compared with classmates who dropped out and began selling and using drugs.

Stories of adversity are common in Esperanza. Luis Rojas, 34, moved from apartment to apartment when he came to the neighborhood around 1998. Drugs, prostitution, and gang violence were frequent, he says. His brother became a leader of one gang. His sister followed, and, eventually, so did Rojas. He calls it a cycle. If kids didn’t play sports, they seemed more likely to join gangs. He lists spots where skirmishes broke out: Cottonwood Park’s blue tennis courts, the fields next to Carolyn G. Bukhair Elementary. He says he saw friends die. 

His sister moved to Laredo. His brother spent time incarcerated, Rojas says, and later died of an overdose. After his family was evicted from an apartment in 2014, Rojas left Esperanza.

Today, Rojas lives just north of the neighborhood with his father, wife, and two kids. He walks to his shifts at a restaurant supply store. His son, who was non-verbal, went to Dobie, Rojas says, and the school helped him learn to speak. Rojas’ daughter would’ve gone to Dobie this year. Rojas attended when he was a kid. “That was our safe place,” he says.

Cuadra and Rojas share cautious optimism about the new resource center. But Cuadra still worries it could be a public relations stunt. Rojas doubts it will compare to the peace he knew at Dobie and remains concerned about traffic and drug activity. Their mistrust comes from years of feeling invisible.

“I hope it'd be good,” Rojas says. “I hope, because we need it. We need it. It’s time for this little spot to get their little moment.”

Gang activity hasn’t felt as prominent these days, Cuadra says, but in some ways, the realities in Esperanza are similar to what they were. Her stepson went to summer school at Forest Meadow Middle School near Lake Highlands. He once told her it’s fancy — different from his magnet school. “Do not let that make you feel less,” Cuadra told him. 

She became RISD Academy’s PTA president last year and tried to motivate parents to push their children academically. “I want these kids to be known as more than just Esperanza kids or the low-income kids,” she says. She’s proud of the outcome; last year, at least 19 RISD Academy students were accepted in magnet programs. “These kids already feel like they’re not important enough for this state,” Cuadra says. “Being Hispanic, it’s hard. It’s really hard.” 

The neighborhood for years didn’t feel like a priority to public officials, which she says many residents chalked up to the population’s Hispanic roots. Today, Esperanza is a melting pot of families from countries including Mexico, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Honduras. Residents suspect that has attracted attention from agents with the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Regina Flores, a 65-year-old Esperanza homeowner, says law enforcement officers—who she believes were federal immigration agents—came to her door and showed her photos of people they sought. She spotted agents a second time exiting cars in black vests, guns in hand. Cuadra says only about a dozen people showed up to a recent meeting about the new resource center. She suspects her neighbors are afraid. “A lot of people stopped coming out,” Cuadra says. “It is a scary time.”

Residents assumed Dobie would be torn down and turned into apartments; a resource center, Cuadra says, never crossed their minds. Once news spread, Cuadra says she saw parents “not fully breathe,” but “take a little breath.” She told officials to prioritize counseling and kid-friendly amenities like a splash pad. Their nearest one is 4 miles north. These children, Cuadra says, need to keep busy. They need to feel safe and valued.

The city and county hope the community center and park can help keep kids away from crime. They hope it will be a place where adults feel safe and supported, too. The neighborhood still has some of the highest crime rates across the police department’s North Central Patrol Division, which stretches from Amherst Avenue, just north of Lovers Lane, to the city’s border with Plano. Officers have placed surveillance towers in the neighborhood and say drug sales, prostitution, robberies, and assaults are common here.

Former Council member Jaynie Schultz, who finished her term this year and opted not to run again, championed Esperanza’s name change. Soon after, the owner of an empty office park in the neighborhood wanted a zoning change to use it as a storage center. Instead, Schultz worked with the owner to find a different purpose. That became Goldmark Cultural Center, which features studio space for about 175 artists. Today, it counts painters, sculptors, ceramicists, and at least one glass blower among its members.

Schultz also helped direct $1 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds into neighborhood initiatives such as community surveys and a green space plan. She and Sommerman held a listening session with Esperanza leaders who reiterated the need for more childcare and healthcare. 

Their first directive, Schultz says, was to find a neighborhood-based early childcare center. When it was open, Dobie didn’t have enough spaces to serve the entire neighborhood. A study by the nonprofit Groundwork DFW showed Esperanza parents struggled to get their kids to programming; the household breadwinner often took the family’s only car to work every day. The center needed to be within walking distance of where people lived.

Sommerman and Schultz floated a temporary building to host services. Then Dobie closed, which presented a new opportunity. They viewed the Jubilee Park & Community Center just north of Fair Park as a model. They showed the school district’s leaders its vision of centralized programs for kids, adults, and seniors: from afterschool care and youth sports to cooking and Zumba classes as well as bingo and arts and crafts for seniors. Dobie would have enough space to execute something similar.

“We have become the fire line of social services,” Sommerman says. “The best way to demonstrate that fire line is to show that we're gonna provide those social services to those who need the most.”

The county signed a 30-year, $10 lease with RISD at the end of 2024 for the property. Sommerman has allocated $5 million in county money for renovations but expects to need more. He’s trying to raise money for the construction, as well as for nonprofits whose budgets have been slashed by federal cuts. Organizations plan to move in on staggered schedules; the RISD literacy center is scheduled to open in September while others won’t move in until early next year.

RISD officials say they wouldn’t have left Dobie abandoned, but they wouldn’t have been able to provide resources to this level.

“This whole program is completely innovative,” Schultz says. “To my knowledge, we've never as a city taken an area and said, ‘How do we look at this holistically?’”

While awaiting renovations mid-summer, Dobie still looked like a school. Artwork of kids in chef hats lined the top of kitchen walls. Framed colorful drawings hung in hallways with ribbons. Layers of colored paper on one wall made out the shape of a hippopotamus. A red curtain framed a stage where 3- and 4-year-olds once showed off for peers and families. Two playgrounds—one for the big kids, another for the youngest—were desolate. Officials want to keep those, as well as the cafeteria and the gym. Sommerman plans to open these spaces for community events such as quinceañeras.

There’s still work to be done. In July, the county was unsure of the city’s progress on the park, and officials have disagreed over which entity will pay for the center’s security that some tenants require before moving in. (City spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.)

The new center can’t take the place of Dobie, but in the spirit of her neighborhood’s name, Astry Cuadra holds on to hope. On Aug. 12, the first day of school, she’s up before dawn, squirting glue on the back of a homemade poster by her front door. Inside, her 3-year-old, Erasmo, leaps from a playhouse clutching colored plastic rocks. He’s been ready since 6 a.m., his Avengers backpack zipped up on the couch. His siblings aren’t far behind. Everly Ramirez, 4, perches on a stool while her mother braids her hair. Adelynn Salgado, 11, strolls from her bedroom with a black backpack. “It’s too early for this,” grumbles Yoneri Salgado, 13, dressed in black.

“Estás ready?” Erasmo Ramirez, 36, asks the youngest boy in a mix of Spanish and English.

“Sí!” the younger Erasmo yells to his father, his light-up shoes blinking as he jumps in place. 

Their path for the first day of school isn’t what Cuadra had prayed for, but new beginnings are difficult to predict. She remains resilient in the face of change, a quality she can trace to when she was a small kid in a red brick house, looking for hope in a neighborhood better known for its mayhem.

Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. [email protected].

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