Oak Cliff's Steady Heartbeat

Walking Roosevelt High School’s hallways with Toni Johnson feels a bit like being part of a celebrity’s entourage. Nearly every student says hello to her. Some call out updates about a sports or academic victory. Others ask when she’ll be available to talk. One would later privately share that he is sleeping on a neighbor’s couch because of trouble at home. Another talked about her grief after a friend was wounded in a shooting.

Johnson is the eyes and ears for this high school on the east side of Oak Cliff, sure to know who is going hungry, who has lost a parent, or who is on the edge of eviction. She’s the muscle for securing material needs, whether uniforms and desks for students or beds and utility payments for their homes. Hers is the brain that keeps careful track of every dollar due to Roosevelt from Dallas ISD bond elections. She's detail-oriented and organized, maintaining a thick file of documents to back up everything she says the school has been promised. 

But first and foremost, 63-year-old Johnson is Roosevelt’s robustly beating heart; her passion for the campus powers everything she accomplishes for its students, their families, and the surrounding community. Roosevelt’s principal, Abram Joseph, laughs and shakes his head when asked for a list of Johnson’s most impactful efforts on behalf of Velt Nation, the nickname proudly worn by the school’s students and alumni. “No matter how many sheets of paper I covered with notes, that still wouldn’t be enough to make anyone understand.”

He’s right. While shadowing Johnson this semester, I watched one woman make a thousand incremental differences that add up to better outcomes in the lives around her. Ask her why she has done so for decades and you won’t get a flowery explanation; she simply “gets up and gets after it” every single day. Johnson has neither time nor patience for anything except practical talk. “We gotta make it work for these kids,” she says, “because if we don’t do it, who will?”

Roosevelt opened in 1963 in a still-segregated Dallas ISD as Oak Cliff’s only secondary campus for Black students. It was built near the northern edge of Cedar Crest, a triangular neighborhood roughly situated inside Interstate 35E, the Trinity River, and Loop 12. While many middle-income Black families, including Johnson’s, had bought homes in Cedar Crest, construction of the campus prompted bomb threats from white segregationists. Johnson grew up on the stories of her grandfather being among the men who stood guard at Roosevelt. “My community quite literally fought for this school,” she says. 

Johnson, who graduated in 1981, was appalled by what she found upon her return about 15 years later. She remembered a thriving neighborhood with Black-owned homes, businesses, and restaurants surrounding Roosevelt, the pride of the community. By the late 1990s, the school’s academic buildings and adjacent facilities were in disrepair. Storefronts were boarded up and residences were poorly maintained or abandoned.

Many homeowners had decided the southern Dallas County suburbs provided more stable lives for their families. Increasingly, those who chose Cedar Crest lived in apartments and rental houses, most of which were owned by outsiders who didn’t have a stake in this community. “The neighborhood around the school was impoverished and the school wasn't taken care of,” Johnson says.

Today, Roosevelt’s enrollment is 857 students, too many of whom, Johnson says, are “hungry, homeless, and hopeless.” In Joseph’s first year as the school’s principal, it broke a string of failing accountability scores and earned a “C” from the Texas Education Agency in 2023-24. It earned a “B” last year. “You have to be a Swiss army knife to be here. You need all the tools,” Joseph says. “I’ve worked in high-poverty schools before, but here it’s so consistent.”

When a shooting occurs in the neighborhood or someone’s parent dies by suicide, “our kids don’t even recognize it’s trauma. They don’t even know they need help.” As important as the food and other material items are to students, Johnson’s emotional support is just as vital. “All our staff is there for them,” Joseph says, “but sometimes they aren’t going to open up to us. So the trust she has built makes a huge difference.”

Johnson’s road to full-time volunteering at her alma mater began about 30 years ago with three big pans of chicken spaghetti. After graduation, she held good jobs in the insurance, telecommunications, and banking industries. She eventually moved to Athens, about 70 miles southeast of Dallas, to care for family members.

That’s where Chandria McDonald, a 1991 Roosevelt grad, tracked her down with an urgent concern: Teens in the preseason football program weren’t getting regular meals at home and were practicing on empty stomachs. McDonald had reached out to many alums, but Johnson was the only one to respond. She had chicken in her freezer, noodles in the pantry, and $20 in her purse. Enlisting her mother to make the spaghetti while she purchased salad and rolls, Johnson was soon on her way to Roosevelt. 

She remembers the young teen who approached her after everyone had been fed to ask for a second plate to take home to his two brothers. After Johnson drove him and the remaining food to his apartment, she asked one of the coaches, “How often are kids going hungry like this?” “All the time,” he responded. “All the time.”

Inside Roosevelt, Johnson and McDonald occupy a small office adjacent to a storage area. Their space is crammed with nonperishable food, diapers, hygiene products, prom dresses, school supplies, and myriad household items. Here they confidentially do the laundry of students who would otherwise have to wear dirty clothes. They hand out school uniforms to newcomers in need. More than she likes to admit, Johnson pays a family’s utility bill out of her own pocket.

“From the beginning, we were just looking for every possible way to find food and connect it with our kids,” McDonald says. “Teaming up with Toni was nothing but God at work.” 

In addition to providing hundreds of pregame meals for the football and basketball teams—along with the drill team, cheerleaders, coaches, band, and ROTC—Johnson watches for teens who are lingering on the edges of school activities. “When they ask if they can help out, that’s a sure sign they need a meal,” she says. She and McDonald also keep track of which students, and sometimes teachers, need a box of food to take home. When an unexpected milk donation shows up, they pair the gallon jugs with cereal and invite students to stop by at the end of the school day. At winter break, they provide backpacks loaded with food.  

When a call comes in about a donation, maybe a pallet of frozen chickens or a closet full of toys, the women are on their way in Johnson's gray 2013 SUV. Her greatest wish is for a van that would allow them to distribute more food and household items and to pick up more donations.

Until her mother’s death in 2024, Johnson often drove five days a week from Athens to Dallas then back. After suffering a heart attack three years ago, which led to three stents in her chest, Johnson returned to DISD board meetings within a month.

In July, she tripped on an uneven sidewalk while checking on elderly relatives in Cleveland and, despite the pain, flew home and headed straight to the district’s headquarters for a bond advisory meeting. The next morning she went to the emergency room and learned she had a cracked shoulder and four broken ribs. “If I'm laying down at home, then it's still hurting, so I might as well be fighting for my school,” she says.

Johnson uses the verb “fight” deliberately. “I don't mind bumping heads with people, especially if you are not about the kids,” she says. She led a years-long effort that resulted in Roosevelt—officially Franklin D. Roosevelt High School of Innovation—receiving a $63 million makeover. After lobbying for the funding in the 2015 bond election, Johnson stayed on top of the project until every renovation was completed: Full updates to the 1963 buildings, the addition of an administrative suite, library, media room, fine arts wing, student-run restaurant, 800-seat competition gym, new athletic fields, a community garden, and new labs and classrooms to support the school’s public-health careers path.

Johnson rarely misses a DISD board or bond meeting, and both Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde and Principal Joseph use the same phrase to describe her: She’s a firecracker. 

“I can't think of another school that has this kind of a consistent, dedicated alum,” Elizalde says. “All this work she does, yet you’ve never heard her name even after all these years. She’s about the work and the kids.”

Much of the help Johnson provides is done in confidence, one student or family at a time. But twice a month she and McDonald oversee a community-wide mobile food pantry in a Roosevelt parking lot. The drive-through event, usually held the second Wednesday and fourth Thursday of each month, is testament to Johnson’s networking skills, in this case with Feed the Streetz Outreach in partnership with the North Texas Food Bank and Catholic Charities of Dallas.

When the federal government shut down for 43 days this fall, halting SNAP benefits and other safety-net funding, difficulties compounded for the Roosevelt community. More calls came in from mothers unable to feed their kids at night. More students asked for boxes of groceries from Johnson’s shelves. More families arrived for the mobile food distribution. But in a community as food-insecure as Oak Cliff, Johnson says, it’s difficult to distinguish the needs created by the SNAP freeze from the regular daily grind of poverty. “Yes, there’s more need, but there’s always need. It’s always right in front of us.”

Before the gate opened at 12:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in early November, more than 50 cars were already lined up. As Roosevelt Alumni Association president, Johnson can summon a small army at a moment’s notice. When the Catholic Charities truck arrived, a flurry of popup canopies and collapsible tables flew into place as a dozen volunteers pulled pallets of food from the vehicle and began bagging groceries with assembly-line precision.

Johnson’s day had begun with a 1 a.m. phone call, a plea on behalf of two parents furloughed from their federal jobs and just evicted, with their two children, from their home. The caller needed money to get them into a motel and a box or two of food. Johnson offered a little personal cash and called two friends who also chipped in. Just after dawn came another call. Two nearby elementary schools were in need of food boxes for their students. 

Operating on almost no sleep, Johnson still made time to pick up a big order of Williams Chicken for her volunteers. Then it was all business as she barked orders: To those bagging food, “I need you to move a little faster for me, baby. We’re opening up in five minutes.” To the drivers once the event began, “Tighten up that line of cars so no one’s blocking the street.” To those ferrying the groceries to each car, “Let’s double up this one. She’s got extra family staying with her.”

This day’s provisions included apples and oranges, canned corn and mixed vegetables, peanut butter and pasta. No meat had come on the delivery truck—it’s been that way for more than two months. “We are appreciative of whatever we get,” Johnson says, “but I’ve got to find a way to get these folks some meat.”

By 2 p.m., volunteers had loaded food for about 100 families. The remaining groceries went into the school, where they were offered to students that afternoon. “When those kids get in line, that’s how I keep finding out who's actually going through some hard times,” Johnson says.

Johnson is clear with the students: She needs them to be straight with her and, if what she learns indicates someone is in harm’s way, she will alert the appropriate person. That doesn’t dissuade the kids from talking to her, Principal Joseph says, because they know she will offer solutions.

Johnson rarely acknowledges how overwhelming the work can be. Like the day a young girl needed shoes and the volunteers had none. Or earlier this semester when she had to take the football team to task because several players were misbehaving on the sideline. Or the morning a student said he might have to turn to crime so his younger sister would have food.

Those are the days Johnson cries her eyelash extensions off when she’s alone in her SUV, the salt in her tears weakening the adhesive. “It can just be so hard sometimes to figure out, ‘how do I help them?’” Johnson says.

Luckily for Roosevelt, she keeps her eyelash glue in her purse.

Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior writer of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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