Dallas ISD White Flight through a 50 year lense

Dallas ISD White Flight was actively happening 50 years ago. White families were leaving DISD in increasingly great numbers, but minority enrollment was growing much faster. In 1969/70 DISD was about to celebrate another record high all time enrollment. Dallas prepared for more record growth not knowing 173,799 would become the all time DISD enrollment record for the next half century. White Flight exploded the summer of 1970. Over 10,000 White students left! Could Dallas make more progress by exploring this history with a 50 year lense as it unfolds over the next decade? Sam Tasby, a DISD parent, was about to file a lawsuit in 1970 that would change Dallas more than any parent lawsuit in Dallas History! A DISD school is now named in his honor.

From page 159 of "1874-1966 Education in Dallas" published in 1966.

55 years ago, during the 1964/65 school year, Dallas ISD had what was to become the highest White-non-Hispanic enrollment on record for DISD: 127,124 students. Then White numbers began to decline in 1966, but minority numbers grew faster than the White decline until 1970. 
DISD Administration has rarely been more wrong in an enrollment prediction than 49 years ago, in May and August of 1970. In May 1970 DISD was predicting as many as 180,000 students for the next school year. By August that prediction was down to 177,000 students. The final full enrollment count was only 164,726, over a 9,000 total enrollment loss in one year!  
They had terribly underestimated White Flight! Over 10,000 White students had left Dallas ISD in 1970! 
They were possibly resting on the statement published in 1966 in "1874 - 1966 Education in Dallas" on page 159: "Desegregation of the Dallas Schools was accomplished in the course of ten short years with a minimum of commotion and stress. This may be viewed as just short of miraculous."

Published in 1966. This copy is in Dallas Public Library.

The peace did not last! This 1966 statement in a DISD History book accuraely reflected one viewpoint, but was terribly wrong! White Flight was about to explode! 50 years ago the 1969/70 DISD full enrollment of 173,799 students was to become the largest annual enrollment in DISD History to date. DISD did not know that. 
DISD thought they would continue growing in 1970/71, but then suddenly DISD started to shrink.
The loss of White students was for the first time thousands greater than the increase in minority students that had sustained total DISD enrollment growth since 1965 when White students began to leave.

A new stage of White flight began as DISD full enrollment began to dramatically shrink. That shrinkage continued until total enrollment had lost 46,337 students in just 14 years! The full DISD enrollment of 173,799 in 1970 was down to 127,462 by 1984.  

The summer of 1970 was the highest loss of White students in all 44 years of White Flight, 1965-2009, and in all of DISD History! It was estimated at far over 10,000 students.  

In 1971/72 DISD had the second highest loss as another 8,698 White students left. White Flight continued with thousands leaving annually for three decades, until 2002 when the annual White loss fell to and remained in the hundreds for a total of 8 more years.  
White Flight finally ended in 2009 when White enrollment hit 7,207. From 1964/65 to 2008/09 120,000 White students had left Dallas ISD to achieve the lowest DISD White enrollment in over 120 years in 2009.  
In 2010 White enrollment went up, for the first time in 45 years, to 7,232. That was 45 years after having a White-non-Hispanic student enrollment of 127,124.