Imagination Takes Flight: Dallas City of Learning Turn Up! at Love Field
By Carson Bolding
This past Saturday, the Frontiers of Flight Museum and Dallas Love Field Airport opened up their doors to children and families for Dallas City of Learning’s 5th Annual Turn Up! at Love Field. The event featured free admission to the museum, tours of the new terminal at the airport, opportunities to build foam gliders and experiment with wind tubes, food samples from airport concessionaires, and more.
The Turn Up was hosted by Dallas City of Learning, a public-private citywide partnership between the City of Dallas and Dallas ISD, managed by Big Thought. DCOL brings high-quality summer learning programs to students across the city to stem summer learning loss. Last summer, Big Thought partnered with SMU’s Center on Research and Evaluation to evaluate the impact of the initiative. They found that over 23,000 Dallas ISD students participated in DCOL programs and consistently showed a higher GPA at the beginning of the new school year than they had the previous year.
The Dallas City of Learning Turn Up! at Love Field promotes summer learning by engaging students in a new environment and exposing them to a wide variety of aviation career possibilities. This year, kids had the chance to explore the cockpits of airplanes at the museum and make slime with Seeds to STEM. The terminal tour pointed out the spot on the tarmac where President LBJ became the first president to be sworn in on this side of the Mississippi, and Big Thought’s Mobile Tech XPerience was on-site to teach kids about robot design and computer programming. There was something for everyone!
Closing the opportunity gap is a team effort. Every year, the Dallas City of Learning Turn Up! at Love Field brings community partners together to provide valuable resources and opportunities to the young people who need them most.