South Oak Cliff High School (colloquially referred to as SOC, pronounced "sock") is a public secondary school located in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, Texas, United States. South Oak Cliff High School enrolls students in grades 9-12 and is a part of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD).
The school serves the area of Dallas known as "South Oak Cliff" (generally east of Interstate 35E and south of Illinois Avenue, though the area was never technically part of Oak Cliff). The school also previously had some students who lived in the former Wilmer-Hutchins ISD boundaries. DISD began to take in WHISD-zoned students during the 2005–2006 school year, and at that time the entire Wilmer-Hutchins High School senior class attended South Oak Cliff.
In 2015, the school was rated "Improvement Required" by the Texas Education Agency.
History
South Oak Cliff opened in 1952 as the first DISD high school to be constructed in almost 15 years (Lincoln High opened in 1939.) The school served developing areas of south and east Oak Cliff. In the first year only a few hundred students enrolled, but the school grew rapidly as new housing developments were completed along Kiest Boulevard and Ledbetter Drive. In the late 1950s, before Kimball and Carter high schools were opened, SOC was one of the largest high schools in the city. For its first 13 years SOC was designated a "white" high school by DISD, but the neighborhoods surrounding the school began to change rapidly to African-American in the early 1960s. Many of the schools that fed into SOC (Holmes and Zumwalt junior high schools and Miller, Stone, Pease, Bushman and Mills elementary schools) were converted to "negro" elementary schools in the late 1960s.
Roosevelt High School was opened in north Oak Cliff 1963 to serve the growing African-American student population, but at the beginning of the 1966-1967 school year, DISD was forced to desegregate its high schools and black students enrolled at SOC for the first time.
Between 1966 and 1970 the student body changed from nearly 100 percent white to almost 100 percent African-American. This type of racial turnover was common in the US during the white flight era of the 1960s, but it was rare to see it happen in such a newly developed area. Most of the homes, businesses and shopping centers in this area of Oak Cliff were less than ten years old when the racial changes began. There was a period when SOC had over 2,000 students.
After the A. Maceo Smith High School moved in 1989, the attendance boundaries between Smith and South Oak Cliff shifted, with students zoned to Stone Middle School and Zumwalt Middle School, except for students also zoned to Bushman Elementary, moving from SOC to Smith, and students zoned to Storey Middle School, except for those who began their educations at Marshall and Oliver elementaries, would be zoned to SOC.
In 2005, after the closure of the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District, what would have been the entire senior class of Wilmer-Hutchins High School was sent to South Oak Cliff. SOC and other DISD schools absorbed the remaining WHISD high school students.
In 2011, the district re-opened Wilmer Hutchins and converted A. Maceo Smith into a technology magnet. Some former WHISD zones covered by South Oak Cliff were rezoned to Wilmer-Hutchins. South Oak Cliff absorbed parts of the former A. Maceo Smith boundary.
By 2016 the district agreed to remodel the SOC building. At first the renovation was to only cover the inside, the plumbing system, and the roof, with $13 million in funding. The funding and scope increased after advocacy from the SOC community and student walkouts. In February 2016 DISD agreed to up the amount to $25 million. The following May it increased to $42 million. Finally the board voted 6-3 to increase it to $52 million in October 2016. The renovation is to include refurbished classrooms, new hallways with an atrium and athletic facilities. The latter category consists of a gymnasium for athletic competitions that has a capacity of 2,000 people, as well as another weight room and an auxiliary gymnasium.