Texarkana early education center to open this year, offer hands on learning

TEXARKANA, Texas (KTAL/KMSS) – Texarkana ISD is nearly ready to welcome students to the new Paul Lawrence Dunbar Early Education Center for the upcoming 2025-26 school year. The $47 million project is made possible by the 2022 Bond package.

“We have been able to serve 3 and 4-year-olds within our district, but we’ve only been able to serve a limited number of 3-year-olds. So we saw a need in our community to increase that and so this building offers the ability we are able to house 650 3 and 4-year-olds,” says TISD Director of Communications, Kelly Bixler.

The new preschool is expanding early education opportunities. It is split into pods, two for each age group, that are built around the concept of experiential learning.

“There are nine Experiences in each pod. So by the time that a 3-year-old goes through the entire school year, she will have gone to 18 different Experiences, so we have things from farm to table, space, the polar area, the savannahs,” says Bixler.

Every two weeks, students and their teacher will rotate into a new Experience which will serve as their classroom, only a much more engaging one.

“It’s learning by doing so we’re learning by our classroom, the surroundings in our classroom we’re learning through our hands and our emotions through our play so there’s a lot of games associated with the themes that are heavy in vocabulary, heavy in phonics, heavy in mathematics and everything they’re doing, they’re learning and they don’t even realize they’re learning because they’re having so much fun,” says Bixler.

The idea is that these experiences will stick with students more than traditional lessons, setting them up for success further down the road.

“They also love the Dinosaur Journey in Time room. Kids will actually have a sand pit where they will be digging for fossils, and so when they go and they learn about archaeology, they’re going to have that knowledge in their head to remember when they were little and they dug for dinosaur bones,” says Bixler.

Space is limited, but registration is still open for the upcoming school year.