Dawson Elementary School is an elementary school in the Austin Independent School District (AISD) currently serving students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The school is located at 3001 South First Street in South Austin, Texas, and is named after Mary Jane "Mollie" Dawson, a beloved teacher and school administrator who worked in Austin in the late nineteenth century. History Early history In the early 1950s, multiple factors, including the baby boom, propelled demand for public schools. The Austin School Board invested significant public funds (estimated in 1952 at $8,838,400.74) in the construction of several new public schools, including Mollie Dawson Elementary School, Brentwood Elementary School, Maplewood Elementary School, Highland Park West Elementary School, Florence Ralston Brooks Elementary Schools, William B. Travis High School, McCallum High School, Anderson High School, and O. Henry Junior High School. An architectural sketch of Dawson Elementary by Fehr and Granger appeared in the local newspaper in 1952. The sketch planned for 16 classrooms, a school cafeteria, administration offices, and playrooms. However, demand required putting the school into use before construction could be completed. Dawson Elementary first opened in 1954 with an eight-room unit on a nine-acre site. Construction continued into 1956, with four additional rooms completed that fall. When the school board held its official dedication ceremony in January 1957, the building included classrooms, offices, a library, a "cafetorium," and a "visual education room." A 1957 newspaper article stated that the complete cost of construction was $281,176.92. Neighboring Dawson and Joslin Elementary Schools shared a similar origin story and held their official dedication ceremonies on the same day. According to The Austin Statesman, Mrs. Paul Wagoner played a significant role in the creation of Dawson Elementary. As a substitute teacher and mother of a student at the St. Elmo School, she became deeply concerned with over-crowding, inadequate facilities, “unhygienic conditions,” and the exporting by bus of the top three grades to the Fulmore School. She invited School Board Member Willie Kocurek to a St. Elmo P-TA meeting to present school development plans, where he “found himself explaining to a stacked-to-the-rafters audience just why it was unfortunately true that no new school could be provided for some time to come.” Consequently, Wagoner and others lobbied Kocurek and Superintendent Irby Carruth to breakdown a plan already in motion for one large school into three smaller neighborhood schools: the Molly Dawson School, the Jerry Joslin school, and “the