As the parent of three daughters under the age of five, I've had growing anxiety about how to navigate our educational options.

I live a few blocks from the Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff, and there are several Dallas public elementary schools within a mile or so from my house. Rosemont Elementary is the popular choice, but we are a block outside the attendance boundary area, in the James Hogg Elementary zone.

The middle-class families in my neighborhood have for years exclusively chosen Rosemont, and those outside of the Rosemont boundary simply transferred. As a result, 76 percent of Rosemont's student body is low income, quite a bit lower than the district average of 89 percent. Hogg's student body is 95 percent low income.

But Bishop Arts' popularity in the past decade lead to an explosion of middle class families with young children. Suddenly Rosemont is unable to accommodate transfers, and families like mine must explore other options.

While doing so, I came across research that concluded the one thing schools can do that has made a consistent difference in improving performance, that actually cut the achievement gap in half, was integration. Specifically, income integration. And yet it is rarely discussed or attempted.

But DISD leaders are aware of this and trying to do something about it. Last spring the district, led by Chief of Transformation and Integration Mike Koprowski, started some public conversations to actively woo the middle class back to Dallas public schools.

I realized that the best thing I could do to support the elementary school in my neighborhood is to enroll my kids there. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. If you think I'm experimenting with my children's future, you and my mother have that in common. But the research I've read in the past year indicates that my children will have success in life regardless of the schools they attend. Both my wife and I are college educated and we are comparatively upwardly mobile. And regrettably, those two factors are the biggest indicators of educational achievement in America today.

So with my oldest turning four in early June, we looked at registering for pre-kindergarten at Hogg. But it turns out that pre-K in DISD is only available to low-income or military families. The rationale for this is sound: with the current levels of funding, kids that are the most at-risk are given the highest priority. And yet Hogg is currently under 70 percent capacity, which means there will be empty seats in the pre-K classroom this year.

So I reached out to my trustee and to a few other DISD staff members to inquire about paying for a pre-K spot that would otherwise go unused. This had not been an option in DISD in the past, but given the rapid growth in our neighborhood, our proximity to downtown, and the amount of excess capacity at the school, Hogg seemed an ideal test case.

A month later DISD rolled out a pilot program to test paid pre-K at five elementary school campuses, all north of Interstate-30. Two of the five have capacity ratings higher than 100 percent.

Closing pre-K to middle class families poses a significant challenge to DISD, in my opinion. Most families I know with working parents need child care, and pre-K is a natural transition from daycare to school. If the most effective solution to DISD's underperformance is to attract the middle class back to public school, leaving them out of the on-ramp to elementary school seems like a significant oversight.

The problem is funding. The State of Texas has cut education funding to critical levels, and DISD has been forced to make cuts accordingly. There isn't enough money to do everything that the district needs to do, yet given the opportunity to present voters with the choice to raise property taxes to expand early childhood education and two other proven programs, the DISD board voted no.

There are good things happening at DISD. Schools are improving, and educational outcomes for kids who desperately need every opportunity are moving in the right direction at many schools. But only four out of 225 schools in the district are truly diverse in terms of socio-economic status (between 40 percent and 60 percent low-income) primarily because the middle class has abandoned DISD.

I hope we can invest more time as a city understanding the impact concentrated poverty is having on our neighborhoods and our kids' education, and begin making conscious decisions to make it as easy for middle class families to opt back in to Dallas public schools.

Rob Shearer is a parent living in Oak Cliff. Twitter: @robshearer