By Bill Zeeble, KERA 90.1 Reporter
Dallas, TX –
Bill Zeeble, KERA 90.1 reporter: Castle Hills Elementary could be "Any School, U.S.A." Every weekday, more than 700 K-through-5th graders fill this relatively new building - their art, history or social studies projects lining the hallway walls. But here's a difference.
Mona Effler, LEAP Teacher, Castle Hills Elementary: We received over $126,000. It'll be dispersed part of it this spring and part this fall, for the educational benefit of the children.
Zeeble: Mona Effler teaches the school's gifted and talented students. Her room boasts a DVD, video and web connected projector and interactive screen the size of a chalk board. It can show regular videos; it can lead students through virtual science lessons.
Effler: This happens to be dissecting a frog. I could also do an owl pellet and there's also a squid. There are a number programs here that do shark dissection. I can actually introduce it to them here before they have to do it in real life.
Zeeble: This is several thousand dollars worth of high-tech tools the school couldn't afford without money from the local, non-profit, Castle Hills Schools Foundation. Developer Chris Bright, son of football coaching legend Bum Bright, started building Castle Hills on some family land in 1997. He wanted to recreate, in part, what he says he had growing up in Highland Park, where he raised his family: good schools, helped with money from a local foundation.
Chris Bright, Developer: Education is an important thing to people and so we created it in order to enhance the education the residents in this community would be able to receive.
Zeeble: It's the funding mechanism that's unique. Residents here of course pay property taxes on their homes that sell for roughly $300,000 to nearly $700,000. But aside from some money the Bright family put into the education fund, it grows the half percent transfer of all property sales transacted here.
Bright: When you're typically seeing closing costs on a single family home sale running seven percent anyway, an extra half percent kind of gets buried in the overall type of deal.
Zeeble: When Bright sells a plot of land to a home builder, even he pays the fee. Some of the Castle Hills home builders love it, because it's openly marketed as an enhancement. Residents like John Lopez appreciate the fund because they directly benefit, since some foundation money goes to residents attending college.
John Lopez, Castle Hills resident: It's $2,000 a year if you take above 23 hours. By the time we're all said and done, between all three of my kids going through college, it'll be about $26,000. This is money my kids can use. They've earned it. They've been good students. This is money they can use for extra expenses.
Zeeble: And soon, money in the school fund will also help Castle Hills teachers pay for advanced degrees. Before Mona Effler started teaching here, she'd already completed some hours towards a Masters degree.
Effler: And I plan to finish it through them. My students will benefit from that. They've already benefited from part of the Masters I paid for myself.
Zeeble: To those who follow charitable education funding, like Bill Porter, with the Portland, Oregon-based Grant Makers for Education, this program stands alone.
Bill Porter, Director, Grant Makers For Education: I don't know that I've heard of other efforts quite like the one you've described. It strikes me as an innovative approach. This solution seems like an innovative approach to getting more resources so schools which can develop educational resources in buildings in a quicker way so they serve more kids.
Zeeble: The Castle Hills Schools fund has distributed more than a million dollars so far to college-attending residents, and the eleven schools Castle Hills children attend. The nearby Lantana development has a similar program, borrowed from Castle Hills. Other communities are also looking at it, and Chris Bright will readily share program details with them. For KERA 90.1, I'm Bill Zeeble.
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