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Sep 14, 2009 10:32 pm US/Central
Billionaire Wants Local School Program Duplicated
GRANBURY (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
A program that started in a small North Texas school has caught the eye of a billionaire. Now, he wants the school's lessons taught to teachers around the world.
T. Boone Pickens is opening a $2.5 million training center at
Happy Hill Farm Academy in Granbury. But, he wants the school's work spread to far more children. "If you could get it in the hands of capable qualified people to do exactly what we've done here you could go from 1,000 to 10,000 to 20,000," Pickens said. "The number could go anywhere."
Jennifer Phillips is the result of the academy's work. The mother of a one-and-a-half year old could have had a very different life if she hadn't found Happy Hill as a child. "It was a real hard time," Phillips said of her childhood before going to Happy Hill. "I was coming from a broken family. My dad was terminally ill. They found a home for me. And this was, well, I called it home."
Begun in a small red school room in 1975, the private boarding academy grew with donations. Its founders, a minister and his wife, became interested in the plight of at-risk children after a local marshal asked them to care for two runaway sisters. After looking for a place for them statewide, the couple decided to offer their own academy to similar children. It offered education, moral guidance and a place of refuge.
The interdenominational Christian school offers very small class sizes, fine arts instruction, 4-H training, and reaches out to at-risk children statewide.
"They kind of reintroduced the family environment for me, reintroducing the values of home," explained Phillips, who graduated from the academy in 1994. "And I was able to take that with and embrace it and bring it down to my own family which I've started today."
"There are students from everywhere," said Sarah Shipman, the granddaughter of
school founders Ed and Gloria Shipman. "And it's really good when people come back and you can see that because they were able to get the education that they couldn't have got in other places what they've done with their lives, and hear their stories."
This is why Pickens is opening the door for more lessons. The idea is to offer instructions to teachers who want to learn how Happy Hill works -- so they can apply the same lessons in other parts of the world.
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