Fort Worth ISD is receiving a grant from the Texas Trust Gives Foundation to build entrepreneurial and business incubator classrooms to provide students with tools to create professional business ventures.
Texas Trust selected Fort Worth ISD as one of the recipients of its full grant, while other grant applicants received half or partial grants.
Most of the money included in the grant will go toward creating business and entrepreneurship programs at Fort Worth ISD’s World Language Institute, a 6-12 grade multilingual instruction school near Benbrook.
“World Language Institute is one of our higher performing campuses, but also most of the students are economically disadvantaged,” said Jamie Rodriguez, executive director of grants and development for Fort Worth ISD. “It’s truly an honor that our grant application got selected by Texas Trust. It’s one of those grants that really does help our schools and directly impacts the students because students are the ones that will be able to benefit from these resources.”
Fort Worth ISD leaders and administrators at World Language Institute hope the grant will expand on the “makerspace” program that is already in place. The program allows students to pursue careers related to entrepreneurship, computer science and engineering. Campus leaders at WLI hope students leave the program with the ability to start real-world business ventures.
“We want to expand the program by buying printers, presses, cutting tools, power tools and any other supplies and tools that give our students the ability to create ideas for entrepreneurship,” Rodriguez said. “It’s really about providing them the resources so they can bring any idea they have to life and get hands-on experience before they graduate high school.”
Texas Trust has dozens of school districts across the state apply for its grants each year, but Fort Worth ISD’s application stood out because of its size, so the organization’s money would be helping out the largest number of students, said Washima Huq, executive director of Texas Trust.
Texas Trust chooses who will receive their grants and how much each recipient will get through a series of meetings with its board of directors. The board uses a rubric to decide which applications showcase how their funds will be put to use. Fort Worth ISD’s application showed everything Texas Trust was looking for, Huq said.
“Applicants either get funding in partial, none or full,” Huq said. “Luckily for Fort Worth, they got the full funding. Fort Worth ISD has the most students among school districts that we partner with. And also the most that are underserved. They have a lot of diversity when it comes to students who are bilingual or first-generation college students, and so we took all of that into consideration.”
Fort Worth ISD’s entrepreneurship and business classrooms made possible through the grant will start with roughly 80 students during its first year, and it will continue funding the program for four more years after that.
Fort Worth ISD also wrote in its grant application that it hopes to replicate its entrepreneurship program at World Language Institute at more campuses across the district in coming years.
“We also hope that other districts will be inspired by this model and apply for something similar, ” Huq said. “Funding for this lasts for five years, so you’ll have five different cohorts of students experiencing this. This type of grant really allows schools to be innovative. It gives them resources that they normally don’t have access to.”
