Coppell Chronicle Vol. 3, No. 39
Coppell Chronicle Vol. 3, No. 39
Mockingbird Continues Neighborly Tradition • CFBISD Begins Training Aspiring Firefighters • Dream of Ice Cream Shop May Melt Away • Grapevine Hopes to Add Second Waterpark
This edition includes four in-depth articles per usual, plus a restaurant roundup and a few congratulatory notes before we get to the Chronicle Crumbs. If you enjoy what you read, hit that “like” button and let me know in the comments what you found to be particularly informative or entertaining.
Mockingbird Continues Neighborly Tradition
A colorful cast of characters got a lesson in character last week by cleaning up some fall color. For the 11th consecutive autumn, the students at Mockingbird Elementary collected leaves in yards close to their school during the annual event known as Rakesgiving.
This tradition, which always happens on the Friday before Thanksgiving, was established by Jennifer Braafladt, a fourth-grade teacher who has worked at Mockingbird since 1999. She’ll admit, though, that she didn’t dream it up. Braafladt borrowed the idea after hearing another teacher discuss it at a Schools of Character conference in Washington, D.C.
“We were like, ‘That’s so awesome. Let’s do it,’” Braafladt said. “And we just came back and jumped right in.”
On Friday morning, I tagged along as Braafladt’s fourth-graders and their buddies from Cindy Hubbard’s kindergarten class picked up leaves from Jeff and Phyllis Fink’s yard on Hawk Lane. The Finks’ three adult children all went to Mockingbird, where Braafladt and Hubbard were among their teachers.
“We view it as a great event to allow the younger kids to perform some community service and also get to know some neighbors,” Jeff Fink told me via email. “As you may have noticed, we have three large oak trees in our front yard, and unfortunately for us (good for the kids), the first big leaf dump of the year always seems to closely follow this event!”
Braafladt was in prime teacher mode as the students assembled in front of the Finks’ house. “Wave at me if you can hear me,” she said. After a sufficient number of kids waved, she asked them, “Where do the points go — down or up?” Thankfully, her Mavericks all knew “down” was the answer. “Just make small little swoops in piles,” she told them, “and then we’ll open up bags.”
The bags were supplied by Jabo’s Ace Hardware, where her husband, Todd Braafladt, is a manager. He used to work at Lowe’s, which donated a collection of rakes to Mockingbird years ago. The bagged leaves were bound for the compost pile at the community garden next to the Coppell Senior and Community Center.
A fourth-grader named Darren, who is new to Mockingbird this year, told me this was his first time to ever rake leaves. Same goes for his kindergarten buddy, Edison. But another fourth-grader named Dean was participating in his fifth edition of Rakesgiving, and he had a chance to demonstrate his veteran skills. When his rake broke, Dean dispensed with the handle and used the rake’s head to scoop leaves into bags.
Befitting an event designed to teach a character lesson, Darren was aghast when he saw another kid wielding a rake that Edison had been using. “You can’t just take his rake,” Darren said. “Edison, did he ask you if he could use it?” Edison assured him that permission had been requested and granted.
Mockingbird isn’t the only Coppell ISD campus surrounded by houses, but none of the district’s other elementary schools has copied the Rakesgiving idea. Braafladt said she isn’t surprised by that.
“We all sort of respect the little traditions that each start,” she said. “It’s just a big undertaking for sort of a crazy time of year.”
CFBISD Begins Training Aspiring Firefighters
More than three dozen students in Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD are taking a class this fall that could help them become firefighters.
The district — which includes portions of Coppell and Irving — offers several career-oriented academies at its four high schools. Creekview High School added a Fire Academy this semester after the Board of Trustees approved an agreement with the City of Carrollton.
“This is a great example of our community identifying a need, and then our community coming together to figure out how to meet that need,” Trustee Sally Derrick said before the unanimous vote on Aug. 3. “These are, I imagine, kids that will probably stay in our community, and they’ll be our first responders, which is really exciting.”
Those kids would be following in the footsteps of Christopher Holterhoff, who graduated from Newman Smith High School in 1999 and has been a Carrollton firefighter since 2015. The aforementioned agreement calls for the school district to help pay his salary. He’s the Fire Academy’s first teacher, but as an added bonus, he also serves as the firefighting equivalent of a school resource officer. We talked briefly on Friday, the day after he helped a Creekview student deal with a severe allergic reaction.
“I was able to use the EpiPen that we have here at school and, basically, get his care started quicker than if I hadn’t been here,” he said.
Ideally, Holterhoff’s students won’t follow in his exact footsteps. He admits that he “just kind of coasted through school.” After discovering a knack for scientific research at Trinity University in San Antonio, “even though I didn’t like it,” he ended up with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Rice University. He earned that degree when the economy was still reeling from the Great Recession, so he became a 911 dispatcher to make ends meet. Connections he made doing that job eventually led to him becoming a firefighter — after he got serious about his health and lost approximately 100 pounds.
Because of his meandering experiences, Holterhoff is determined to help his students find direction and a purpose.
“I really wish we would have been doing stuff like this when I was going through high school,” he said. “It would have saved me a bunch of circuitous pathways that I probably didn’t necessarily need to go down.”
CFBISD’s Fire Academy is based on similar programs in Arlington ISD and Lewisville ISD. Holterhoff’s inaugural cohort of freshmen are taking a “Disaster Response” class that’s based on a federal training program called Community Emergency Response Team. Two years from now, they will start taking dual-credit courses at North Central Texas College.
JoAnn Gillen oversees CFBISD’s career and technical education programs as the district’s Chief of Social Emotional Learning and Postsecondary Readiness. During the August board meeting, she said Fire Academy graduates could be fielding job offers before reaching the age of 20.
Carrollton pays rookie firefighters $75,000 per year. Coppell starts them at $71,339 but also offers a $5,000 signing bonus. Irving’s base salary for firefighters is $76,092.
“To be a 19-year-old, and be able to have that opportunity from your high school, is amazing,” Gillen said.
Writing about the Fire Academy has been on my backburner for a while. What finally sparked this article? Holterhoff and his students produced a public service announcement about how to safely fry a Thanksgiving turkey:
Dream of Ice Cream Shop May Melt Away
As someone who lives within walking distance of Old Town, I was excited to learn that an ice cream shop is in the works for that part of Coppell. If the whole thing gets derailed over a dumpster, I’m going to be down in the dumps.
Coppell resident Diana Ahmad owns the two-story building under construction at 767 West Main Street. The property’s zoning calls for retail uses on the first floor and a pair of apartments on the second floor. On Thursday, the Coppell Planning and Zoning Commission held a public hearing on Ahmad’s request to change the ground-level zoning to allow restaurants.
Ahmad plans to devote about 25 percent of the space on the first floor to a shop called Mr. Henry’s Real Fruit Ice Cream. “This is a new concept from New Zealand that involves mixing fresh fruit and ice cream,” Development Services Administrator Matt Steer wrote in a report for the commissioners. (Last July, The New York Times published an article called “New Zealand’s Fruit-Rich Ice Cream Gets a Sugary American Makeover.”) The rest of the first floor would be reserved for a restaurant to be named later.
Unlike retail shops, restaurants are required to have a dumpster on the premises. The exact location of that dumpster was the contentious aspect of Thursday’s hearing.
Ahmad and her husband, Ahmad Khatib, want the dumpster to touch their southern property line, but Steer said it should be at least as far from their property line as their building. Ideally, he said, it would be in the middle of the building’s rear parking lot.
“I’ve been trying to work through this,” Steer told the commissioners. “Normally, we work through the issues before we bring cases to you, and this is just something that we disagree on.”
Ahmad said they’d like to enclose the dumpster in a brick structure that would match their building, but she said there isn’t enough space to do so in the middle of their lot.
“I’ve never seen a property, really, with, like, a dumpster in the middle between parking spots,” she said. “Like, here will be parking, here will be parking, here’s a dumpster.”
That scenario would be the preference of Ann Dragon. The Coppell resident and her husband, Elias Dragon, own the property directly to the south, where they operate a business called Main Street Retirement Planning.
“For the same reason they don’t want it in the middle, because they’re concerned about parking their car next to it, is the same reason I’m concerned,” Dragon said. “And I’m not driving the need for this dumpster.”
After 48 minutes of discussion and debate, the commissioners recommended approval of the zoning change on the condition that the dumpster be placed in the middle of the lot. On Saturday, Ahmad told me that added condition may be a deal-breaker. If she has to put a dumpster in the middle of her parking lot, she may not pursue food-oriented tenants after all.
The ultimate authority lies with the City Council. Ahmad and Dragon will each have a chance to influence the council’s decision during another public hearing scheduled for Dec. 12.
Grapevine Hopes to Add Second Waterpark
When you drive into Grapevine via Sandy Lake Road, there’s a convenience store, a coffee shop, and a tire business to your left. To your right, there’s a vacant lot — for now. A developer has big, huge, humongous plans for that land just outside Coppell’s city limits.
Stand Rock Partners is a Wisconsin-based company that builds and operates waterpark resorts. The firm aims to anchor that 33-acre parcel with a park featuring indoor and outdoor waterslides. The park would be attached to a 12-story hotel that would include 495 rooms. The hotel would be augmented by another building boasting 166 time-share condominiums. Here’s what the whole complex will look like, if it ever gets built.
In December of 2018, the Grapevine City Council approved Stand Rock’s request for an “entertainment and attraction overlay.” That’s a planning tool designed to “promote progressive land development on tracts of land with maximum flexibility in the design of entertainment and attraction projects.” That overlay expired after a year, but the council approved a new one in October of 2022. Last month, they granted Stand Rock a one-year extension.
That extension was part of the council’s consent agenda, which means it was one of several proposals approved on a single motion without debate. For more details, I had to watch the council’s meeting from Oct. 18, 2022.
On that date, Stand Rock’s Stuart Zadra acknowledged the elephant in the room — or should I say the wolf in the room? Grapevine already has an indoor waterpark. Great Wolf Lodge is only 3 miles from the land where Zadra’s company intends to build, but he said competing with the Great Wolf chain will be nothing new for Stand Rock. Both firms have waterparks in the resort town of Wisconsin Dells, Wisc.
“We play well together, and we play well together because kids love water,” Zadra said. “And that’s why we want to bring this great concept to Grapevine, Texas.”
Council Member Duff O’Dell asked Zadra how many people Stand Rock will employ in Grapevine. He said his company operates a similarly sized resort in Sevierville, Tenn., that has about 450 people on staff.
“That’s a lot of employees for that property,” Duff said, and she wondered where Stand Rock hoped to find them. Zadra said his company imports student workers via J-1 visas when necessary.
“Obviously, we try to attract local first, but when we can’t, then we use the J-1 visa to bring in people that work on our behalf,” he said.
Zadra told the council his firm planned “to put a shovel in the ground in the second quarter of 2023” so the resort could open by the spring of 2025. That obviously didn’t happen. Now that the one-year extension of the overlay has been granted, maybe we should add 12 months to each of those projections.
“This is a really exciting project,” Council Member Sharron Rogers said during the 2022 meeting. “We’ve been working on this for several years now. It will be another jewel in Grapevine’s crown, and I look forward to seeing it come to fruition in the coming months.”
Restaurant Roundup
• We’re going to have to wait a bit for our Timbits. According to a form filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, construction of the Tim Hortons restaurant at Freeport Parkway and State Highway 121 — which would be the Canadian chain’s first location in North Texas — isn’t scheduled to begin until March. The project could take as long as a year to complete. The same timeline applies to the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen next door.
• Way back in January, I reported that Popeyes planned to open another one of its chicken emporiums within the boundaries of Coppell ISD, specifically on the site of the shuttered Irving Diner on North Belt Line Road. I noticed last week that the diner has finally been demolished.
• The leasing brochure for the Point West shopping center indicates that Dumont Creamery & Cafe plans to occupy a space in the building along South Belt Line Road that houses only First Watch at the moment.
• Egg Mania, a New Jersey-based chain of restaurants that offers “egg-centric Indian street flavors” to customers in seven states, is expanding to Valley Ranch. They’re eyeing a spot in the Walton Boulevard building anchored by a Patel Brothers grocery store.
• CEC Entertainment, which is headquartered within the Irving portion of Coppell ISD, plans to remove the animatronic bands from all but one of its 550-plus Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, I learned from NBC 5. The surviving edition of Munch’s Make-Believe Band will keep raising their arms and blinking their eyes in Northridge, Calif., as reported by The Washington Post.
Congratulations are in Order
• Congratulations to the Coppell Cowboys varsity football team, which overcame a shaky third quarter on Thursday to secure a 42-23 victory over the Jesuit Rangers in the second round of the playoffs. Senior receiver Baron Tipton caught three touchdowns from junior quarterback Edward Griffin in the first quarter, and he punctuated one of them with a standing backflip. Next up is a regional semifinal against the Byron Nelson Bobcats. That game is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Saturday at the venue that I still insist on calling The Ballpark in Arlington.
• Congratulations to the Coppell Chamber of Commerce, which recently earned a 3-Star Accreditation from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Only 199 of the approximately 7,000 chambers nationwide have attained such status. The Coppell chamber is among 44 accredited chambers in Texas. “This accreditation exemplifies how the Coppell Chamber of Commerce is performing and operating at a very high level for the heartbeat of this organization — our membership,” President and CEO Ellie Braxton said.
• Congratulations to the Taylor’s Gift Foundation, which raised $275,000 on Thursday during its “Singo Bingo” event at Venue Forty50 in Addison. Founded by Coppell residents Todd and Tara Storch, the Taylor’s Gift Foundation provides families of organ and tissue donors with free grief support after losing their loved one. Click here to see photos from the event.
Chronicle Crumbs
• In July of 2021, Coppell and a few other warehouse-heavy cities sued Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar over his proposed changes to the distribution of sales tax revenues for online transactions. The trial in Travis County’s 250th Civil District Court (Judge Karin Crump presiding) was originally scheduled to begin in May of 2022, but then it got delayed until January of 2023. And then it got delayed until May of 2023. And then it got delayed until November of 2023. And then it got delayed until January of 2024. Last week, I noticed that it has been delayed yet again. The latest start date is May 6, 2024.
• On Tuesday, the Coppell City Council approved a zoning change that will allow retail businesses to occupy the live-work units that Chris Collins is developing on South Coppell Road. They also approved plans for a 257,600-square-foot warehouse augmented by a pair of two-story office buildings on vacant land north of State Highway 121, due east of Business 121. But the council’s hearing on the case I wrote about in “Senior Living Proposed Near DART Bridge” was delayed until their Dec. 12 meeting.
• On Nov. 10, Irving police shut down the westbound lanes of Interstate 635 near MacArthur Boulevard due to a fatality accident. Four days later, police said the collision was caused by a wrong-way driver who was trying to kill herself. Diamond Brown, 22, was charged with manslaughter and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She was allegedly driving 88 miles per hour when her Nissan Altima crashed into a vehicle driven by Fatima El Adel, who also survived. El Adel’s passenger, Zainab Monsoori, died at the scene.
• If you think there’s too much traffic on Round Grove Road in Lewisville, then this will be bad news: Palladium USA plans to build a 90-unit apartment complex on the northeast corner of Round Grove and Uecker Drive. Per a form filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, construction is supposed to begin next April and last until the fall of 2025.
• The City of Coppell is encouraging residents to patronize local retailers on Small Business Saturday. Hey, I know how you could support a Coppell business during your holiday shopping:
Community Calendar
Sammy Miller and the Congregation: If you would enjoy “a bracing dose of joyful jazz performed with infectious theatricality,” then be at the Coppell Arts Center at 6 p.m. today.
Holidays at Heritage Park: The Coppell Historical Society invites the community to Heritage Park between 6 and 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 1 to enjoy Christmas carols and a Christmas tree lighting.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: Theatre Coppell will stage nine performances of this Christmas comedy at the Coppell Arts Center. The first show is scheduled for 8 p.m. on Dec. 1.
Holiday Parade and Tree Lighting: Coppell’s annual lighted parade will begin at 6 p.m. on Dec. 2 at Saint Ann Catholic Parish and end at Andrew Brown Park East, where a 65-foot tree will be lit.
HarpEssence Holiday Concert: A free show featuring four concert grand harps is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Dec. 3 at the Coppell Arts Center.
The Four C Notes: The Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons tribute group will present two Christmas shows at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Dec. 9 at the Coppell Arts Center.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Glad to read the harpists are coming back for another show! We had just been talking about the show when they were here two years ago. Wonderful news! Not so sure about that waterpark though. Thanks for keeping us up to speed Dan!