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.