HOUSTON, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BBVA Compass
and KIPP Houston Public Schools
cut the ribbon Monday on the charter school system's newest campus:
the BBVA Compass Opportunity Campus, home of KIPP NEXUS Primary
School and KIPP NEXUS Middle School in Northwest Houston. The campus, which welcomed
its inaugural classes in the fall, is the first KIPP campus
nationwide to share its name with a corporate investor.
KIPP is the nation's largest charter school system, and has a
strong track record of moving low-income children to and through
college at a much higher rate than traditional public schools. In
the Houston area, 10.6 percent of
low-income eighth-graders have graduated from college within six
years, whereas 50 percent of KIPP Houston students do so. The new campus is
opening hundreds of seats in KIPP Houston, which currently has a waiting list of
more than 10,000, underscoring BBVA Compass' commitment to
Houston and to creating
opportunities in underserved communities.
"BBVA Compass' investment in KIPP Houston marks our largest ever education
investment, and there's a reason we chose KIPP," said BBVA Compass
President and CEO Onur Genç.
"Whenever you see an organization that's having such a
transformative effect on lives, especially children's lives, you
want to do whatever you can to help it go farther and create even
more opportunities."
Mike Feinberg, who co-founded
KIPP in 1994 in Houston with
fellow Teach For America teacher Dave
Levin, said he hopes the partnership with BBVA Compass can
serve as a model of public-private cooperation.
"KIPP is preparing our kids not just to do well in school, but
to do well in life," he said. "This partnership is an example where
business and K-12 can work directly together. BBVA Compass knows a
lot about growing organizations and supporting businesses, and it
can help give direction on how to shape the workforce of the
future, how to give our kids both the hard academic skills and the
soft skills — skills like teamwork, perseverance,
self-control — that they're going to need to both get
their foot in the door and also become future leaders."
The bank announced at the ribbon-cutting, which was delayed from
earlier in the year due to Hurricane Harvey, that it was giving
each KIPP NEXUS student a $25 voucher
to open a Young Savers account with
the bank. The bank's volunteers, meantime, have already spent time
at the school teaching financial education to kindergarteners.
"One of the great things about the partnership with BBVA Compass
has been the financial literacy class that's been offered to our
youngest students, our kindergarteners," said KIPP NEXUS School
Leader Lisa McClinton. "Many of our
families are not aware of what it takes to really get to college
and to sustain in college financially, and so this particular
course was a way to start the conversation with our families here
at KIPP NEXUS."
Hundreds get 'that awesome phone call'
KIPP launched a growth campaign in 2014, with a goal of adding
10 new schools in Houston to
increase its total number of area students to 18,000 by 2024. The
BBVA Compass Foundation became the lead corporate investor in the
campaign, committing $1.8 million
over five years and earning it the naming rights to one of KIPP's
campuses for 10 years. The BBVA Compass Opportunity Campus is home
to KIPP NEXUS Primary School and KIPP NEXUS Middle School. It
currently boasts 91 kindergarteners and 110 fifth-graders, and
plans to add first-grade and sixth-grade classes for the 2018-2019
school year.
KIPP Houston is a public
charter school system, and it gets most of its operating dollars
from the State of Texas. It was
prohibited from using that funding for new facilities, however,
until the Texas legislature voted
to change that for the 2018-2019 school year. Now the state's
charter schools will get $60 million
for facilities funding, which charter-school advocates say covers
only a fraction of the current facilities needs.
"The bottom line is this commitment from BBVA Compass is
enabling us to open up a school in Northwest Houston, where we didn't have any
schools and yet there were thousands of kids nearby on the
waitlist," Feinberg said. "It allowed hundreds of families that
were praying they could somehow get a seat in a KIPP school to get
that awesome phone call saying, 'Guess what, good news, your child
has a seat in our school.'"
A history of commitment
Over the past five years, BBVA Compass has invested more than
$7 million in education, much of it
in underserved areas. In 2015, for instance, the bank teamed up
with the Houston Symphony and the Houston Independent School
District to launch the Houston Symphony School Residency at Crespo
Elementary, which has a student population that's 95 percent
economically disadvantaged and 97 percent Hispanic.
As part of the program, two of the symphony's Community-Embedded
Musicians lead classroom interactions designed to enrich the lives
of every third-, fourth- and fifth-grade student at Crespo. BBVA
Compass funded the program, the first of the kind in the city,
which is structured around lessons, instrument demonstrations and
performances.
The effort was designed in part to support the bank's drive to
help build a pipeline of the kinds of creative thinkers
Houston needs to sustain its lead
in some of the most demanding disciplines that would seem to have
nothing to do with the arts — medicine, space exploration, energy,
to name a few. Studies have found that students from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds were significantly more likely to excel
in math if they'd had music education, for instance, and non-native
English speakers are also able to pick up the language faster
through the use of music.
"After Harvey, it's worth saying: We believe in Houston's bright future, we're committed to
it, and we're paying close attention to what it needs to continue
to be a model city in this 21st century," said BBVA Compass
Director of Corporate Responsibility and Reputation Reymundo
Ocañas, who played a prominent role in organizing the bank's relief
efforts after the storm. "One of the best ways we can help ensure
Houston's future is to give its
children — all of its children — the education they need so they
can one day step up and lead it into the 22nd century."
It's a sentiment KIPP's Feinberg echoes.
"Houston is such an
entrepreneurial city with so many opportunities with so many
industries, which means there's a need for a lot of talent here,"
Feinberg said. "But we're not going to get there if only 20 percent
of all of our children wind up getting college degrees. It's simply
not enough in this global economy, so we need to increase that
level. And if we do, then the race to the top is won right here in
Houston."
To learn more about BBVA Compass, visit: www.bbvacompass.com
For more news visit: www.bbva.com and
newsroom.bbvacompass.com
About BBVA Group
BBVA (NYSE: BBVA) is a
customer-centric global financial services group founded in 1857.
The Group has a strong leadership position in the Spanish market,
is the largest financial institution in Mexico, and has leading franchises in
South America and the Sunbelt
Region of the United States; it is
also the leading shareholder in Garanti, Turkey's biggest bank for market
capitalization. Its diversified business is focused on high-growth
markets and it relies on technology as a key sustainable
competitive advantage. Corporate responsibility is at the core of
its business model. BBVA fosters financial education and inclusion,
and supports scientific research and culture. It operates with the
highest integrity, a long-term vision and applies the best
practices. More information about BBVA Group can be found at
bbva.com.
About BBVA Compass
BBVA Compass is a Sunbelt-based
financial institution that operates 649 branches, including 336 in
Texas, 89 in Alabama, 63 in Arizona, 61 in California, 45 in Florida, 37 in Colorado and 18 in New Mexico. BBVA Compass ranks among the top
25 largest U.S. commercial banks based on deposit market share and
ranks among the largest banks in Alabama (2nd), Texas (4th) and Arizona (5th). BBVA Compass has been
recognized as one of the leading small business lenders by the
Small Business Administration (SBA) and ranked 5th nationally in
the total number of SBA loans originated in fiscal year 2016.
Additional information about BBVA Compass can be found at
www.bbvacompass.com. For more BBVA Compass news, follow
@BBVACompassNews on Twitter or visit
newsroom.bbvacompass.com.
About KIPP Houston Public
Schools
KIPP was founded in Houston in 1994 and has since grown to 209
public charter schools in 20 states and D.C. educating more than
88,000 children. Houston is KIPP's
largest region and educates 14,500 students in 28 schools and
serves an additional 2,300 alumni in college and beyond. While only
10.6 percent of students from low-income communities in Houston
graduate from college, 50 percent of KIPPsters, tracked from the
8th grade, graduate college. www.kipphouston.org
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SOURCE BBVA Compass