Growing room

Expansion gives KinderFrogs and StarPoint School new gym and classroom space.

Melissa Legvold likes the high ceiling and open feel while Jamie Carey thinks it’s a great place to shoot hoops.

The two six graders at the Starpoint School praised the facility’s recent expansion at a ribbon cutting ceremony Monday morning. The $750,000 addition was funded by a grant from the Morris Foundation, private donations, school fund-raisers and a fair amount of sweat equity.

 “It really is beautiful,” Marilyn Tolbert, Jean W. Roach Chair of Laboratory Schools, said at the ribbon-cutting event. “When the kids are in here playing, it’s the most beautiful of all.”

Starpoint is a laboratory school for learning disabled students that also serves as an on-campus training site for the School of Education. KinderFrogs is a second laboratory school providing early childhood education to children with Down Syndrome. Both schools also provide teacher training through the College of Education at TCU.

The program has grown from a handful of students when it founded in 1966 by M.J. and Alice S. Neeley, to 93 students today.

The recent expansion involved turning the existing gym into a classroom and two therapy/tutoring offices and building a new multipurpose room with more storage space. The new classroom accommodates 12 students and the therapy room has an observation window for parents. There was also an added ADA-compliant restroom.

The LEAP classroom was created as a transition model, in partnership with the FWISD, servicing both KinderFrogs and Starpoint students.

Tolbert said the new space will enable the school more room to invite area teachers in to observe the school’s educational therapies and techniques.  She said the new technology lab will help the school, which serves students through 6th grade, better prepare students to transition to middle schools.

Joe Monteleone, executive director of the Morris Foundation, said the Fort Worth-based charitable organization continues to be impressed with the school and the progress of its students.

“We don’t see any better results in any of the programs we support than we do here at Starpoint and Kinderfrogs,” he said. “If we could help the facility reach more students, we wanted to do so.”
Tolbert praised the Morris Foundation and its support of the school.

“Winston Churchill once said ‘No one stands taller than when he stoops to help a child, in my mind the Morris Foundation stands 30 feet tall,” she said.

For more information about KinderFrogs, visit www.kinderfrogs.tcu.edu. For information about StarPoint School, go to www.starpoint.tcu.edu.

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