Texas Schools Get Huge Improvements from Wind Farm Revenue

Blackwell's new $3 million football stadium, which wind money helped pay for.

The on-site wind turbine can produce up to 40 percent of the school's electricity needs.

When people complain about the weather here, Abe Gott, the school superintendent, just smiles. A visit to the campus shows why. Behind the 1930s-era façade of the Blackwell school building looms a distinctly 21st-century sight: a wind turbine. Energy development capitalizing on the high winds in the area has injected sluggish rural communities with new economic lifeblood. More than one local resident has called it the “windfall,” and it has bestowed hundreds of millions of dollars on West Texas schools.

By the 2018-19 school year, Gott’s district will have received about $35 million from a deal it brokered with a wind farm company in 2005. On the school grounds, $15 million from a combination of bond and wind farm revenue has paid for a new football stadium and academic complex attached to the original school building. About $28 million sits in a foundation earmarked for scholarships; graduates receive $3,000 for each year they have spent in the district, which they can put toward any type of professional advancement, from a beauty school certificate to a bachelor’s degree. The influx of wealth has also enabled the district to buy an iPad for every student, starting in the seventh grade.

“What I wanted is, if you grew up in a town of 350 people in West Texas, that should not work against you,” Gott said. “We can send you to Harvard, we can send you to Baylor, we can send you to Texas Tech — we can send you anywhere because we have the pathway to get there.” Even without more money from wind companies, their presence still helps districts by technically allowing them to lower their taxes by adding more property value on the tax rolls.

Meanwhile, other investments that districts put in place with money from wind deals are beginning to make their mark. The Roscoe School District will receive a total of $11 million over 10 years. It has used the money to build a state-of-the-art academic facility — the Eon Center for Innovation and Higher Education, named for the alternative energy company that made it possible — and to hire instructional coaches, a new dean, and an early college director. Kim Alexander, the superintendent, said “Without the wind company, we would not have had the means to even enter into the early- college arena.”

As an early-college school, Roscoe joins a handful of Texas schools that partner with local community colleges to let students begin taking college courses in ninth grade instead of in their junior year. Depending on how well they perform, students can graduate with an associate’s degree at no additional cost. The goal, Alexander said, is for 90 percent of Roscoe students to do that by 2015. “We think it’s going to be a significant way to develop a model to break the poverty cycle,” Alexander said.

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