LITTLE ROCK — El Dorado won its second consecutive Class 6A high school football state championship last Saturday night.
It seemed that most of the city’s residents were dressed in purple and seated on the west side of Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium. High school football, however, isn’t the only thing that El Dorado has going for it these days.
The city clearly is on a roll. The shift in momentum began in January 2007 when Murphy Oil Corp. announced a donation of $50 million to create the El Dorado Promise scholarship program. The premise was simple: Go to school, graduate, get a scholarship. The scholarship money was made available for use in colleges and universities anywhere in the country.
“For students, this is life-changing,” El Dorado Superintendent Bob Watson said that winter day. “Students who have worked hard but would not have been able to attend college because of financial limitations now have the means to do so.”
Since the sweeping scholarship initiative was announced, families have moved to the city from 31 states and 13 foreign countries. Enrollment has grown by more than 4 percent in the district, and the percentage of El Dorado High School graduates who enroll in college now exceeds state and national college enrollment rates. Almost a quarter of them are firstgeneration college students.
Last spring, former President George W. Bush was the keynote speaker for what’s known as academic signing day. Members of the class of 2010 enrolled in schools ranging from Johns Hopkins University to the University of Michigan.
Two years following the originalannouncement, those associated with the El Dorado Promise unveiled an expansion to allow more flexibility for students and their families. Students with scholarships and grants covering tuition now have the option to apply El Dorado Promisefunds toward other expenses such as room, board, books and additional needs.
“Living in Arkansas and getting the lottery scholarships is wonderful, but now living in El Dorado just got a lot better,” Watson said.
Meanwhile, the El Dorado Education Foundation has invested almost $2 million into the school district during the past dozen years. The foundation assisted in the establishment of the nation’s first elementary and secondary school endowed-chair program with experts hired in the areas of mathematics, science, foreign language and literacy. You expect to find endowed chairs at colleges and universities, not in public school districts.
The momentum continued to build for a few months after the original El Dorado Promise was announced when the city’s voters approved a tax to fund economic development projects. The 1-cent sales tax increase has, among other things, helped fund the construction of a multipurpose conference center that’s about to open.
Murphy Oil pledged $5 million toward the conference center, which will be operated by South Arkansas Community College. The $14.4 million, 50,764-square-foot facility will include a large meeting space that will seat 1,000 people, smaller meeting rooms, a student union for the community college, a cafe and student support services. The college is also building a three-story health science center. The 38,000-square-foot facilitywill have classroom space, specialized labs, a computer center and a lecture hall.
Mayor Mike Dumas said during a groundbreaking event last year that these facilities will tie together “two of our biggest assets in ways that were unimaginable, the best downtown in the nation and the college.”
Speaking of downtown, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Center honored El Dorado last year with one of only five Great American Main Street awards. The awards go to those communities that have best revitalized their downtown business districts.
The Main Street Center called downtown El Dorado “a shopping, cultural and entertainment destination” and noted that with more than 65 “specialty shops, restaurants and accommodations, a busy nightlife and a live music venue that is the envy of the state, it is easy to see why.”
“I remember the first trek I made into the downtown square, and I told everyone . . . that I thought the best downtown square I’ve seen is in El Dorado,” Gov. Mike Beebe said last year.
Another piece of El Dorado’s revitalization effort was voter approval of a millage increase to pay for a new high school building that will open next fall. The school will feature an arena seating 2,200 people, a theater with top-notch acoustics and a massive skylight.
The design committee for the facility toured schools from Texas to Utah to come up with ideas. The 317,000-square-foot high school will have a collegiate look that features white columns.
The original boom in El Dorado began in 1921 when oil was discovered. Now there’s a new boom in Union County that goes far beyondthe oil field and the football field.
Free-lance columnist Rex Nelson is the senior vice president for government relations and public outreach at The Communications Group in Little Rock.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/11/2010