Thumbs up to Bill Farrell and Elaine Farrell for importing to Dallas the “I Have a Dream Project,” a program to fund the college education of ghetto kids, conceived by New York industrialist and philanthropist Eugene Lang. Lang drew national media attention after promising a sixth-grade class in East Harlem that he’d personally pay the college tuition of every student who applied himself scholastically and graduated from high school. The Farrells are enlisting the support of Dallas business and civic leaders to raise $1.3 million for a scholarship fund that would pay college tuition for about 1,000 Dallas Independent School District sixth-graders attending six West Dallas and South Dallas learning centers. The project is essentially designed to motivate students, many of them the children of welfare parents, to stay in school. Although twenty-five other cities have reportedly expressed an interest in the program, Lang chose Dallas as the first project participant. For the past five years the Farrells have guided the activities of Dallas’s STEP Foundation-Strategies to Elevate People. STEP, which sports a $500,000 annual budget, is engaged in an array of volunteer activities ranging from working with high school drop-outs to cleaning up public housing projects.
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