Hilary Prine Baker and Brenda Prine
Dr. Brenda Prine, founder and former director of the Lake Highlands High School College and Career Center, died last week surrounded by her loving family. She’d been bravely fighting metastatic breast cancer.
Prine taught English before becoming a school counselor, but she really hit her stride when she and other brilliant minds conspired to create LHHS’ College and Career Center, where students could explore (with Prine’s expert assistance) options on where to go to school and how to pay for it. She took particular pride in finding programs and funds for first generation students — sometimes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other prestigious houses of learning across the country. She also helped families whose parents held multiple degrees between them but still found the process baffling.
In the early years, Prine’s salary was funded by contributions to Wild for Cats — the high school’s academic booster club. Wild for Cats began by funding teacher wish lists, but educators were so committed to Prine’s mission that they happily agreed to see her receive the bulk of donated dollars. After a few years, Richardson ISD officials could easily see the success of the program and funded academic booster clubs at all four high schools (and salaries for all four directors) via district funding.
“Brenda can work with kids who’ve never even thought that college was a possibility,” then-principal Peggy Dillon told parents at a fundraiser for Wild for Cats. “They believed the best they could do was to work in fast food, landscaping or office cleaning jobs. Now we’re seeing kids having opportunities they’ve never had before. There is money out there (for scholarships and grants), but the process can be complicated and changes yearly. Through Brenda’s work, we’re seeing unbelievable results.”
“These kids are smart,” agreed the late David Wood, a legendary English teacher at LHHS. “What happens at the high school impacts us all, and Brenda is helping to create a vision of each student’s future that spreads throughout the school. She shows them where they can go.”
Prine was born Brenda Kay Jenkins in Nashville, Tennessee, on February 26, 1951 as one of nine children. She met Bruce Prine at Baylor University, and they married in Dallas in 1977. Their children, Andrew, Hilary and Preston, all graduated from LHHS.
You may read her full obituary here. A memorial will be held at Lake Highlands United Methodist Church at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, December 9.