Downtown Dallas Inc. kicked off North Texas Giving Day at the AT&T Discovery District In downtown Dallas, September 15, 2025. The video board is reflected in a plaza sculpture.
Tom Fox/Staff Photographer
A southern Dallas educational nonprofit is asking donors to help celebrate a milestone anniversary in a big way.
Beacon Hill Preparatory Institute provides in-school and after-school tutoring to more than 1,000 students who need extra support to catch up to their peers. It’s one of more than 3,000 charitable organizations that are raising money as a part of North Texas Giving Day, which is Thursday.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the nonprofit organization’s founding. To mark the occasion, leaders hope to raise $200,000 in private donations, said Kayla Carthel, Beacon Hill’s development manager. The organization already has two matching pledges of $60,000 lined up, putting organizers well on their way to that goal, she said.
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Beacon Hill provides small-group tutoring to struggling students in 21 schools in southern Dallas. Tutors work with groups of three or four students at a time, said Charnella Derry, Beacon Hill’s president and founder. The small group nature of the program is critical, she said, because it allows tutors to tailor their instruction to students’ individual needs in a way that’s impossible for a teacher working with a class of 25 students. The small group also becomes a safe space for students, many of whom feel self conscious about their academic struggles, she said.
Most of the students who work with Beacon Hill tutors are two to three grade levels behind where they should be, Derry said. Beacon Hill can point to numbers suggesting it’s helping those students catch up. Last year, the number of students in the program who tested two or more grade levels behind decreased by 76% in math and 71% in reading.
Education researchers say high-impact tutoring like the program Beacon Hill offers can be a highly effective way of helping struggling students catch up. Over the past six years, districts have invested millions in tutoring programs they hoped would help students make up ground they lost during the pandemic. Those programs often showed less success than school leaders hoped.
In a June 2024 report from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, researchers concluded the disappointing returns were largely due to logistical problems that arose when districts tried to scale those programs up quickly. Tutoring was effective at helping students recover academically, researchers said, but districts struggled to provide as many hours of tutoring as students needed.
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Private donations are critical to Beacon Hill’s future, said Carthel, the development manager. Since the pandemic, inflation has roiled school district budgets. State lawmakers boosted the per-pupil funding districts receive last year, but not enough to bring them back to the buying power they had in 2019. That means schools are less able to afford the services Beacon Hill offers, Carthel said.
As school budgets get tighter, Beacon Hill is leaning harder on individual donors, corporate sponsors and foundations to make up the difference, Carthel said. Among other efforts, the organization is inviting foundations and corporate donors to adopt a school, covering the cost of tutoring for that campus.
Ultimately, she said, leaders hope to be able to continue to offer students the support they need to catch up academically, at no cost to their families.
“We just want them to come and be seen, and be known, and get to learn in a safe and nurturing environment,” she said.
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The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.