Richard Rodriguez
Carter English has stepped into roles he never expected to fill.
A marketing graduate of TCU’s Neeley School of Business and a walk-on to the football team, English’s professional visions focused on coaching football.
And he did that for a while, working on coaching staffs at Southern Miss, Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, and Texas State.
So, working at Higginbotham as chief business officer overseeing employee benefits at the corporate office in Fort Worth, the job he holds today, would have been a surprise to the younger English.
So, too, would have been the role of champion for early intervention education for the developmentally disabled and founder and chairman of the board of the Rise School in San Antonio, which sits on the CHRISTUS Children’s Hospital campus. The Rise School is widely considered the best in class for early intervention for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities from birth until 6 years old.
That became a circumstance in English and his wife Taylor’s lives when their daughter Isabelle — “Izzy” — was born with Down syndrome two years ago while the couple lived in San Antonio.
English had friends in Dallas with the Touchdown Club, a nonprofit created to bolster funding for options for families with children with Down syndrome, who immediately encouraged him to start a Rise School in San Antonio, one of the few big cities in Texas without one. Taylor, too, wanted a better option where few existed for children with Down syndrome. She recognized the children at Rise schools seemed to progress and advance better.
Of course, one doesn’t just snap his fingers and create a Rise school. The Englishes had some built-in disadvantages. They had just moved there, so, they didn’t know a soul. He had more than full-time professional obligations, and they had a newborn with Down syndrome.
“I was like, ‘Man, I'm not gonna start a Rise school in San Antonio,” Carter says. “But I just so happened to be reading the Bible and this verse, it’s in Genesis 50. I told Taylor and I told my mom: ‘I think we're supposed to start the Rise school.’”
And Joseph said, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today, so do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones.”
He had friends encouraging him to do so. He had a wife who recognized the lack of adequate early childhood schooling for children with disabilities. Then Carter had “coincidentally” read a Bible verse that seemed to put it all together.
“We just felt like, OK, we're just going to pursue it until the Lord closes the door,” Carter says.
The birth of their daughter had been a test of faith. And an affirmation of love.
Prenatal testing showed no indications of any abnormalities with Izzy. So, when the parents discovered at birth that Izzy had Down syndrome, they were devastated. The news shattered the dreams they had envisioned, filling them with unexpected grief, confusion, and a profound sense of loss for the life they had imagined for their child. They grappled with emotions they hadn’t prepared for, trying to come to terms with a future that suddenly looked very different from what they’d expected.
They knew no one in San Antonio, but their network, and even outside their network, immediately jumped in to offer support. Chris Hipps, who played football at SMU, was one of those. He left a voicemail on Carter’s phone.
“He has a daughter with Down syndrome,” Carter says. “On his voicemail, it's so funny because he literally starts crying talking about his daughter. He goes, ‘Here I am some stranger crying on your voicemail talking about my daughter.’
Bruce Matthews, the Pro Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman, called him. His words initially “pissed me off,” Carter says. Matthews, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, told him that even if he could, he wouldn’t change his daughter, Gwyneth.
“Because, he said, then she ceases to be the daughter that I know and love,” Carter recalls Matthews telling him. “I remember thinking at that time, and even telling Taylor, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm always going to want this to be gone.
“And now, truly, I would never take it away from her. I love exactly who she is and how she is and her personality.”
Says Taylor: “The joy that we didn't have the day she was born, we are experiencing tenfold today. We know that God created her for a reason, but you don't always get to see that purpose played out. And we're getting to see that, so I'm so grateful for it.”
The parents had a new purpose and a job to do. Carter immersed himself in literature about Down syndrome and development.
He also had a calling to start a Rise school in San Antonio. Carter was transferred back to Fort Worth, but he remains committed to finishing what he started. Izzy today goes to KinderFrogs, which has a specialization in early intervention.
The first Rise school was established in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, by Alabama football coach Gene Stallings, whose son John Mark was born with Down. Stallings devoted his life to promoting projects that advanced education and quality of life for the developmentally disabled.
The first person Carter called was his best friend from high school at Highland Park — Clayton Kershaw, the professional baseball pitcher who plays for Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers.
“He said, ‘We'll be the first ones to support this. We'll give you $50,000,’” says Carter. “And so that was kind of the first thing that made me start thinking like, OK, maybe people will buy this.”
Each of their families also pitched in. Higginbotham employees, individually and through its community fund, have given roughly $500,000, Carter says. And, Taylor says, “San Antonio loves to give.”
Carter asked John Poston with the Touchdown Club in Dallas to come to San Antonio to give counsel. The Touchdown Club’s name derives from the concept of “touching Down” syndrome. Poston had established the Rise school in Dallas. Carter also arranged a meeting with Cris Daskevich, the CEO of CHRISTUS Children’s Hospital, hoping it could replicate what Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston had done by establishing a Rise School on its campus.
“She walks in and I'm about to start my deal, and she goes, ‘Hey, before you start, I want to tell you two things,’” Carter says. “She said, ‘First of all I went to TCU, go Frogs. Second of all, I came from Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. I know and believe in the Rise school.’ And she said, ‘Before you begin, we're in and we're gonna help.’”
Daskevich told the meeting that a study around neurodevelopmentally delayed kids in San Antonio, ages 0 to 6, found that the city was 25 years behind the other top 10 cities in the United States when it came to that specific population. As a result of that, the hospital had just awarded a national grant to focus on it. CHRISTUS had also just hired physicians with expertise in autism, spina bifida, and Down syndrome to move into San Antonio just for this.
The timing of all this, she said, was “crazy.”
CHRISTUS helped with an infusion of $500,000 into the effort and a building it rents to the Rise school for a $1 a year.
What started as a nightmare evolved into a beautiful story with love as the centerpiece.
“God continued to open doors,” Taylor says. “It was a God thing how everything happened. He just put us in contact with the right people at the right time.”
