My son began 10th grade this year at a brand new high school: Boerne Samuel V. Champion High School in, you guessed it, Boerne, Texas. The school was named after a beloved, lifelong resident of Boerne who was also a school principal. Sam Champion died a few years ago, and the school is named in his honor.
This is a gorgeous school, nestled among live oak trees. One of the things I like most about the school is its commitment to water reclamation. You can see evidence of this in the photo below. The water tower is not merely an architectural element, but a functional part of a campus-wide water reclamation system. All of the roofs of the school act as gathering sources for rainwater. And the condensation from the air conditioning (a lot of water in Texas!) is also collected. The net result, in an average year, will be ten million gallons of water to be used for landscaping. (They don’t make students drink rain water.) Ten million gallons! What an immense number!

BCHS is must one more sign of how committed Texas is to excellence in education. Learning this has been one of the happy surprises about our move from California.