Through Family Legacy and Legacy Charter School, William W. Brown has sought to make a difference for generations of Greenvillians
William W. Brown wants to make a difference.
He thought at one time it might be as a doctor – until a stint in the military took him to Vietnam for a year. When he came home, his desire for a military career didn’t come home with him.
He decided instead to major in business administration and put his mathematic skills to use as an accountant.
In 1977, Brown started a CPA firm in Greenville. Nearly 20 years later, he started an investment advisory firm, Family Legacy Inc.
“As an CPA, I did a lot of financial planning for people, but if the money doesn’t work, the plan doesn’t matter,” he said. “That way we were 100 percent responsible for the plan and the money.”
With his son, Chris, now serving as president of Family Legacy, Brown can focus on making a difference through another Legacy: Legacy Charter School, which gets part of its funding from Campbell Young Leaders, a private foundation started by the late Bob Campbell, a retired vice president of Vulcan Materials and a former Clemson University trustee.
“One of the most important things I learned from Bob Campbell is that all of us can make a difference if we’re willing to work at it and commit,” Brown said. “He was always talking about making the playing field level.”
It’s a responsibility that Brown says isn’t somebody else’s, but everyone’s. “It’s not us and them. It’s all of us together.”
When Brown went to Dallas for a preventative physical and a weeklong wellness program at the Cooper Institute several years ago, he expected to get a new diet, a new exercise program and a road map to better health. He didn’t expect to come home with the motivation for a new school that would improve students’ academic performances, in part, by requiring physical education five days a week.
Brown, a former high school basketball coach, had been thinking about starting a new charter school to serve Greenville’s poorest neighborhoods where students faced formidable challenges.
Instead of launching a brand-new school, Brown got involved with the former Fuller Normal School. The school changed its name (to Legacy Charter School), changed its location (to the old Fine Arts Center and the old Parker High on Greenville’s west side) and changed its curriculum.
Legacy is the only public school in South Carolina to require 45 minutes of physical education each day. It serves students three healthy meals a day and teaches manners and social skills. It has a longer school day. It expects all students to go to college.
The connection between physical activity and increased cognitive ability was one Brown heard about from Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a pioneer in aerobic fitness and founder of the Cooper Institute in Dallas. “It seemed crystal clear that’s what we should be doing.” Brown still believes Legacy is taking the right approach, even though the school received an F on its state report card.
“We’re not concerned about that,” he said. “That will change.”
You aren’t an educator. Why did you want to found and help run a charter school?
Bob Campbell, who I worked with for 30-plus years, started Campbell Young Leaders in 1997. Campbell Young Leaders is a private foundation started to help underserved kids achieve their potential. One of the things he was a proponent of was if you could find a way to make the playing field level, you could expect similar results.
I think education is the key. You can’t eliminate poverty until you improve education.
When you say we have a 75 percent to 80 percent success rate, that sounds really good. Unless you grow up in West Greenville, a place where 50 percent finish high school, seven percent of high school graduates go to college and only 3 percent graduate college. That’s not exactly a level playing field. I saw this when I coached basketball at Hillcrest High.
Why does a child’s ZIP code, where he grows up, determine his or her success? If I’d been born in West Greenville, I wouldn’t be sitting here.
It’s not only in West Greenville. In every school district in South Carolina, even the districts we think of as being better off, there are pockets of poverty where more than half the residents and in many cases more than two-thirds of the people who live there are living in poverty. It’s about making a difference for these kids.
How has your background in financial planning helped you with Legacy Charter?
In business, particularly in financial planning, you look at what you want the end result to look like. You have to make clear what you want to happen or it likely won’t happen.
At Legacy, starting at five years old we talk about going to college and graduating from college. We have 34 seniors this year and we already have four accepted to four-year colleges and I think it will keep improving as our students see their peers going to college. It takes something that seemed elusive and not even in their conversations and makes it something they can do.
How is running a charter school different from running a business?
In a business, you say you need “X” amount of dollars to operate and then you prove your model. With the school, we have to prove the model and then the money will come. Hopefully, after we prove the model, it can be replicated in other areas.
It’s similar to business in that if you’re trying to build something bigger than you, you have to have the right people or it won’t work. We’re putting the right people in place.
What is your biggest regret?
When I was coaching basketball at Hillcrest, one of my players missed practice. I went to his house and told him I’d pick him up the next day. He told me he was going to drop out. I thought I should have been able to help him, and I couldn’t.
Poverty has so many aspects to it. Educating kids in poverty is so much more complex than we realize. It’s so easy to point your finger and blame somebody else. But we all know what happens when we blame another group. Nothing changes and you get the same results.
What was your biggest mistake in business?
That’s a tough one. I don’t know if anybody has made as many mistakes as I have, and I’m still learning.
