The Story That Earns Coverage Every Time We Pitch It for one private school

Every April, we prepare one of our favorite pitches of the year. No product launch. No executive announcement. Just a group of high school seniors at Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) in Addison who spend their final semester engineering assistive devices for children with special needs — and a teacher who dared to make purpose the curriculum.

We have been pitching this story for years, and it has never missed.

The Program Behind the Placements

TCA Upper School Math and Engineering Teacher Teresa Rosario — a former computer programmer who made the pivot to education — does not teach engineering from a textbook. She challenges her senior-level students to design, develop, and test assistive devices for children with special needs. The families who receive these devices are not getting something off a shelf. They are getting a custom solution built specifically for their child, by students who poured a semester of their lives into getting it right.

This year's presentation is particularly meaningful. Not only is it the 10th year of this senior capstone engineering project but also, Teresa's class is returning to a family TCA first helped eight years ago, redesigning and developing new interactive play devices for 12-year-old Gideon, who has Peroxisomal Disorder (Zellweger Syndrome). Gideon is legally blind with some light perception and has profound hearing loss. His world is shaped by what he responds to most — vibration, lights, and wind — and the students have let those preferences guide every design decision.

One of the first engineering capstone projects for TCA seniors.

Three teams have spent the semester working on separate projects built around Gideon's daily life ranging from a bed activity station, an interactive play station and a swing play station. The students recently presented their final projects to Gideon and his family. Not only is this a heartwarming story that shows TCA students putting their engineering skills into practice to serve others, but it is truly a PR lesson we come back to every spring and one of the stories that has resonated with media for the past decade.

What the Coverage Looks Like

When a story is this good, it tells itself. This year’s presentation was no different with CBS 11 coming to film the presentation and interview this group of creative engineering students. Every year this story resonates with media not only because of its visual components, but because it tells a deeper story that is genuinely compelling and has impacted so many for a decade. Both the recipients of the newly engineered products customized just for their needs as well as the engineering students themselves who see firsthand how their ingenuity is making someone’s life better. Here are just a few placements where the TCA engineering program has landed over the years from this one inspiring school program.

• KXAS (NBC) -TV — Trinity Christian Academy engineering students use lessons for good

• Dallas Innovates — TCA Students Use STEM for Good in Engineering Projects

• NBC’s “Carter in the Classroom” — School Teaches Engineering While Helping Others

While we talk a lot about storytelling in PR from building narratives, identifying angles and crafting the right hook, but the TCA engineering program reminds us of something more fundamental: when the work itself is meaningful, the story writes itself. Our job is simply to make sure the right people hear it.

The senior engineering project began with one engineering class in 2016 and it has since grown into a decade of coverage that spans every major DFW media outlet and has helped position TCA as a school where innovation is not a buzzword — it is the curriculum.

Dala did not just find a good story and tell it once. We re-engineered it. Season after season, we identified new angles, new audiences, and new moments of relevance that kept the narrative alive and the coverage coming.

That is what we do at Dala and why TCA has remained a client for more than 16 years! Ready to re-engineer your story? Contact Dala Communications to put your media relations strategy in motion today.