Photos courtesy of Rachel Weingartner.
Jennifer Mueller, a third grade teacher at Crestline Elementary, wears an audio enhancement microphone device with safety features funded by the foundation.
For more than three decades, the Mountain Brook City Schools Foundation has quietly been doing something that can be easy to overlook: helping ensure that the community’s investment in its public schools continues long after a child walks across the graduation stage.
Founded in 1992, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit was created with a simple idea: that strong public schools benefit the entire community and that community support can help schools do more.
Today, that idea has grown into an endowment of more than $20 million and a network of fundraising efforts that bring parents, grandparents, students, teachers and other community members together in support of Mountain Brook City Schools.
For the 2026-2027 school year, the foundation’s board of directors approved a grant of $723,198.08 to the school system. The money will support professional development, academic assistance and other programs designed to give teachers and students resources beyond what traditional public school funding can provide.
For Rachel Weingartner, executive director of the foundation, the organization’s role is not to replace public funding but to provide the extras that can make a good school system even stronger.
“The foundation likes to step in and say, ‘We are the extras that help with innovation or some needs that are not being met on a school-system-wide basis,’” Weingartner said.
That distinction is important. Foundation dollars can help provide opportunities that might otherwise have to wait, compete with other priorities or go unfunded altogether.
This year, $227,140 of the foundation’s grant will support professional development. Among those opportunities is the annual Engage Learning Conference at Mountain Brook High School, which in June drew 506 educators, including 216 Mountain Brook teachers.
Because of the foundation’s support, educators can attend the conference free of charge and receive continuing education credit. 61 Mountain Brook teachers also led learning sessions, sharing their innovation and creativity with their peers.
The foundation also provides stipends for teachers participating in summer learning. Last year, its funding provided more than 8,700 hours of professional development for Mountain Brook teachers at no personal cost to them.
“We really feel like that’s a way that we can retain the best teachers and also recruit the best,” Weingartner said.
Last year’s sixth graders Emma Tomlinson, Mary Mead Smitherman, Carlisle White and Beatty Maxwell show school spirit at their last foundation track meet in 2026.
The foundation’s support reaches students directly. Another $230,000 of this year’s grant will support academic assistance, including the Math Lab at Mountain Brook High School.
Last year, teachers recorded more than 4,000 student interactions in the Math Lab, where students could receive additional help and tutoring during the school day.
The foundation also funds a math coach for each elementary school. Those coaches work alongside teachers to strengthen instruction while helping identify strategies to meet students at different learning levels.
For Weingartner, those kinds of investments are part of the foundation’s larger mission: responding to needs as they arise while building a financial foundation that can support schools for years to come.
That long-term commitment is where the foundation’s fundraising efforts become especially important.
Throughout the year, community members have numerous opportunities to support the foundation’s fundraising efforts. Give180, a campaign that encourages families to contribute a dollar for each day their child attends school, raised $214,339 last year. The Grandparents Club campaign raised another $326,563, reflecting the involvement of a generation whose connection to Mountain Brook schools often stretches well beyond the years their own children attended.
Crestline students Elizabeth Clinton and Molly Drummond participated in the 2026 elementary school track meet, a fundraiser for the Mountain Brook City Schools Foundation.
Then there is the elementary school track meet, which brings together students from all of the Mountain Brook elementary schools and has become both a fundraiser and a community celebration. More than 840 elementary students participated in April, helping raise $107,000 for the foundation.
“It’s really a community-wide event,” Weingartner said. “All four elementary schools participate, and they’re able to compete and also fundraise for our schools at the same time.”
Those annual efforts provide immediate support, but the foundation is also thinking decades ahead.
In 2024, it launched Fund Our Future: Endowing Student Success, a major campaign designed specifically to grow the endowment. More than 230 donors have contributed $5.85 million so far, putting the campaign just $150,000 shy of its $6 million goal.
The impact of building that endowment is perhaps less visible than funding a Math Lab or a teacher’s summer professional development, but it may ultimately prove just as important.
The foundation’s spending formula is designed to protect the endowment’s principal while allowing the organization to make an annual grant to the school system. With the endowment now above $20 million, the foundation hopes to reach the point where it can provide $1 million annually to Mountain Brook Schools.
“We are also aware that part of our role is being a sustainability support for public school systems,” Weingartner said. “We do say that we’re a protection and kind of a long-term insurance policy for them as well.”
That phrase — long-term insurance policy — captures something fundamental about the foundation’s work. Its impact is not simply measured by what $723,198.08 can accomplish in one school year. It is also measured by the community’s willingness to keep building a resource that can support Mountain Brook students and teachers through changing times and future challenges.
And that is where the numbers tell a much warmer story.
Behind the $20 million endowment are generations of families who have chosen to give. Behind the $5.85 million campaign are more than 230 donors who believe in the future of the schools. Behind the $107,000 raised at a track meet are hundreds of elementary students and their families participating together. Behind the professional-development dollars are teachers given opportunities to keep learning and growing. And behind the Math Lab are thousands of individual moments when a student receives a little extra help.
“We really had a lot of different people that were willing to step up and make a multiyear pledge to help us increase the endowment and ensure that our school system has the funding that it needs,” Weingartner said.
That may be the foundation’s greatest strength: It turns community pride in Mountain Brook’s schools into something tangible — opportunities for teachers, support for students and a financial commitment that can continue serving the schools long after today’s students have become tomorrow’s graduates, parents and community leaders.
