Johnson County native and Blue Valley Northwest alum Arash Ferdowsi, who has gone on to make a name for himself as co-founder of cloud storage site Dropbox, has donated $500,000 to his home district to help establish a fund for future classroom grants.
The Blue Valley Educational Foundation announced Ferdowsi’s gift last week.
“Our schools are essential to the future of our community and our local economy. I am proud to call Blue Valley my home and feel fortunate that my educational foundation was built through the support of my Blue Valley teachers and schools,” Ferdowsi is quoted in the BVEF’s announcement.
The BVEF says it will first invest Ferdowsi’s $500,000 gift at Midwest Trust before it begins allocating a portion of the funds in December of this year.
Joy Ginsburg, BVEF’s executive director, said that should give the new fund time to grow with different investments.
“What a fund like this typically tries to do is earn income from investment so that we aren’t pulling from the principal but instead from the earnings,” Ginsburg said.
After one year of investing, the plan is to withdraw $30,000 annually to support the district’s students and teachers.
If the fund hits $1 million or more, the BVEF will be able to start drawing 10% annually, she said.
Money seeded by Ferdowsi’s gift, Ginsburg said, will ultimately go towards supporting competitive classroom and district-wide grants with the hope of ensuring these grants will be sustained well into the future.
“We plan to use these funds for the innovative grants that are ranked the highest from our grant committee,” Ginsburg said. “When it makes sense, we’ll prioritize schools Arash attended: Cottonwood Point, Harmony Elementary, Harmony Middle and Blue Valley Northwest.”
According to BVEF’s release, Ferdowsi’s family immigrated to the United States from Iran and settled in Overland Park in the early 1990s, in part, so their son could attend school in the Blue Valley School District.
Upon graduating first in his class at BV Northwest in 2004, Ferdowsi went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met Drew Houston.
In 2007, the pair founded Dropbox, which is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
