Dan Andrews, CEO and managing partner with Tempus Realty Partners, is hoping his idea for seeding 529 college savings plans for elementary students in Jacksonville will become a blueprint for others.
Andrews, who appeared on this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics, unveiled on Sept. 11 the GROW (Generational Resources and Opportunities for Well-Being) program, a first-of-its-kind funded savings program in Arkansas. Through GROW, Tempus will provide seed funding, as well as financial incentives and targeted financial education, to empower Murrell Taylor Elementary students and educators to invest early in 529 plans to achieve educational and career success.
For the 2025-2026 school year, Tempus will provide an initial investment of $600 for each kindergarten through fifth-grade scholar at Murrell Taylor and their direct classroom teachers, principal and assistant principal.
Tempus will offer an additional $300 in annual incentive savings for scholars and teachers who achieve goals in attendance, engagement and financial education, with a money-management curriculum informed by Economics Arkansas. With support from an annual grant, Murrell Taylor will also have a GROW Ambassador, who will serve as a liaison between the school, scholars and their families and program partners.
Tempus will make an additional $300 investment in the 2026-2027 school year for individuals with existing GROW accounts, as well as a $600 per-person seed investment for all new kindergarten and transfer scholars. Tempus designed GROW’s scalable structure as a model for other investors to consider for future expansion and replication.
“GROW will have a lasting impact for scholars, educators and the larger Central Arkansas community—a place where many of our investors, partners and team members are proud to live and work,” said Andrews. “Our seed investment is only part of the equation. The unique combination of support that GROW offers is designed to spark lifelong financial stability.”
Arkansas’ Brighter Future 529 Plan allows account holders to withdraw funds tax-free to pay for qualified higher education expenses. Andrews expects that some kids could have up to $10,000 in their plans by the time they’re ready for college.
“The program starts in kindergarten and a kindergartner that participates and hits their incentives each year going through the program could have $10,000 or more by the time they graduate high school,” he said.
Andrews is also counting on the economic education foundation that will be taught will springboard many of these young students to a better life of financial management of their resources.
Teachers can also participate in the savings program and are part of Tempus’ investment in the school.
“We wanted to create an entire community that is thinking about the future, dreaming about the future together. And the teachers are such an important part of that,” said Andrews. “So the teachers can use this capital too. They can use that to invest in their further education to get their master’s degree or to do other kinds of conferences and things, or they can use that for their family and their children to grow their dreams.”
GROW could grow in other areas of Arkansas or the nation, Andrews hopes. He said the way the GROW program is designed and how he expects it to be evaluated should entice other businesses or philanthropists to model a program after this one in Jacksonville.
“Our hope is that people will see the value in this program. We’ve engaged with the Clinton School to do a long-term evaluation of the program to measure the actual impact and be able to benchmark that in a way so that others can look to this and see the effectiveness of the program and make their decisions about how they want to support it in the future,” he said. “But we did build it so that it can be replicated so that these barriers that have been removed are not just removed for this school, they’re removed for anyone who wants to adopt another school in their hometown or a group of schools or what have you. This is designed in such a way so that they can plug into what Grow is already built and do the same thing for the children in their community.”
You can watch Andrews’ full interview in the video below.