San Leon gets $10K from Box Tops

Published April 21, 2026

SAN LEON — The mother of a San Leon Elementary student happened to be listening as a popular Spanish language radio program announced a sweepstakes to earn a school a $10,000 prize.

Marisa Gonzalez, whose daughter Cassandra Trejo is a third-grader at the school in Dickinson Independent School District, entered. The talk show host and officials from General Mills arrived Friday with the big check.

The sweepstakes was part of the Box Tops for

Education program, which is a charitable arm of the food conglomerate General Mills. The 16-year-old program encourages shoppers to collect marked box tops that carry the Box Tops for Education logo and give them to the school of their choice.

For each box top mailed into the program, the school gets 10 cents, Zack Ruderman, the director of the Box Tops for Education program, said.

To date, the program has given $475 million to schools since the program launched in 1996. In 2011, the program contributed $67 million to schools in the United States, and this year, is expected to donate $74 million, Ruderman said.

The sweepstakes Gonzalez entered was part of the box tops program outreach to the Hispanic population. In partnership with Univision, General Mills launched an aggressive Spanish language campaign to encourage parents and residents to collect the Box Tops for Education items for their schools.

That’s huge for San Leon Elementary that has 134 bilingual students, Assistant Principal Sherri Blackburn said. About 10 percent of the Dickinson school district’s population is in a district Spanish-English bilingual program, spokeswoman Tammy Dowdy said.

That was evident as well Friday when the special visitor was Dr. Isabel Gómez-Bassols, a radio psychologist for RadioCadena Univision. She is also a popular figure on Univision’s various TV news programs offering marital and personal life advice.

“We had people who don’t even have students who go to this school asking if they could come today because she’s so popular,” Dowdy said. “Parents have been asking if they could bring other family members to the school.”

Gómez-Bassols was principal for the day as she toured the campus and helped Ruderman present the $10,000 check to the school. San Leon Elementary Principal Stephanie Williams said it had not been determined what the money would be used for.

Dowdy said it’s possible some of the money would be used for field trips, which had been cut from the budget because of a spending crunch. The district also could consider using the funds for technology upgrades, she said.