As transplants to Florida, Kitty and Charles “Chuck” Tatelbaum had heard of NSU in passing, but they were not overly familiar with the university when they settled in the area. That all changed as colleagues and neighbors encouraged Chuck Tatelbaum to learn more as a member of the Susie and Alan B. Levan NSU Ambassadors Board.

“Once I got involved and started hearing everything that I didn’t know about NSU, I would come home and share what I learned with Kitty,” Chuck Tatelbaum shared. “With that information, I saw the opportunity to create a special projects fund to help students in need, and I was made chair of that. I then became vice chair of the Ambassadors Board membership committee.”

Chuck Tatelbaum, a director and bankruptcy attorney at Tripp Scott, was then tapped to join the board of governors for the Shepard Broad College of Law. He became the co-chair of the outreach committee and was named vice chair before being appointed as chair of the board in April. “That was very exciting, because I think NSU Law has just unbelievable opportunities,” he said.

Unfortunately, one of the issues that NSU Law has faced is losing its best students at the end of their first year due in part to state schools that offered lower tuition. University President Harry K. Moon, Provost Ronald Chenail, and Associate Provost Meline Kevorkian took a deeper look and presented a solution.

“First, a study was commissioned that found that students in their first semester of law school who had 3.5 GPA overall had a 97 percent chance of passing the bar,” Chuck Tatelbaum said. “The indicator of success in bar passage was not their LSATs, nor their undergraduate GPA. So, if we could keep those students from being poached, we would have a much higher bar passage, because we would have all the best students.”

The NSU Shepard Broad College of Law launched the Dean’s Excellence Program, which contains a strategic initiative to retain top talent, by offering a competitive scholarship package and unique leadership and engagement opportunities.

“We had 39 students who met the qualifications,” Tatelbaum noted. “All 39 said, ‘We’re going to stay. We don’t care what anyone offers us. We want to be at NSU.’”

The next step was to determine how to make the program sustainable. A former professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, Chuck Tatelbaum appreciates the quality of legal education that students receive from NSU. When he joined Tripp Scott 14 years ago, only one senior partner had an NSU law degree. The firm now partners with NSU and other area law schools to sponsor summer interns and hires two of those students each year.

“For the last four years, all eight new hires have been NSU Law grads,” he said. “It isn’t just that they’ve had a good education. They’ve learned how to be lawyers.”

With that in mind, coupled with their desire to give back and help others, the Tatelbaums decided to make an initial gift to create an endowment fund for the Dean’s Excellence program.

“I was an educator for 38 years in Connecticut,” Kitty Tatelbaum said. “I had earned, by the age of 40, three master’s degrees, and I know the challenge of not having a great deal of money to go through school. So, if we can help other students to not have to do that, then why not do it?”

“As board chair, you lead by example,” Chuck Tatelbaum added. “We feel that it would be very difficult to ask other board members to become active participants if we did not demonstrate it ourselves.”