Thursday, January 17, 2008

School Choice Proves Educational

Well, I have decided to enter the world of the blog. Here we go. My life the past two weeks has involved shopping for elementary schools for my five year old daughter who will be starting kindergarten next fall. What a learning experience it has been! First off, let me just say, I am officially old. No smart boards or document cameras or multiple computer stations in my elementary school classrooms. At least the alphabet still looked familiar. I did happily discover there are many great public schools in my area to choose from. In Lee County, Florida, School Choice allows me to rank order the schools that I want my child to attend, giving me some say in the process. So far, I really like it. I was very encouraged to see how excited and proud the majority of the school teachers and staff were about their schools.

Due to my interest in fundraising, all the school touring brought to my attention the varied implementation of grant writing among the different schools both public and private. It appeared to me that much of the grant writing responsibility was given to teachers or assigned to various administrative positions and some schools put more emphasis on it than others. Obviously, the school's main goal being educating children, in many cases, grant writing must be squeezed in wherever it can be squeezed. I am more impressed than ever with the teachers and administrators who do take it upon themselves to write that grant for special projects or programming or whatever it may be so that the students get something much needed or something unique and extra!

That being said-I want to share two grant opportunities that are fairly basic to complete but might be a good fit for a particular school or teacher's needs. The Airborne Teacher Trust Fund provides small grants to teachers with program ideas in art, music, and drama. More information can be found at www.airbornetrustfund.com. Also www.intel.com/education/schoolsofdistinction will provide information about Intel's grant for school's of distinction. This grant is for schools excelling in math and science. Check it out if you are in need of the type of school funding these grants provide. The cool thing about both of these opportunities are that public, private, parochial, and charter schools are all eligible. Good luck and please feel free to email me with questions or if you would like assistance with a project.

And this is the end of my first blog.

1 comment:

JoAnn said...

Welcome to blogworld! I'm posting a hello! I'm following your blog to watch for your info! Come by mine and say hi!