Grant Program For Teachers

This is a local grant program for teachers who want funding to be able to travel to other areas within the United States in order to study and bring back new techniques to help them improve their own classroom studies.

For the 2008 - 2009 season 15 of these grants were awarded to area teachers.

This particular grant program provides grant funding for teachers and administrators, allowing them to explore new ideas that they may not otherwise have had an opportunity to pursue. Last year, grant recipients participated in projects nationwide in an effort to bring new and exciting resources back to their local districts.

Applications for 2010 will be distributed this month to principals at all local area public and nonpublic schools. The grant program offers 19 individual grants for educators worth $500 each.

Other grant awards include:

• 2 $500 administrator grants
  
  
• Five $750 two-educator grants
  
  
• Two $1,000 building-wide or multi-educator grants
  
  
• and one $1,500 district-wide or multi-district grant.

The funding is provided through an endowment and supplemented by the local school districts.

Past grant recipients include:

• a local area public school teacher that attended a workshop at a university in another state. The workshop was designed to assist the implementation of bioinformatics across biology curriculum by incorporating bioinformatics into a variety of courses.
  
  
• a teachers who worked with a local artist to establish curricular offerings appropriate for middle school students. The teacher's goal was to extend student activities in this particular art and to integrate 3-D activities that were already included in her school's curriculum.
  
  
• a school administrator who attended a conference in Utah, where she learned training skills to increase effectiveness when working with school staff to develop appropriate building-based intervention strategies.
  
  
• a high school teacher who attended a six-day event designed to provide biology teachers with an introduction to a specific program as well as to provide teachers with the basic tools to create a successful laboratory program.
  
  
• an occupational therapist who attended an advanced training program in Michigan to help with their school's program that helps students with cognitive impairments maximize their independence and life skills.
  
  
• a kindergarten teacher who traveled to Costa Rica, where she studied the habitat of the rainforest. The teacher will incorporate her experience into her kindergarten curriculum on ecosystems found throughout the world through photos and artifacts from this trip.
  
  
• another elementary school teacher who used the grant to attend a technology conference to acquire expertise in a microsoft program so that she design a program to help engage her students in the use of technology in the classroom to enhance the development of their literacy skills.
  
  
• a Catholic school teacher who attended an event in Washington, D.C. to help increase her understanding of plant and animal biodiversity. The teacher interacted with scientists, curators, and museum educators during specially designed visits to museums, laboratories and the National Zoo.

The Department of Energy is offering a prize to the inventor of an energy-efficient alternative to the 60-watt light bulb!

ANOTHER Local

Grant Program

For Teachers!

Eleven local area teachers were recently surprised when a grant program's employees showed up at their schools with as much as $1,000 each in grant money! The money came from a cooperative grant program which allows teachers to compete for funding outside of their school district's resources.

All classroom educators are eligible to apply if they teach kindergarten through 12th grade in the cooperative’s four-county service area. Teachers were awarded grant money if they could demonstrate in an application that they had an innovative idea for a classroom project.

Each school was eligible to submit more than one application, but individual teachers are limited to one application per school year.

You can visit the grant program's website for the dates when new applications may be submitted.

Pastor Receives A $40,000 Grant! An associate pastor for adult discipleship and outreach at a Presbyterian Church has received a $42,000 grant from a national endowment program! This grant money will allow the pastor to pursue local and international mission projects including traveling to South Africa and volunteering with a school that provides shelter and education for orphaned students, many of whom lost their parents to AIDS. The pastor who openly talks about his own experience living with HIV, applied for the grant with a deep desire to reach out to others in the local and international HIV/AIDS community. The purpose of this grant program is to "support an extended period of intentional reflection and renewal." Pastors from 149 churches across the United States earned grant money, the amount depending on their individual proposal needs. The program rewards select pastors for their hard work, allowing them to travel the world and "see sights they’ve only dreamed about, to learn new languages, take up a new hobby or relearn an old one, and use this time to reengage themselves in their calling." Although he does not yet have a definitive timeline for when he will spend his grant money, the pastor hopes to visit South Africa in the fall of 2011. He will use some of the grant money to thank the friends and family who have supported him through his life. While in South Africa, he hopes not only to learn about the correlation between racism, poverty and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but to share the exotic beauty of the country with those closest to him.