They’re in the Money
How did these 10 districts snag some of the billion-plus dollars proffered by top private foundations?
By Marty Weil
For those of you holding your breath to see if you have an instructional technology budget this year, you can now exhale. The U.S. Senate decided to reopen the $425 million funding spigot for next year’s Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) federal block-grant program. This large source of federal funding for instructional technologies such as computers, software, projectors, interactive whiteboards, training, support, and upkeep is relatively intact. In February, the Bush administration eliminated EETT from its 2006 budget proposal. In June, the House appropriations committee voted to restore $300 million to the program, and the July 12 Senate action comes even closer to matching the $496 million total the program received in 2005.
The on-again, off-again EETT funding underscores the fickle nature of federal money for schools, and highlights the growing importance of privately funded school grant programs. In 2003, the last year for which statistics are complete, the top 50 U.S. foundations awarded nearly $1 billion in such grants to elementary and secondary education. The grants highlighted on the following pages showcase some of the ways in which private money is being used by school district administrators to shore up sagging resources from the public sector.
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For, Highlights from the Foundation File, click on the links to the right.
Write a Grant, Transform Your School
By Jacqueline Heinze
“Most of our staff didn’t know much more than how to turn on a computer,” says Lesha Crawley, the tech coach at Blue Springs Elementary School in Cleveland, Tennessee. Now, the school with the smallest enrollment in the county that the local school board once threatened to close is a thriving technology integration center.
Crawley says Blue Springs applied for the federally funded EdTech Grant to boost morale and prove the school’s worthiness to the community. Thanks to the $300,000 the school was awarded, its school spirit skyrocketed. Each classroom has a teacher laptop, projector, digital camera, and five desktop computers. The grant funded both Crawley’s position as tech coach and professional development opportunities for teachers. The school has won a second grant, which gives Crawley the opportunity to train staff members in four other schools on how to integrate technology.
Crawley’s advice to school leaders sounds more like policies heard on the playground than strategies to save a school: Give everyone a turn and follow the rules.
First, get the entire faculty involved. The staff must share the vision that the grant would allow. “We had a lot of meetings and sent out surveys to make sure they really wanted to do this,” says Crawley of the staff members. These not-so-tech-savvy teachers had to be willing and prepared for total turnaround.
Second, although Crawley describes writing the initial grant as “dreaming on paper,” she stresses the importance of following the guidelines. “See what they’re asking for and give them what they want,” she says. Before Crawley submitted the grant, she circulated it among the teachers to proofread. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us,” she says, and no typo was going to get in their way. 
