Granting Your Wishes

With only 274 students, one pre–K–to–12 school building, and the closest big town 50 miles away, Texas's San Isidro School District is about as small and poor as a school district can be. Its technology administrator, Mario Alvarado, worked to bring computers and the Internet to students who often had no telephone in their homes. He remembers how he wrote "dream" goals such as "We'd like every kid to have a computer in their home with Internet access."

Although it seemed like a dream a few years ago, today the homes of 14 of his students have dial-up access to the Net—and the rest have computers with high-speed DSL modems. San Isidro succeeded in reaching its technology goal by receiving grant funds and equipment from the Valley Telephone Cooperative, its local telephone company, combined with some state funding.

At a recent conference sponsored by eSchoolNews on the state of grants and funding for school technology, Alvarado and other speakers told listeners that the money is out there—money from foundations, corporations, and state and federal governments. But the road to getting that cash is rockier these days in the current standards-based education climate. Michael Gershowitz, a grants consultant, says that wanting new computers and a better network used to be reason enough to get funding, if educators could demonstrate a need. Now, he says, "Technology must be seen as a means to an end—learning. It's not an end in its own right in this age of reform."

Sheryl Abshire, the technology coordinator of Louisiana's Calcasieu Parish Schools, was an elementary media specialist a decade ago when she wrote her first grant proposal, asking local businesses to fund a student-anchored TV news show. Since then she's received hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant funds for her district and now advises other teachers and librarians how to get some funding of their own. "Foundations want to fund something that makes a difference," she says, "and today that has to include professional development. And I don't mean a single 'drive-by in-service,' after which a teacher puts a 20-pound binder on the shelf, forgets about it, and goes back to doing things the way she always did."

Abshire strongly recommends that grantwriters pay attention to the requests for proposals (RFPs) issued by granting agencies, and to the descriptions of the kinds of projects they fund. Corporations, for example, often fund projects only in specific geographic areas—typically the places they have offices or factories. Foundation and corporate givers, she continues, want to see a school and community "buy in," that is, they want to see that the district board endorses the project, that there are local businesses and organizations ready to support the project, and that the project will change the way that community's kids learn.

Once you're certain that your project meets those prerequisites, you must then explain your project's goals and objectives clearly and passionately, says Abshire. You should also be able to demonstrate in your proposal that the project is sustainable and replicable in other schools. You must also include plans for a thorough project evaluation, and make certain that the evaluation you propose is appropriate. Gershowitz told of a one-year project that wasn't funded because the grantwriters proposed a "cohort analysis" without understanding the term. Cohort analyses are used for multi-year projects.

Abshire says the Internet has been a great boon for people writing grant proposals. For example, sites such as the Foundation Center (www.fdncenter.org) offer grantwriting advice and sell directories of information about funders. Abshire has assembled a collection of recommended Web sites for grantwriters at www.cpsb.org/abshire/grant_resources.htm.