Auburn-Washburn Foundation is helping check off teachers' classroom wishlists
Joe Taylor would love to take his sixth-grade students to ancient Persia.
He'd also love to have them walk through the pyramids in Egypt at the height of their triangular glory.
For most of his career, Taylor has been limited to having his students read about these kinds of history lessons or maybe see some artistic depictions.
But thanks to a grant from the Auburn-Washburn Public Schools Foundation, he'll have the next best thing.
Classroom grants have been supporting Auburn-Washburn USD 437 teachers for 25 years
Taylor, a teacher at Pauline South Elementary School, was one of dozens of recipients of cash grants from the foundation on Wednesday.
For the past 25 years, the Auburn-Washburn Public Schools Foundation has looked to support teachers in the classroom by disbursing mini grants to support projects that are often too small to be line items in a school’s budget but too costly for educators to pay out of pocket. They might also be equipment or supplies that don't fit neatly into each school's capital outlay schedule.
"A lot of the grant applications we get are to extend and expand the students who are already learning, and giving them the extra tools and resources to do something more out of the box," foundation president Jill Griego said.
This year, the Auburn-Washburn Public Schools Foundation is distributing 76 grants, the most it has ever awarded in a single year. At a cumulative $64,222, it’s also a record amount of total dollars given in one year by the foundation for classroom grants.
Some examples of this year’s funded projects include the following:
Books, at various schools, to stimulate a love of learning, especially among younger students;
Therapeutic equipment and tools, across the district, to help students self-regulate;
Equipment to promote pickleball and disc golf as physical activities at Farley and Indian Hills elementary schools, respectively;
Adaptive cooking utensils and tools for special education students at the middle and high school to use in learning how to live independently.
Since the classroom grants started, the foundation has distributed $659,230 across nearly 900 individual grants.
Grants make a world of difference for USD 437 students
In Taylor's classroom, his grant for virtual reality headsets will allow him to place his students in the settings of the history lessons he teaches.
"One of the hard thing in teaching history is that kids feel a disconnect between what was in the past and what is in the now," Taylor said.
He had put together an application for the grant, hoping he would get maybe a couple of Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headsets.
He held his face in shock as school district and foundation representatives visited his classroom and presented him with a $5,000 check that will allow him to purchase between 20 and 30 such headsets.
"It means so much, especially in our building, because a lot of the kids don’t have these kinds of opportunities at home," he said. "This just gives them chances to get or do things we’d never be able to do regularly."
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Auburn-Washburn USD 437 Foundation distributes classroom project grants
