What a wonderful surprise I found today in my mailbox at school! A $3,000 check from Target!!!

Hi, my name is Betsy and I’m a fourth grade teacher in Orlando, and the self-appointed grant-writer for our school. This summer, I challenged myself to see how many grants I could earn for our school. Last fall, I had earned a $1,000 field trip grant from Target and I realized I had been bitten by the ‘grant-bug.’ I worked for many hours on a ‘Learn & Serve’ grant this spring, and was excited when our school was awarded $5,200 for the environmental proposal I had submitted. So, as the summer months passed, I started searching the web for any grants for which our school might qualify. I was amazed to find so many available. My quest had begun.

Our grant from Target is totally based on the We Both Read series. We are a Title 1 school, with 80% of our students on free/reduced meal programs, and we are 70% Hispanic. Our students are not reaching the required goals for math, reading, science, or writing state assessments. We have a population of 970 students, pre-k to grade 5, and sadly, have less than 20 families who attend PTO meetings. We know parent involvement is the key to the success of our students. We just didn’t know how to encourage the involvement. Then, I found We Both Read.

Our grant will allow us to buy 10 complete sets of the We Both Read series, plus many accessories, and provide our student/parent partners with incentive prizes as students are successful with their leveled books.

We will be holding monthly mini-workshops with 1/2 hour parenting sessions for ‘tips to help’ and 1/2 hour Celebration sessions with a light snack provided by our Partners-In-Education sponsors.

Fran, from Customer Service, was so excited to hear about our grant. She asked me to submit a post here to encourage other teachers to find the means to reach the parents.

The Target Grants are the most-friendly grants out there. They are calendar related, but it’s never too early to start thinking of a proposal. In the meantime, you can look for other literacy grants. There is a lot of money out there for Early Readers, which is the section of the Target Foundation which honored our grant.

The most important thing to remember is that you’ll never know if you can be awarded a grant until you try. (Don’t be surprised if you, too, aren’t bitten by the grant-bug once you are awarded your first one.)

Betsy