It definitely is a busy time for anyone involved in the school business. Most fall deliveries of supplies, materials, and equipment have been made, and the money is either gone from the budget or earmarked to take care of the bills that are starting to arrive.
Once you’ve been in school for a
month, it is a good time to assess your budget. That budget might be for a district, campus, or classroom, but very
shortly you should be able to tell if you have the money left to fund the
things you need for the rest of the year. If you’re pretty sure you’re going to be running short of money, it’s
time to start searching for grants that will help you bridge the gap.
If you are in charge of a campus
budget, you now may be well aware of some surprise expenses that you weren’t
expecting. More students may have
arrived at your campus than you were expecting.
Maybe your population is a rapidly changing one, and you have a whole
group of students now who have very limited English skills. You may realize that you are getting more and
more students who are obese, and you feel like you are going to have to address
the issue immediately, but you didn’t budget for it.
School life is often just like
regular life. You have more needs and
expenses than you have money coming in.
Since we are not allowed for our campuses to go into debt, the solution
may be fundraising or finding grants to cover the costs of these unexpected
expenses. The amounts you can raise
doing fundraisers is typically limited which leaves grants as your most
promising solution for budget shortfalls.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll
mention it again. When I was a middle
school principal for a small Northeast Texas campus of 500 students, we stayed
broke almost all the time. We had a host
of things we wanted to do for our students, and we knew we weren’t getting any
more money from the district.
We turned to grants and business
partnerships to fund the projects we needed.
In a three year period, we raised more than $300,000 to use on our
campus. We built a 100-foot greenhouse
for our science classes to use, put in a piano lab so that 110 of our students
took piano every day, bought thousands of books for our library, bought
computers for every classroom throughout the building, and made very sure that
teachers never, ever spent their own money for the supplies and materials they
needed.
I encourage you to look at grants as
a way to fund the programs or the solutions to the problems that may have
arrived along with your students at the beginning of the school year. Grants
will not be the solution to every problem you have. Money is never the solution to all of our
problems. But from my experience as an
educator for 20 years, writing grants is the best solution to a school’s money
problems much of the time.
Yes, applying for grants can be a
hassle. No, they’re not fun to write, but
the money they provide can help when you find problems and expenses that you
weren’t expecting at the beginning of school.
Don’t delay. If you need money,
grants may very well be your solution.
