Can You Spare a Few Hours?

I could tell you that you should write a short grant during the holiday break. You’ll probably have a little extra time during the ten days to two weeks that you’re on vacation from school. A lot of grant deadlines are listed for December 31st, so that makes it a good time to write a grant and get it in just under the wire. Also, the competition will be limited, because, let’s face it, how many people will actually get around to applying for a grant during the holiday break?  

Having said all that, I’m not going to recommend that you apply for a grant during your break because you probably wouldn’t do it anyway. I am going to suggest that you take a few hours during your vacation time and do some grant research.

The first research I would do is to examine the mid-term assessments you will likely be administering before the holidays. These assessments could be for the district, a single campus, or even a classroom, but they likely contain information that will help you get grant money for the spring semester or summer school.

Basically, you want to identify two types of programs from your assessments. You want to know the programs you have in place that are not as productive as they should be. You set goals for each program at the beginning of the year. The first thing you are looking for are programs where the students simply are not progressing as they should. They won’t reach their goals by the end of the year. You will need to make changes to those programs early in the spring semester, and you may not have the money to make those changes. If you don’t make changes, you are unlikely to reach your goals. If you make the right changes and get grant money to help you, you just might be able to turn the program around and still meet your goals.

You should also be studying your assessments for another type of program: one that is working remarkably well. If you just keep doing what you’re doing, your students will far surpass the goals you set. But what would happen if you were able to expand that program to other students, other grade levels, or other buildings? Chances are, they would get the same extraordinary results. You can use your assessment data to write a grant to expand your services to those larger groups. This type of assessment data can be very persuasive to grantors if you use it properly and make a thorough analysis of why you are being so successful.

The other research I would do during the holiday break revolves around school grant databases. As you probably know, I am a strong proponent of using grant databases. They save an unbelievable amount of time and effort. Discount School Supply® provides you with an excellent free grant database where you can find grants listed under a wide variety of topics. You need to take a few hours and do a comprehensive search using that database just to see what all is available to you.

You would probably be amazed at the number of grants available, the amount of money available, and how simple some grant applications are to complete. If you are going after grant money for a district, campus, or classroom, knowing the content of the Discount School Supply® database can be invaluable to you. It’s certainly worth a few hours of your time on the Internet to explore everything that’s available.

No, I’m not asking you to spend all your holiday vacation working on one grant application after another. Just do some research so you’re ready to start filling out grant applications when you go back to school. Study those mid-year assessments to find those programs which are failing miserably. Then find the programs that are working remarkably well. Repair the failing programs and expand the ones that are working. And finally, do some research using the Discount School Supply® grant database. It’s free and it’s a perfect resource for finding the grants you need.