Peek's Perspective

The Second Step:
Developing Your Plan

If you want to secure grant money for your school, the first step is to understand in detail the problems your school faces. Once you have clearly identified those hurdles to student achievement or schoolwide success, the second step is to develop a plan/solution that has the greatest likelihood of achieving your goals.

[content block] When I first became a middle school principal, our test scores indicated that we had a reading problem. Overall, our students read about 1.5 grade levels below the national average. We already had a Title I reading program, but we werent getting very good results. We did our research and found that:
1) Although we had a serious school-wide reading problem, only our very poorest readers attended reading classes.
2) Although we knew that reading was a skill, we did not provide enough time durng the school day for our students to practice that skill.
3) Monitoring large amounts of independent reading is difficult without enough computers and specialized software.

With that knowledge, we were able to put together a comprehensive plan in which

In addition, we would initiate "structural" changes in order to meet the needs of our new program:

We developed a special budget in order to put our plan into place. While our solution was relatively expensive, we did not consider costs when we developed the plan. We only considered the results we would be likely to achieve. To get the money we needed to fund our plan, we tapped into the regular budget, Title I, and special education funds. But that wasnt enough. We wrote grants, and we entered into a partnership with the software company to do detailed research as we measured our students reading growth.

When your school faces a hurdle to student achievement, the key is to build a plan that directly addresses the problem and has the greatest likelihood of success. When you are developing your plan, dont worry about costs. That will come later. If you can, find schools with similar demographics that have faced similar problems and made major improvements. Duplicate the best parts of their plans if its feasible for you to do so -- without consideration to money.

When your plan is complete -- and youre sure it is comprehensive and has an excellent chance of success -- then comes the time to start worrying about the budget and finding the money to fund your program. Which brings us to the topic we will cover in my next column: finding grant money to fund your program.

Don Peek is former educator and past president of the training division of Renaissance Learning. He now runs The School Funding Center, a company that provides grant information and grant-writing services to schools. Learn more about The School Funding Center at the bottom of this newsletter.

Article by Don Peek
Education World®
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