CSISD Education Foundation awards record number of grants to teachers

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) -The College Station ISD Education Foundation is making a difference in the lives of teachers across the school district through grants. Drum lines, cheerleaders, and district officials visited College Station ISD schools on grant patrol, funding projects that take students beyond the average classroom.

According to the CSISD Education Foundation, 70 teaching grants totaling $337,965 were awarded during its annual grant patrol. The foundation says this amount is nearly double the amount awarded in 2020.

College Station ISD Education Foundation Director, Teresa Benden says it’s overwhelming to receive the funding this year after the impacts COVID-19 had on the community.

“We are so blessed and so thankful because after coming out of a year of COVID we, really all the nonprofits in the community, struggled with their fundraising,” said Benden. “We were just so incredibly blessed to have an outstanding year this year and to really make an impact on teachers and students and we really wanted to give back as much as we could.”

One of the schools that will be seeing the impacts of the grant is Forest Ridge Elementary. The elementary school is receiving $32,000 to fund projects thought up by teachers.

“They worked really hard on those grants,” said Terresa Katt, Principal at Forest Ridge Elementary. “So I was just fingers crossed and hopeful that as the readers read [the grants] they would see the power in what they [the teachers] wanted to do for the kids.”

“So I’m so excited for them and watching their faces when their names were called I mean it doesn’t get better than that,” said Katt.

For kindergarten teacher Melanie Wigley it means more sensory learning in her classroom.

“We will get to have the kids interact with hands-on multi-sensory type objects,” said Wigley. “For example, we have a stretchy snake that they are going to get to pull while we stretch out words. Magnet wands to use for syllables deletion and combining words, so these kids will get hands-on practice while we are doing our lessons.”

Pamela Beard, an ESL Specialist, received a grant to help pair high school students and Forest Ridge kindergarteners for a drone program to take both to new heights.

“We don’t know what our littles will be able to do in 20 years, where technology will be, and what things they will come up with that are capable with drones from the technology they learned as kindergartners,” said Beard.

According to Beard, things like this would only be possible because of the limitless possibilities supported by the CSISD Education Foundation.

“Things that you could only imagine in your classroom are possible through the education foundation because we can think so out of the box,” said Beard.

To give to the CSISD Education Foundation, click here.

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