Finished Your Budget Yet?
By Don Peek

Regardless if you are a teacher, principal, superintendent, or somewhere there among the others, you are probably working on or have recently completed your next year's budget. The problem with most budgets is that the needs are too many and the dollars are too few.

I am especially concerned for districts that use property taxes for the majority of their budgets and whose property values are taking a huge hit right now because of the housing bubble. I know quite a few superintendents will end up with ulcers over this situation, and, of course, these kinds of budget problems are passed all the way down to the classroom level.

My answer to this problem is to encourage everyone in the district to begin applying for grants---now! It shouldn't just be the district grant writer, or the curriculum director, or the special programs person writing grants.
It should also be superintendents, principals, and classroom teachers applying for those grants.

There is a huge amount of grant money available to all types of schools. The grants range from $500 to millions of dollars.
There's grant money for reading, after-school, science, social studies, volunteerism, foreign language, professional development. The list goes on and on.

But, you won't get a nickel if you don't apply.

Grant money is really not that hard to get if you really need it and consistently apply for it. I believe the key is closely matching your needs to the purpose of the granting entity. When you do that, you are 100 times more likely to get the grant money you need.

The problem is finding all of the thousands and thousands of grants available to you and then matching those to your needs.

That's why The School Funding Center Grant Database is so important to schools. All the available grants are in one sortable database, and the database helps you to quickly and easily match your needs to the available grants.

Whether you use our grant database or not, I encourage you to get more people throughout the district involved in your grant writing. This will be a tough year for many schools, and grant money will help get you through these tough times.