From new guitars to robots and professional development, Homewood High School teachers are elevating education through the funding of Homewood City Schools Foundation grants. On Sept. 27 HHS teachers received over $45,000 in grants to fulfill specific educational initiatives and bring new material to the classroom.
HCS teachers and staff can apply for grants each fall and spring semester for extra educational resources. This fall, the HCSF gave a total of $110,000 to teachers across the school system, with HHS receiving 21 of the 37 grants during this cycle.
The HCSF is a nonprofit organization founded solely to support HCS teachers and students with any extra resources required. Through various fundraising events and campaigns such as Homewood Grown, the Give $189 initiative and the High Rollers Casino Night, the foundation generates hundreds of thousands of dollars that directly benefit the schools through these grants.
Carlye Dudgeon, Director of the HCSF, oversees the distribution of grants. She and her board of colleagues read through teacher applications, detailing their vision for the funding they’ve requested, and allocate the funds accordingly. Grants are divided into three categories.
“One is grants for innovative programs and creativity,” Dudgeon said. “This is for teachers wanting to try something new, like a new software or program they’ve heard about, and the foundation will pay for it for one year to test it out and see if the school system wants to expand it.”
This includes grants given out this year such as the physics department’s $40,000 for their new hovercraft education program involving high school and elementary school students. Instead of hiring an outside company to teach interactive robotic lessons, they’re moving the education in-house thanks to this grant. Also in this category is the HHS special education department’s new Patriot Printing initiative receiving $6,000 for machinery, including a laser cutter, to further their job-skills education.
“Our second category is to support existing programs,” Dudgeon said, “That might mean the class size changes and we need more sets of books, or some of the school Chromebooks are getting old and we need some new ones, those are also things that we’re happy to support.”
Some HHS grants that fall into this category are funding for seven new guitars for the guitar class, a new MacBook and software for stage effects for the theater department, and the ROTC expansion of its archery program.
“The third category is professional development,” Dudgeon said. “We pay for teachers to get extra training in their job areas. Most of the time this means sending a few people in a general area like history or math to go and learn new material and techniques and come back and share it with their colleagues. But other times we send teachers who are kind of in their own department like Mr. Helf with AP Physics or AP Psychology, those are more specialized.”
Grants falling in this category are the Biology teachers’ funds for a professional development conference, as well as journalism teacher Julian Kersh’s grant to attend The Journalism Education Association’s national conference.
Kersh, also varsity soccer coach and Spanish teacher, received funding from the foundation to attend the four-day journalism conference in Philadelphia, Penn. in November. Unlike other departments at HHS, he doesn’t have the opportunity to learn from his colleagues, and instead has to get creative when expanding his journalistic teaching skills.
“I’m the only one who teaches journalism in the high school,” Kersh said. “So I don’t even have little organic professional development conversations that you might share with your colleagues in the hallway like with other fields of study. I’m desperate for opportunities to level up what I’m doing and learn so that I can help my students. That’s why I filled [the grant] out.”
Kersh is grateful for the school foundation’s consistent and abundant support for teachers at HCS. He recognizes how fortunate he and his colleagues are to receive this special funding with no strings attached.
“It’s certainly not lost on me, and I would imagine my colleagues would agree,” Kersh said. “It’s a huge privilege and it’s incredible to feel that kind of support that we can request thousands of dollars to go do professional development across the country, and they give us all of the resources we need to ultimately support our students. It’s really cool, and obviously not every school system has that kind of money to throw at teachers.”
HHS assistant principal Jana Flinkow is especially proud of the faculty and staff at the high school for showing ambition and passion for teaching when applying for grants.
“I am really proud of our teachers because this is the most grants that Homewood High School teachers have ever written,” Flinkow said. “A lot of teachers wrote grants for professional development, which shows that they’re lifelong learners and they want to keep getting better for our students. It’s awesome.”
