Teachers, local classrooms surprised with grant money
(Seguin) – It was a day of surprises and celebration throughout the campuses of the Seguin ISD. On Thursday, the Seguin Education Foundation SurPRIZE Patrol spent the day delivering thousands of dollars in grants to teachers across the district. These competitive grants that teachers were encouraged to submit proposed innovative teaching tools for the classroom.
This year’s rollout of the grant prizes, however, was one for the record books. That’s according to SEF Executive Director Jill Nash.
“It’s been incredible to see the faces of the teachers as they are surprised for being awarded the grants. We were able to award 29 grants this year with $105,000. That is award winning. We have not been able to do that ever in the history of the education foundation and so we have been able to make more stops at each campus to award more grants and the kids are excited as the band is walking down the hall playing their music and then we are giving them high fives as we are hyping up the excitement and there were teachers that were just tearing up because they were just so thankful to be able to win the grants from the education foundation,” said Nash.
Through community donations and fundraising, the SEF works to support the funding of these classroom tools that otherwise could not be afforded through the regular school budget.
In fact, at one of the surprise visits at Ball Early Childhood Center (ECC), Nash was able to celebrate a community partner who also understood the assignment of helping students be successful
“HEB loved your grant so much that they have personally sponsored this for you. So, we have gift cards in the amount of what you need to make this happen. What’s going to happen is we are going to put you in touch with the head marketing director for HEB and they are going to work with you individually to help you get these spent to cover everything you need in your budget,” announced Nash.
Sharing in that moment were Pre-K teachers Kathrynn Morales, Jeanene Nickerson and Rachel Marek. The trio was surprised with a large check for $1,550 for its Cooking Up Learning: A Hands On Pre-K Experience.
Although they felt they had a good chance to be selected, Marek says the surprise came in knowing that HEB was backing their classroom plan.
“HEB, I mean that was a big surprise adding in HEB. The education foundation grants have been really great to us. We won a bike grant last year to help our kids with that for gross motor skills and this one, we will just continue to push for more and push for doing great things for our students, our little Ball ECC 3 and 4 year-olds,” said Marek.
As for the curriculum itself, Marek says she’s excited for the kids and can’t wait to get cooking.
“We are able to just bring in a lot of different curriculum pieces, math, writing and something that is really engaging for the kids. So, what it is – it’s like little carts that we can push into the classroom, and we can cook with the kids, so we are measuring. We are talking about measurements. We are talking about different writing. So, it’s just a wonderful way to engage all the different content areas,” said Marek.
Again, more than two dozen other cool classroom programs were funded thanks to the efforts of the SEF.
The folks making up the SurPRIZE Patrol included SEF board of directors, Seguin ISD Superintendent Veronica Vijil; members of the Seguin ISD Board of Trustees and central office staff. Also accompanying the group on the large yellow traveling school bus were members of the Seguin High School Band which also spent half of its day providing celebration music in the hallways. New to the group were high school journalism students and photographers assigned to capture the moments.