Indigo,

That's how we were able to do it.  Because we have a non-profit
foundation, we could write a grant proposal to cover all kinds of
expenses the school might incur - buses, drivers, subs, etc. for a visit
to the museum. Teachers have a harder time accessing the administrative
structure that you need for a grant so we are the funnel for the funds
from the funding group to the teachers.

We too had found that bus expense was a barrier to visits as was the sub
money.  Through our program, the teachers can apply for money to cover
whatever their needs might be since those differ from school to school
depending on their resources.  The teachers decide what their most
pressing need is and apply to us for the funds.  Some schools will
provide the bus but the students don't have money for admission so they
use the funds for admission money.  Some schools can't provide any trip
support and those teachers need more help than others.

In our grant proposal we used an average cost of expenses for a class
visit of $150 (bus, admission, etc. based on our experience with the
teachers) and asked for funding to support 100 class (class = 1 teacher,
25 kids, 2-5 adult chaperones) visits.  Teachers can apply for more than
the $150 if they need to (and some do) but we find that many teachers
use less so it averages out just fine.

In order to make our proposal a stronger sell and more relevant to the
teacher's needs, we tie the programs directly to the state "standards of
learning" that the kids are tested on and the schools are accredited
with.  The teachers tell our educator which SOLs they need help
addressing and programs are selected and altered to fit their needs.  We
will be doing classroom pre- and post-visit mini-tests to determine if
our programs were effective and if the kids actually retain any
knowledge that will help them on their SOL tests.  Fortunately, the SOLs
are fairly broad and include the basics so our programming can include
all kinds of content depending on what exhibits we have in-house at the
time.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Moore, PhD
Virginia Museum of Natural History

-----Original Message-----
From: Museum discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Indigo Nights
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 4:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Grants for Bus-y Teachers

I was just thinking about the question involving
helping teachers write grants, and I had another
thought.

School budgets right now--in a word--suck!  The
economy is so bad that the arts are being cut right
out of many school budgets (again, sigh).

Have you considered writing a grant for your museum to
provide a bus (and the gasoline--$2.25 in CA at the
moment, per gallon) and the salary of a driver,
perhaps, to bring children to your organization or, in
the alternative, a mobile museum to bring some of the
artifacts to the kids?

I know.  You have no more money and resources then
they do.  Such a sad state of affairs.  But maybe you
could turn it around that way.

I was thinking that an NPO may not be able to help a
school district as readily as it could help a
nonprofit.



=====
Indigo Nights
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