GRANTing Wishes

Today I'm still on Cloud 9 because yesterday was a special one for me personally and professionally. Personally, we went with our son Joshua on his graduation pictures photo shoot. John had the idea of recreating this Father's Day picture from when he was in first grade, so I snapped one on my phone while the photographer was setting it up.

The professional shot will look better, for sure, but this will give you a glimpse into the fun that we had hanging out and reminiscing with our senior.

Earlier in the day, our Education Foundation surprize patrol came by and granted a lot of our dream-big wishes in a big big way.

This year, our awesome AP Wendy and I decided to write a grant

and guess what? It was fully funded!

Our grant idea came from our friends at North Pointe Elementary, a 2013 National School of Character; we called it 

Building Character By The Book: 

Principal's Picks For Promoting Our Pillars.

It's kind of like a book-of-the-month club.

We were encouraged to break large grants like ours into small grants so that school stakeholders could get in on the fun and buy a grant. Two of our months, September and May, were adopted just that way, one by a parent of one of our students, the other by our former Principal. The Education Foundation decided to fund the remainder of the grant so that we could start in September with our Principals Pillar Pick Program.

Our school will be receiving 25 copies of each of these books, one for each month of our school year. In September, for example, when respect is our spotlight pillar, members of our leadership team will go to each classroom to read Do Unto Otters aloud, briefly discuss it with our learners, then leave a copy with the teacher for enrichment activities and as a possible take-home reader to foster that school-to-home connection.

I'm super excited about this new program and I'm feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for a Foundation and a community that supports what we do in our character building.

Happy April.