School District 27J has been awarded a $60,000 McKinney-Vento ARRA Grant over a period of two years. The grant, funded out of stimulus money, is designed to help homeless children and youth and their families in a variety of ways. The 27J award, announced at the Board of Education meeting Aug. 25, will be used in four areas: transportation, community outreach and education, literacy, and liaison resources and Web update.
The transportation funds will be used to provide bus passes or to reimburse parents who choose to provide their own transportation to school from an out-of-district location such as the Denver Homeless Shelter.
For community outreach and education, the district will hire a part-time person to help identify homeless children and youth to ensure the district is not missing the opportunity to provide needed services. The individual also will be responsible for identifying resources available within the 27J community and providing the information to the parents.
Since statistics show that having access to books and print literature at an early age increases student achievement and success in later years, part of the grant money will go to provide homeless preschool children with books that they can keep.
The final amount of money will be spent to provide district community liaisons with notebooks of resource material that they can carry with them as they work with the families. The materials will be in English and in Spanish. The same material will be posted on the district website so parents may have ongoing access to the resource information. It, too, will be available in English and in Spanish.
This and other grants School District 27J staffers apply for have become essential elements in the district budget. They support programs with funds that would not otherwise be available.
For more information on the grant, contact Janet Wyatt, in-house counsel, at jwyatt@sd27j.org or 303-655-2994.
No comments:
Post a Comment