By an east coast standard, it really wasn’t rain. But on this Wednesday night in January, it warranted the use of an umbrella. I made my way through the entry doors of Green Elementary School and directly into an active Parent Faculty Club meeting. I was greeted warmly by site Principal Dr. Lorianne Ventura and a group of committed parents. By design, the meeting was temporarily halted from the agenda and I was given the floor. The purpose? To talk a little bit about Dublin Partners in Education and to make a check presentation.
The genesis of this event was hatched at a DPIE board meeting in November 2018. At this gathering, the board of directors approved a monumental motion. Action was taken to approve a stand-alone grant of $10,000.00 per school site (a total of $120,000) within the Dublin Unified School District to be distributed as quickly as possible. A condition of the grant was that the individual schools would make their purchase decisions in the light of day and that the benefits of the grant were to touch the widest number of students as possible. More precisely, any purchase would need to touch one or more of the DPIE pillars which include: Career and College Exploration, Arts Education, Resources for Educators, and Education Enrichment.
Given this wide berth, DPIE wanted to empower each school site administration and staff to collaborate and identify worthy projects to fund. That process has been ongoing for the last few weeks. Anecdotally, we have heard discussions about investing in grade level vocabulary builders, mobile audio equipment for outdoor assemblies, and series books that are not currently available in the library.
So, speaking of the presentation at Green Elementary School, that visit represented my ninth site visit in eight days. Alas, I considered it to be a “happy task” and one that we wouldn’t allow a few raindrops to delay. All of us at DPIE are delighted to support all our schools and to continue to help bridge the funding gap in public education.
