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This year Foundation 65, a not-for-profit that supports District 65 schools, was able to offer financial help for 14 student programs that fund innovative programs created by teachers.
The programs range from the Black Girl Magic Book Club, a seven-school club that features books with Black girl-identifying protagonists, to efforts at individual schools like the Math Accelerated After School Program at Dawes Elementary.
All of these educator-initiated grants address racial disparities and aim to make school more accessible to all students.
But getting these programs off the ground is not without challenges.
“Educators have been asked to be so much more over the years, right? They’re not only teaching you math, but they’re also your social worker,” said Alecia Wartowski, executive director of the foundation. “They’re helping coordinate with parents; they’re also translating; they’re doing all of these things.”
Getting families involved
Mirza Campos, a kindergarten teacher at the Joseph E. Hill Education Center, is one such educator and grant recipient taking on more than just the role of teacher.
Campos was part of the school’s climate team a few years ago, when they analyzed data on engagement in the school and how families felt about being involved.
Research has shown that parent involvement can help students in a variety of ways.
Just before the pandemic, the climate team started working with Family Engagement and Community Resource Coordinator Claudia Renteria to host events that brought parents to campus. The team continued the efforts a few years later when the pandemic allowed.
Campos, though, soon ran into a problem.
“I’m very big on relationships — building relationships,” she said. “Fast-forward, we have events. And on those events, we didn’t have money to feed families.”
She had hopes of providing entertainment for kids, too, like face painting or musicians. The free activities and dinner for children and parents would be a stress-free environment for parents to engage.
“We brought up the idea to administrators and administration, and they said, ‘No, there’s no money,’” Campos said.
So, shortly after the pandemic, she started cooking and bringing food to increase engagement.
Then a grant from Foundation 65 enabled Campos to focus more on engagement — and less on cooking.
Funds for food
Campos and Patrina Gregory, another educator at the Hill center, applied for funding to host these multicultural events and provide food. They aimed to make the events as diverse and colorful as possible so a wide range of parents would feel comfortable, Campos explained.
She especially considered how she thought immigrant parents might feel about going to events if they believed no one there looked or felt like them.
“It was geared for everybody,” Campos said of the events. “What the data had shown was a lot of people of color, families of color, had not been coming, for different factors.”
The Family Engagement program has been renewed for a second year, extending the life of these multicultural events intended to build relationships.
It’s not the only program Campos and Gregory have funded. The two are in the early stages of creating a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) garden at the school.
Hands-on education
“Our three, four, five-year-olds are being asked to sit more, do more academics,” Gregory said. “We know that the best way our children learn is through experience. It’s hands-on experiences.”
Gregory and Campos brainstormed with others in their building on how they could incorporate age-appropriate, developmentally minded and curriculum-connected hands-on experiences into the daily education of students.
They landed on creating a STEAM garden, which will include a small house for students to interact and play in, a “water wall” where kids can see gravity bringing water down, and a music wall where they can explore sound.
“A lot of students of color, they do not have exposure to STEM experiences,” Campos said. She aims to give more students access to green space and nature with these elements.
Campos and Gregory said that students in this year’s kindergarten class will be involved in creating the garden, expected to be completed for next year.
Learning that is ‘alive’
Kingsley Elementary School kindergarten teacher Alyssa Zuravel runs another hands-on learning program funded by Foundation 65.
Her program provides sensory experiences for students with activities and field trips that help them connect concepts with tangible experience.
“Oftentimes teaching is very visual and very verbal, but kids at that young age, they’re kinesthetic,” Zuravel said, referring to sensory experience. “They need the learning to be alive.”
Before Zuravel got funding for this program, she was trying to pay for these experiences out of pocket.
Her father used to help her file the tax write-offs, where she would have hundreds of dollars worth of receipts she spent on classroom students. He would say, “Alyssa, you can’t keep doing this.”
Last year, Zuravel was nominated by her principal to join a cohort of educators who met with Foundation 65 once a month to help convert the needs they saw into potential grant ideas.
Zuravel was teaching kindergartners about the five senses and the idea of storytelling, and trying to connect them as concepts to tangible things that kids could interact with.
“You can sit there and you can tell the kids what the five senses are, but they’re never really going to absorb the learning unless they experience what the five senses are,” she said.
She’s incorporated this experience into lesson plans. There are pieces of the curriculum where students have to describe certain textures to illustrate the “touch” sense.
Zuravel provides sensory discs with different textures, so students can hold them in their hands and recognize what is bumpy, fuzzy or soft.
Adding to curriculum
Zuravel also realized during this section of curriculum that many students didn’t have an idea of what some animals looked like.
“Teaching a bunch of kids who live in the Chicago area about farm animals was hilarious to me,” said Zuravel, who was raised in a more rural area. “A kid once asked me how many legs a cow had.”
This fall, Zuravel used grant funding to take her kindergarten class to Wagner Farm in Glenview so they could see and understand animals for themselves. They get to feed chickens, see pigs and draft horses, remove corn kernels from cobs and even shake a jar of cream to make butter.
“It’s not about replacing the curriculum,” Zuravel said. “It’s finding moments to enhance it in a different way.”
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All the educators spoke about the challenges of conceiving, creating and launching programs that can help students.
“Oftentimes, you know, we’re very, very overwhelmed,” Zuravel said. “We’re very focused on what we’re doing on a daily basis.”
Campos agreed.
“It takes a lot, a lot of, a lot of work,” Campos said of the programs she’s gotten off the ground. “It takes a lot of my energy to do all this extra stuff, but you know, I love it.”
She described how many students she interacts with struggle with social-emotional learning problems in a post-pandemic world. Engaging with those students can already be a bit of a challenge.
Although she loves the work she does with these innovative programs, it can add a lot of hours to her already busy week.
“Now, the good thing about Foundation 65 — Alecia, specifically, she does realize that we’re doing a lot of this without pay,” Gregory said. “She’s allowed for a stipend.”
Educators can request a stipend for the hours they expect to spend on this project. This option is built directly into their grant.
“Whereas [in] the district, for extra things, it’s voluntary, because they just don’t have the money for it,” Gregory said.
The financial climate
“Currently, we fund every application that meets our criteria,” said Wartowski, the foundation executive director. These grants are for an average of around $6,000, she explained, but there’s a range of amounts. In recent years, the foundation has funded more than 20 grants in a year, despite a number of factors that could be limiting to the foundation.
High overhead costs are just one potential challenge the foundation faces.
“I think the hard part about a one-person organization is our overhead seems really high for one person,” Wartowski explained. “You have to have a website, and you have to pay for a bookkeeper, and those costs are stable, whether you’re a one-person organization or a six-person organization.”
For the past three years, the foundation’s expenses have actually exceeded its revenue, according to the organization’s tax filings.
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Contributions to the foundation have also dropped in the years following the pandemic, more closely resembling what they were when the foundation started around a decade ago.
“In 2021 we did receive a lot of support related to COVID, and one of our major donors was able to make a substantially higher gift because of some other giving falling through,” Wartowski said. “That allowed us to build our fund balance so that we can continue support in leaner years.”
This year gifts to the foundation are increasing slightly.
The foundation’s contributions generally fluctuate, with some years spiking higher for designated bigger ticket items, like in 2016. Wartowski wasn’t involved in the organization then, but believes that spike is related to support for EvanSTEM, a collaboration providing STEM learning opportunities.
Clarity on foundation status
Like any organization that relies on donations, the foundation also has to contend with public perception. Evanston/Skokie School District 65 has not been a picture of financial health recently, leading to budget cuts, school closures and negative community feedback.
Wartowski will occasionally receive replies to fundraising emails in which people express their frustration with what’s going on in the district.
“I’ve been trying to emphasize that we’re an independent, grassroots agency that empowers educators on the ground,” Wartowski said. “I think we’ve maybe not been as clear, and people have always just thought that we are part of District 65.”
“We have our own board,” she went on. “We do not report to the school district.”
Despite a turbulent time for the district, high overhead costs and fluctuating contributions, Wartowski said the foundation is committed to preserving the great things that are going on.
“At the end of the day, we have some really amazing educators in this district,” Wartowski said. “What our role is, as Foundation 65, is to retain those educators to teach our kids, because we know that our kids benefit with great educators.”
Despite challenges, Foundation 65 finds funds for District 65 students is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.