This approach saves us from some of the politics of determining who receives grants. We pretty much assist every teacher who receives a grant from some other source but needs additional funding--so that other source essentially saves us from any disputes over favoritism, etc.
Our PTO has a standing policy of offering small "completion" grants to the teachers. The way it works is when teachers receive grants from other sources, often the grant amount doesn't cover the complete cost to get the program up and running. We step in to fill the gap.
Currently, for example, we have a request to buy grocery cards for each grade for a total of $150 to buy supplies for a cooking cart. A teacher got a grant from a private foundation to buy the cart and the cooking & measuring equipment to outfit it and she has written up plans for how each grade could use it to supplement their curriculum; we'll just have to pay for the consumables the students will need to actually use it.
I do have forms we use. If you want to email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I can get them to you that way.
Mini grants have been used by us since way before I became an officer for our HSA. We always have money to spare for these grants. In fact, most of our monies we make go for the grants. We make good money on our 2 fundraisers throughout the year and some on our fall bookfair. Although the money from the bookfairs we use to put books in both the teacher's classrooms and libraries, we don't see our bookfair as a "fundraiser".
I saw this on this forum a while back. Now we have mulch and computers we want to dig our way out of the hole that we were left in and we like the idea of grants. I'd like any info on that too.
I forgot to add that if a request is over a certain dollar amount the requestor must come to the meeting to explain in detail the need for the item(s) requested. That is mandatory. I think we have the dollar amount of $500.
