On Thursday the Georgia Department of Education announced more than $899,000 in Opportunity Grants to increase options for school districts and support programs like languages, fine arts, physical education and summer classes. The grants are the result of federal stimulus funds in the American Rescue Plan (ARP).
“These grants allow schools and districts to continue to expand opportunities and ensure an excellent education for students across the state,” Superintendent Richard Woods said. “Education is more than just the core content areas, and this funding will ensure students have access to opportunities that prepare them for life and keep them engaged in school.”
Most of the couple hundred grants are relatively quite small, with the largest being less than $15,000 and many of them coming in at $2,000 or less. There are twelve different types of grants and the winners are spread out across the state.
In the Advanced Placement and Accelerated Learning category, more than 40 grants will go towards establishing a mentoring program for AP teachers, sending AP teachers to a summer training institute in their specific subject area, sending students to summer school to ease the transition from one grade to the next and finally to provide training for better instructional practices to increase accelerated learning.
In the languages category, most of the grants will go to creating and enhancing existing language instruction but also to dual language immersion programs, including the first program of its kind in Middle Georgia.
The category with the most grants total is for fine arts, where 108 grants totaling $300,000 will go towards equipment and increasing access to quality fine arts education.
Lastly, physical education will also be getting a boost – 70 grants totaling more than $200,000 will help purchase equipment and implement sustainable physical education initiatives to increase access to P.E. programs and ensure they stay around after the grant funding runs out.
Unlike in some states around the country, many Georgia schools have been open for some time but the pandemic was undoubtedly a major disruption to student achievement for a number of reasons. The hope of these grants will be to help make up for at least a little bit of that disruption.
