MISHAWAKA -- The Mishawaka Education Foundation has started a campaign that would cause its classroom grants to mushroom from about $8,500 to $500,000 each year.
That depends on whether the foundation -- now in its 20th year -- can raise its goal of $2.5 million over the next five years. But it's not out to "put new roofs on buildings" or to fill the capital needs that the School City of Mishawaka is struggling to meet, thanks to the $28 million referendum that voters denied last fall, said foundation director Jane Wright.
Rather, the grants stoke special projects of teachers like Shelly Sparrow, who is training students at Twin Branch Elementary School to look for butterfly eggs on the leaves of milkweed, then to help raise the creatures, measure them as caterpillars and watch when they take wing as monarchs.
One grant paid about $400 for 10 digital microscopes, Sparrow said, while another grant will enable the students to track the monarchs' fall migration to Mexico -- now under way -- and to compile a book of their discoveries.
"Kids who are reluctant writers, they can't wait to get their ideas down on paper," she said of the program, which will reach about 200 kids in kindergarten through the third grade.
The campaign, called The Mishawaka Promise, launched in June and so far has raised about $55,000 in donations and another $20,000 or so in pledges, said Wright, a 1968 graduate of Mishawaka High School who serves as the foundation's part-time executive director and its only paid staff member.
Copyright © 2024, South Bend Tribune