Get Your Wishes Granted

Supplementary funds for school music programs are available from a wide array of sources, but tapping into them requires time, effort, and savvy

by Mac Randall

Several years ago, Wendy Bloom, who teaches music at Haley Elementary School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, began to feel that she needed to do something to bring her classes into the 21st century. “I saw other teachers at the school using all kinds of new technology,” she remembers, “and I felt left out.” One of the problems with most new technology, of course, is that it costs a lot of money, and Haley’s school music budget wasn’t exactly running at a huge surplus. So how could Bloom hope to purchase the kind of new equipment that could bring a major change to her classroom?

She started by informing herself. For two years, she went to every area tech workshop she could find, learning about the options and determining what would work best for her students. Then she applied for a Technology Professional Development Grant from the Indiana Department of Education. “I had a little extra time over the summer, so I worked on the application and sent it in,” she says. “I never thought I’d get anything.”

Bloom got something, all right—a $30,000 grant to make her classroom a “technology-enriched model classroom.” With that money, she was able to create a true music lab at Haley, full of computer workstations running state-of-the-art software, electronic keyboards, and numerous accessories. “I never figured that I’d be good at using technology,” she confesses. “But now I can’t imagine working without it, and neither can my kids.”

It’s fair to say that Bloom’s professional life has been changed forever by her successful sojourn through the grant process, and she’s not the only one. Music teachers across the country are taking advantage of a wide range of grants from any number of sources—cities and towns, states, the federal government, nonprofit foundations, businesses, even generous individuals—to lend extra strength to their programs. Not all of these grants provide the kind of bonanza that Bloom was lucky enough to receive, but as any music teacher can tell you, every little bit counts.

Evolution: An Intelligent Design

Another music educator who’s enriched the lives of her students through a grant is Abby Behr, director of music and art for the East Meadow School District in East Meadow, New York. In 2005, through Behr’s efforts, the district obtained a $10,000 grant from the Empire State Partnerships fund to begin a special collaboration with the American Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra, based in nearby New York City, programmed a series of themed concerts for their season; the themes were designed to coincide with East Meadow’s music curriculum. “Musicians from the orchestra would come into our schools regularly with music from their upcoming concerts,” Behr explains. “They would play the pieces, discuss them, and show how they related to lessons the students were learning. Then the students would travel into the city to see the concerts for themselves.”

Students in East Meadow, New York, work with members of the
American Symphony Orchestra, thanks to a grant.

Four years on, the program is still going strong, better funded, and more complex. East Meadow students have actually rehearsed and performed side by side with the ASO—a great experience, to be sure, but one that wasn’t covered under the original grant.

“Our collaboration has continued to evolve,” Behr says. “Every year, the themes and the emphases have changed. This year, for the first time, we actually have a point person whose job is to be the liaison between the musicians and the teachers. And this kind of evolution is exactly what many grantors are looking for. They expect that things will change over time, and ideally a grant proposal should be designed to accommodate that change.”

Ways to Proceed

As Behr’s comments suggest, the writing of a grant proposal has to be carefully tailored, with serious consideration given to the interests of the specific grantor. Finding the right grantor for your program is a major part of the equation, and one we’ll discuss further in a moment. But before you even begin the grant search, there’s one very important thing to keep in mind: Any funds you seek through a grant have to be regarded by grantor and school alike as supplemental.

This photo and the below photos: Wendy Bloom's students
use the technology lab that she created with a $30,000 state grant.

Because the arts have been designated a core subject under the reauthorized No Child Left Behind Act, financial support for music education must be part of every school district’s budget. Therefore, it’s assumed that your school provides for your program’s day-to-day needs already; if there’s any hint that you may be applying for a grant to cover anything basic, you could stand to lose your regular budget funds. “Grant writing is not meant to replace what you’re already doing,” Wendy Bloom emphasizes. “It’s icing on the cake.”

That said, the next step is to find where the grants are and determine the right ones for you. Bloom recommends looking first on the state level: “Just about every state’s department of education has a fine arts consultant, and it’s his or her job to be aware of all the grants the state offers and how you can apply for them. Those consultants are well connected, so you should get on their mailing lists. Look for a grantor that fits what you’re doing. Some only give to large arts organizations, and they’re not going to be interested in a single music teacher.”

For Behr, regional organizations have been a big help. “I first heard about the Empire State grants through a local group called the Long Island Arts Roundtable,” she says. “I attended one of their meetings, and we discussed several different kind of grants, but this one was new to me.”

Remember that grants have seasons; usually, if you’re trying to get a grant for the fall, you should be ready to apply for it at least six months in advance. “The big grantors publish an online schedule of when you should submit proposals,” Wendy Bloom says. “Timing is everything.”

After you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s time to come up with a proposal. Bloom urges that whatever you propose should be project oriented: “You’re not going to get any money unless you’re doing some kind of specific project that appeals to the grantor.” Abby Behr’s grant proposal to the Empire State Partnership fund required lots of support materials, including a letter outlining the roles and responsibilities of the various partners; sample lesson plans, a resource binder, and assessment tools; a copy of the school’s arts educational plan; biographies of key personnel; a description of how parents and community members would be involved in the project; and a list of desired outcomes.

“Grant writing is hard work,” Bloom says. “You need to have firm objectives in place. The language has to be just so. Every sentence has to build. You don’t want redundancy. Many organizations have proposals screened by a computer that picks up on the presence or absence of particular words. ‘At-risk,’ ‘special needs,’ and ‘early childhood,’ for example, are all terms that can mean a lot to certain grantors, and if words like that aren’t picked up by the computer, the proposal never gets read by anybody.”

Most grant applications also include a fairly standard form that your school has to approve and fill out. Bloom warns that school approval is not a foregone conclusion: “School systems are cautious these days about who gets to write grants. It’s very competitive, and there can be a lot of red tape, especially if you’re a music teacher and not a regular classroom teacher. Thoroughly check out what the procedures are [in your school/district] before you go ahead with a proposal—that way, there’s less likelihood that you’ll get shot down.”

Proposal Approved

Let’s assume that both your school and the grantor end up approving your proposal. What happens next? The fact is that your work has just begun. “There are lots of requirements that have to be fulfilled under the terms of our Empire State grant,” Behr says. “For example, we have to provide professional development training for our teachers, and there has to be a summer planning session.”

Expect to do a lot of documentation of your program and write regular reports to the grantor about how it’s progressing for the length of the grant period. “Every grantor needs a grant report,” Bloom says, “and many have to be quite specific.” But in general, the smaller the grant, the more flexible the grantor is about requirements. “This is where it really helps to know your audience,” Behr says.
If all this seems a little overwhelming, then you may not want to begin your grant search by targeting an ambitious project and a megadonor. Bloom recommends starting small by investigating a program like Adopt-A-Classroom (adopt aclassroom.com), which allows individuals, foundations, and/or businesses to contribute to the purchasing of classroom resources through an online credit system.

But no matter how you start, the important thing is that you start. The money’s out there, so why not go for it? As Abby Behr wisely states, “The more you can do, especially in these tough economic times, to help supplement music education, the better.”

- Mac Randall, January 2009, © MENC: The National Association for Music Education. This article originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Teaching Music.