Week 2 Blog Prompt: In your blog, review the needs
statement on p. 37 (Example 2.1) as well as the better draft on p. 68 in Grant
Seeking. Compose a draft of one of your proposal's needs statement.
This is a very rough draft. After much thought, I think my focus
will be on professional development for educators. For now, I’m thinking either
overall disabilities awareness and/or narrow the focus to hearing loss. Here are some “ramblings” for my needs statement. I have
provided workshops in the past and have had a plan for some time to set up a
professional organization called AccessTexas, an organization geared toward
public awareness of disabilities. Although, I may be doing my proposals on
behalf a nonprofit organization of which I am President as the contact for the
proposals.
It is not the norm for educator
training at the undergraduate level to include disability awareness and as more
new teachers are hired and more students with disabilities enter the classroom,
educators lose sight of what their responsibilities may be in relation to providing
accommodations to students with disabilities. Most of the time, it is a result
of a lack of knowledge of the specificities of disabilities, what makes each
disability unique, what types of accommodations are best for a specific
disability, and how an educator can best serve the students and the school. In
addition, many districts are constrained in terms of funding to provide more
professional training or enrichment in
areas other than general education.
AccessTexas recognizes that
there is a need for professional development in the area of disability
awareness, especially for new educators. Through the development of a
disability awareness workshop that spans two days, the purpose of the workshop
is to provide professional development in the following ways: provide
information about various disabilities, share and expand on the legal
responsibilities of educators, encourage role playing and team building
activities that enrich knowledge and understanding.
We are seeking funding to
develop and implement a disability awareness workshop for educators; therefore,
we are requesting $xx,xxx from your organization to develop this workshop.
Enjoyed reading your blog post, JulieG. I like your idea about professional development. Maybe you should write for both an external and an internal grant, looking for something within the district to write for, or someone to propose to. Meanwhile though, AccessTexas looks like a very good organization to write to. Are you going to talk about their website during class tonight for your presentation? What would need to go into a needs statement for AccessTexas?
ReplyDeleteWith regards to AccessTexas - this is actually a group that I'm working on setting up. We have been in discussions and working on a business plan to get this up and running. The goal of AccessTexas is to ensure all entities are aware of their legal responsibilities and that individuals with disabilities/parents are aware of resources available in Texas. However, for the application packets, I may have to narrow down my scope to focus on a specific disability because I was just asked to help find grants for the organization from which I'm stepping down as President and it's a deaf organization that promotes spoken language.
ReplyDeleteFor my presentation tonight, I was going to talk about the value of Grants.gov site and show a grant that I found that has since closed but am looking further for another grant that fits in with what I'm looking for simply for the presentation. I have gotten some suggestions from others where to look. I may have to leave off the grant on the presentation and simply share what I've found and where I plan to go from there. It's been a real challenge to find something that works for personnel development for nonprofits (most of what I find is for educational entities).
Enjoyed your presentation, too, over Oberkotter. Yes, grants.gov is an amazing site, when you think about it. You provided excellent notes about collaboration, evaluation, sustainability, etc. Nice pointing out demonstrations of the grant and what they don't fund.
ReplyDeleteI found your blog post thought provoking. I think there is probably room to address all kind of 'special needs' on many levels such as at the university level and/or during the certification process for the teachers, as well as the ideas you have outlined. Also, maybe some education for administrators such as principals, since some of those needs will impact the physical space and tools needed for effective communication between teachers and students. I think you are right that more and more disable children are entering the system all the time, making this a very timely issue. Maybe a good structure would be overall disability training with subsets for for physical vs. mental, and so on. I spend an awful lot of time around young children and find it difficult to know what is ADHD vs. sugar overload, just as an example. I would think teaching teachers what to look for and how to handle it would improve the classroom experience for all kids. There has to be guidelines for incorporating those needs while not allowing them to become a disruption. Application could spread to making a case for or against ability groupings, classroom design and layout, scheduling structures and so on.
ReplyDeleteI'm also interested to know how you will handle RFPs for your organization when you will also be submitting one - will receive others? Sounds like an interesting position to be in. I'm in a similar position in that I am helping a couple of organizations to form, but it is early yet for representing them.
I really like your workshop idea. I think you'll get funded, and that your organization can offer more ways to address this issue as it grows. For the sake of this project though I think it might make it easier if you do narrow the focus a bit. I imagine this topic could get pretty big, pretty fast.