SANDPOINT — As the Panhandle Alliance for Education goes into its eighth year, it would seem that the job of providing educational grants to schools in the Lake Pend Oreille School District should start to become simpler with practice.

Quite the opposite, according to PAFE President Wendy Dunn, whose organization is gearing up for its 2010 round of funding.

“The quality of the grants has improved every year and the selection process has gotten harder and harder,” she said. “The teachers have also gotten more creative and more innovative.”

PAFE got is start in 2003 with seed money totaling $10,000. Within five years, community donations helped the organization create an endowment fund valued at more than $1 million. Continued support from individuals and businesses has since grown the endowment to approximately $1.5 million.

Once again for 2010, PAFE hopes to award about $125,000 in grants to classroom teachers. In addition, individual educators or groups of teachers may also submit “Big Idea” grant requests for consideration. Taken together, those two grant categories netted a total of nearly $148,000 last year. Out of 67 grant requests in 2009, a total of 51 were funded — an approval rate of more than 75 percent.

“We’re always trying to get more teachers to apply, because the chances are pretty good for being funded,” said Marcia Wilson, executive director for PAFE. “At this point, I think all of the teachers know about us, but they don’t all apply.”

Dunn thinks some teachers might view the grant opportunity as one more thing to do in an already busy schedule. As educators watch their peers being consistently rewarded for creative ideas, however, interest is expected to grow.

“My hope is that they’d be sitting in their classroom thinking, ‘Gosh, if I only had the funding, I could do this and this and this,’” said the president. “Well, we’ve got the funding.”

PAFE has always encouraged teachers to think outside the box and in expansive terms when making grant requests, but it took a year or two for that directive to be completely understood, the executive director noted.

“In the very first grant round, there were teachers writing for things like a trip around the world so that they could document it,” Wilson said. “They were told to dream big — and so they did.”

The dreams are still big — if considerably more realistic — such as the “brain unit” program that started out in one LPOSD school when a classroom teacher received funding to dissect sheep’s brains as part of the science curriculum. Other teachers latched on to the direction, broadening it to include the study of brain science and integrating the workings of the brain with language arts activities.

“That’s what the grants committee likes to see — a spark that grows until it’s picked up by other teachers,” Wilson said.

“The same kind of thing happened at Sandpoint High School, where a grant for a guidance counselor has expanded way beyond that,” Dunn said.

After learning that offerings for college and career preparation after graduation were severely limited, teachers at SHS put their heads together to devise a three-year, PAFE-funded project that now provides post-high school planning, complete with a research library, financial aid seminars and workshops on how to write an effective college or employment application.

“None of these things are our ideas,” Wilson said. “They come from the teachers.”

Outside the grants arena, PAFE maintains a strategic planning relationship with LPOSD staff to further determine areas where financial assistance can improve district performance. Two home runs in that area have been the “Ready! for Kindergarten” early childhood learning curriculum, rolled out in the fall of 2008 to teach parents how to prepare their youngsters to excel in school, and the CORE reading program, in which PAFE has invested $400,000 since it was introduced five years ago.

“The district said, ‘We need a consistent reading program — classroom to classroom and school to school,’” Dunn explained. “It has been so successful that the program is now just focused on instructing new teachers.”

Prior to implementing CORE, the level of reading proficiency across the school district was below 80 percent, according to Wilson.

“The goal was to bring every grade up to 90 percent,” she said, “and we reached that goal last year.”

When all PAFE funding is combined, the organization has pumped almost $1.2 million directly into local classroom projects over a 7-year period. In terms of grants, fully 20 percent of the dollars awarded have gone to fund projects that fall under the category heading of “Creative/Arts.”  Music and art grant requests have been favorably received from the first round right on through the most recent year.

Dunn and Wilson pointed out that PAFE’s support of the arts in schools is meant to carry on and enhance the long-standing efforts of pioneering organizations such as the Community Assistance League, the Pend Oreille Arts Council and The Festival at Sandpoint.

“It’s not just what we’re doing for music and art — all of those organizations have a piece of it,” Wilson said.

“And all of that support translates over not just to creativity, but to things like better math scores and becoming a well-rounded person,” added Dunn.

Along with the arts, annual grant awards go to support programs in math, science, language arts, reading, technology and vocational skills.

“Just because we’re a small town in Idaho doesn’t mean we can’t have top-notch schools,” the PAFE president said. “Everyone has a dream and this is a way to provide for helping those dreams go forward.”

PAFE grants are made possible through individual and business donations to the local, non-profit organization. To learn more about the group and its programs, or to make a donation, visit: www.panhandlealliance.org or contact Marcia Wilson at (208) 610-3236.