SPRINGFIELD, Ore.––Through its annual SPARK! Creative Learning Grants program, SELCO Community Credit Union has awarded more than $54,000 to 64educators at 55 schools across Oregon.
The program, which funds innovative educational and extracurricular projects, provides grants of as much as $1,000 to K-12 educators across the 27 Oregon counties that SELCO serves.
SELCO’s SPARK! Creative Learning Grants have long supported teachers who have creative classroom ideas but lack the funds to get those projects off the ground, the credit union said. This year’s grant funding represents an increase of more than $11,000 from 2020, when 47 grants were awarded to 38 schools.
This year’s recipients will be celebrated on Friday, December 10, at 3:30 p.m. via SELCO’s virtual grant ceremony, which will be hosted live on Instagram (@selcoccu).
“The basic premise behind SPARK! is in the name — spark creativity, imagination, and learning through unique programs in search of funding,” said Craig Carpenter, SELCO’s senior vice president of lending and business banking. “As students and teachers return to in-person learning this school year, we felt it was more important than ever for SELCO to be a strong advocate in the classroom.”
Among the many notable project highlights are a Monarch butterfly school garden, a drone-powered geo-spatial mapping program, and a program to identify human impacts on ecosystems by sampling macroinvertebrates to determine water quality.
The committee’s goal is to fund innovative projects that will have the largest possible impact on students and the greatest opportunity to leave a lasting impression, the credit union said.
One recent example is from Elizabeth Skenzick’s classroom at Elmira Elementary, a grant recipient for its “Squiggle Art for Growth Mindset” program. Skenzick and her first-grade class used their SPARK! Grant to create a children’s book called “The Magic Garden,” which allowed every student to become a published author by writing about and illustrating what they would plant in their own magic garden.
“These past two school years have been especially hard for families, students, and staff,” said Skenzick. “But this grant has been a bright spot through it all.”