January 9, 2018
By Paragon News Director Paul Joseph –
The Elk City Educational Foundation has finished its annual work, but is waiting to disseminate its grant items.
Over $60-thousand dollars in grant items have been bought, paid for and are being held another week before being awarded to the appropriate teachers in the Elk City School District System, according to Brent Meadors, President of the Elk City Education Foundation.
Typically, Meadors says, the grant item dissemination is done the first day back at school after the start of a new year, but because everyone is working to get into the new building, everything has been put on hold for a couple weeks.
The Education Foundation started in 1990 by then Elk City Daily News Owner and Publisher Larry Wade as a way to help reimburse some of the out of pocket expenses that teachers have to provide a proper learning environment in their class rooms – expenses that – sometimes – aren’t in the school district’s budget, but items teachers desire for their students. The need, teachers believe, is so great, they’re willing to make the purchase, sometimes, out of their own pockets.
Meadors says his foundation gave out all the money they had available.
The foundation tries to help those efforts out by using grants made possible by donors and the interest from the funds in the foundation. The grant is not an amount of money, but the actual item teacher’s requested with the grant money.
Meador says the need gets greater every year. He says – though they gave out $60-thousand-8-dollars and seventy-seven cents, they had requests that came to well over $162-thousand dollars.
He says providing grants to worthy teachers is a good cause.
Meador encourages everyone to give and there’s no bad time to give to the foundation.
Meador believes the foundation will be able to hand out the grant items sometime during the week of January 22-26.
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