United to Learn recently launched New Teacher Support Grants, providing $500 to educators new to their profession, grade level, or specialty. The new initiative’s goal is to empower new teachers to create effective learning environments. Research shows that joyful, enriched learning environments can increase productivity and lower teacher turnover rates, which are currently near an all-time high.
Empowering New Teachers
Most educators begin their careers with anticipation and excitement but without a cache of classroom resources, materials, or inspiring decor to help them create the welcoming and engaging environment they envision for their students. United to Learn’s New Teacher Support Grants aim to alleviate the financial burden of enhancing classrooms, support teacher retention, and ultimately accelerate student achievement.”Students are expected to have literacy in many areas, from telling time on an analog clock to organizing a personal agenda to decoding new vocabulary based on context clues, prefixes, and suffixes,” explains a fifth-grade new teacher grant recipient at John Q. Adams Elementary. “Many of the tools required to accomplish these goals, like clocks, calendars, and materials for a word wall, are not readily available in classrooms. Still, I intend to include these essential components in my own classroom to ensure students are able to develop literacy in all of these areas and more.”
Delivering New Teacher Support Grants
Over the last couple of months, United to Learn along with some of our community partners surprised new teachers with school-supply-filled baskets, courtesy of WFAA, and a $500 check to help them enhance their classrooms. So far, 17 new Dallas ISD teachers at nine elementary schools are leveraging these grants to help make their classrooms more welcoming, inclusive, and inspirational for academic achievement. Expanding classroom library book selections tops many of the teachers’ lists. Other essential supplies on their lists include interactive educational tools, manipulatives for hands-on learning, calming corners, student incentives, and flexible seating solutions.A new second-grade teacher at César Chávez Learning Center explained that the new teacher grant will help create “a positive, rigorous, inviting classroom with things I am not able to purchase on my own.”
New Teacher Support Grants in Action
As the first official librarian Chapel Hill Preparatory School has had in three years, Serenity Tran is transforming the library to foster a love of reading, improve literacy for young learners, and provide literacy support to the families of our students.Grace Banks, a special education inclusion teacher, plans to acquire weighted blankets, noise-canceling headphones, and phonemic awareness resources to ensure her students feel comfortable and supported with items tailored to their needs.Luis Lopez, a new kindergarten ESL teacher at Albert C. Black STEAM Academy (formerly known as Pease Elementary), plans to use his grant to improve classroom aesthetics with comfortable seating, rugs, reading nooks, educational posters, student work displays, and thematic decorations related to current learning units.
How New Teacher Grants Are Made Possible
Community support is essential to thriving school campuses. Partnerships empower educators, enhance student success, and foster deeper, more impactful connections between schools and the community.”Our New Teacher Grant program is just one way United to Learn works alongside Dallas ISD schools, creating a bridge between investors and volunteers to build sustainable relationships and make meaningful changes together, benefitting educators, students, and our city’s future,” explains Chris McSwain, Director of Corporate Relations.Erica and Marissa from U2L corporate partner Fossil helped surprise two teachers at Chapel Hill Prep, the same school where they spent a day in the spring refreshing the outdoor learning garden with dozens of other Fossil volunteers.
Dallas ISD Trustee Lance Currie was on campus when U2L Liaison volunteer Sophia Kneeland helped surprise new first-grade teacher Valentina Pereira at DeGolyer Elementary.”Going to the effort to do this means so much about how much you care about the community,” Trustee Currie said to Sophia in appreciation for her volunteer efforts at DeGolyer.Valentina plans to use her grant to create a calming corner in her classroom and expand her classroom library.
More New Teacher Support Grants in the 2024-2025 School Year
We will deliver more New Teacher Support Grants throughout November and this spring to help new teachers running low on supplies. If you know a new teacher at one of our 103 U2L Network schools who could benefit from a $500 grant to enhance their learning environment, please encourage them to apply here. We will consider submitted applications that have not received a grant in this school year’s November and spring award cycles. To find out how you can support New Teacher Support Grants and other United to Learn programs, visit our Get Involved page.Want to see New Teacher Award Grant deliveries in action? Follow us on social media @unitedtolearn and check out our reel featuring Erica and Marissa from Fossil surprising teachers Serenity Tran and Grace Banks.