D181 Foundation

KIDS Grants Blankets for families in need

D181 Foundation

BY MIKE ELLIS

The greater Hinsdale community is distinguished for its general commitment to education, long boasting some of the finest public schools in both the state and nation. Since 1997, the District 181 (D181) Foundation has been supplementing the work of the district at-large, while functioning as a conduit between the community and the nine District 181 schools in Hinsdale, Clarendon Hills and Burr Ridge.

According to D181 Foundation executive director Meg Cooper, the foundation germinated with an exploratory committee stemming from the board of education, charged with examining whether it would be beneficial for the district to create a foundation.

Cooper said the committee learned that foundations are quite common in public school districts across the Chicago metropolitan area. From its inception, the D181 Foundation has grown considerably, having supplied roughly $1 million to support district-wide initiatives to date.

"We work together to sort of bridge the community to the District 181 schools, with the purpose of providing resources for the schools to enrich and enhance the children's educational experience," Cooper said.

The foundation is funded through individual donations and business sponsorships and partnerships, with both revenue sources providing approximately equal funding.

Among its various donors, the HinsdaleClarendon Hills Rotary Club has made the largest overall contribution to the D181 Foundation, having made it a beneficiary of the Rotary Run Charity Classic for a number of years.

Other prominent funding partners include Hinsdale Bank and Trust, whose CEO Dennis Jones was an original foundation board member, and CHT Orthodontics, which has amplified its support of the foundation in recent years.

The D181 Foundation board is comprised of 15 to 25 community members, teachers and administrators.

Board member Colleen Wilcox said its value to the D181 consists in concentrating

Documentary Guest Speaker

on programming across the district, in which it differs from the respective school PTOs, which devote their funding efforts to individual schools.

"The foundation is a broad overview of the whole district," Wilcox said. "We support the whole district, and not just silos."

The foundation's core programming consists of parent programs, teacher grants, kids grants and partnering with D181 on districtwide initiatives.

Parent programs include the thrice-annual community speaker series and films such as the recent LIKE social media documentary the foundation presented last month.

Cooper described the teacher grants program as an "incubator fund," through which teachers can submit applications to the foundation to try something new "without having to risk tax dollars."

The D181 Foundation awards $150 grants to students styled kids grants for which children may apply to aid them in conducting community service projects.

Cooper said the foundation desires that students identify a problem, and conceptualize how they might be able to provide a solution to it.

"I think the power of working together as a whole will make the district even stronger than focusing on individual schools," she said. "That was part of the reason why the district wanted to form a foundation, was to have that kind of bridge."

In October, the foundation showed the social media documentary LIKE at Clarendon Hills Middle School (CHMS) and The Community House in Hinsdale.

Cooper said it had received feedback from District 181 parents indicating a desire to present on the topic of social media.

"It's probably one of the biggest areas of worry and concern that many parents are feeling these days," she said. "That was the genesis of the program."

The film provided a number of perspectives on social media from individuals who formerly worked in the industry and professors who have studied the subject, and drove home the point that platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are companies that conduct extensive research in order to personalize the experiences of their users so they can maximize advertising revenue. "They tried to pull the veil on the business aspect of all those platforms, and how what people were doing for the purposes of making

money were actually having unintended psychological impacts on the users, as they were being manipulated to stay on a specific site or to engage in a specific site," Cooper said.

Furthermore, the film illustrated that this commercial-driven approach, especially when it is undetected by users, can lead to deleterious consequences, such as misleading them with respect to the prevalence of extreme viewpoints. "[Attendees] thought that this was all set up for them and their social relationships," Wilcox said, "which isn't the driving force at all: it's money and business."

Cooper said parental feedback on the film was "very, very positive," indicating that both audiences clapped at the conclusion.

"They really felt like they had some good information to have conversations with their kids at home," she said.

Each year, the D181 Foundation sponsors a young writers night in February for thirdthrough eighth-grade students across the district, as well as a student art exhibit at The Community House in May.

In spring, it is planning to add a district S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) night to function as a culmination to a new S.T.E.M. program that it has implemented this year.

Dr. Garcia with students Young Writer’s Night 2

Classrooms across the district are working on S.T.E.M. challenges, each of which involve some sort of engineering application. Each participating classroom is then paired with another working on the same project, and the classrooms will Skype with each other to identify similarities and differences in their respective approaches.

In addition to working with D181 parents and students directly, Cooper said the foundation connects the community at-large with the schools, referencing its professional partners program with local realtors. Out of 16 participating agents, Cooper estimated that only two or three currently have children in D181 schools.

Student Art Exhibit

"I think the community as a whole is extremely supportive of education," Wilcox said, "and we have a lot of people who, whether they had kids in the schools at one time or never did, still want to be a part of and supportive of our local educational system." ■

For more information about the District 181 Foundation, visit www.d181foundation.org