Four Things You Need To Know This Month

1. NEA Foundation Grants Available

Educators frequently need outside resources to engage in meaningful professional development due to limited district funding. Through the NEA Foundation’s Learning & Leadership grants, support for professional development is available to members in the following areas:

• Individuals to participate in high-quality professional development like summer institutes, conferences, seminars, travel abroad programs, or action research

• Groups to fund collegial study, including study groups, action research, lesson plan development, or mentoring experiences for faculty or staff. Two levels of funding are available: $2,000 and $5,000. Grants fund activities for 12 months from the date of the award. Grant funds can be used for travel, room, meals, registration fees, materials, etc. for individual grants. For group grants, funds can be used for educator stipends, substitute fees, materials, travel, meals, etc.

Grant funds cannot be used to pay indirect costs, grant administration fees, salaries, conference fees for more than one person, or lobbying or religious purposes.

Student Success Grants are also available. Grant funds can be used for resource materials, supplies, equipment, transportation, technology, or scholars-in-residence. Although some funds may be used to support the professional development necessary to implement the project, the majority of grant funds must be spent on materials or educational experiences for students.

Application Period: December 2 - February 28 2021 Notifications: May 2021 To apply, visit maineea.org.

2. Leaders for Just Schools Equity Training

Recordings are now available for MEA’s Beyond the Classroom: Leaders for Just Schools Equity Training. This webinar series allows participants to take a deep dive into understanding equity and how bias can impact teaching and learning. The webinars will give you practical tools you can use to improve school culture so that every student can succeed. There are four webinars in the series, which has a scaffolded curriculum. The webinar topics include: Equity, Equality, and Justice, Equity and Bias, Privilege, and Isms and Microaggressions. You can find the recordings on MEA’s website, maineea.org under the professional development tab.

3. Virtual Office Hours

The Maine Department of Education offers free virtual office hours to support educators and administrators. The office hours are broken up into content categories, ranging from Visual and Performing Arts to Social and Emotional Learning to Elementary Education. The topics run the gamut and webinars are available both live and recorded. Questions will be answered during the sessions. To see the full content calendar visit: https://www.maine.gov/doe/ calendar

4. New Education Secretary

President-Elect Joe Biden told then-NEA President Lily Eskelsen García that on his first day in office he would fire Betsy DeVos and nominate an educator for Secretary of Education. With his commitment to including educators in the conversation, a pro-public education ally in Biden’s cabinet would center on issues facing students and educators regularly.

The Department of Education will be Educator-Oriented, “Education should be put more in the hands of educators. You should have more input on what you teach, how you teach it, and when you teach it. You are the ones in the classroom, you should have more input,” Biden said at the NEA 2020 Virtual Representative Assembly in July. He continued, “This is going to be a teacher-oriented Department of Education, and it’s not going to come from the top down—it’s going to come from the teachers up.” Biden also reiterated that when federal funding is allocated to schools, educators should have a say in how it is spent in their local districts.