Teacher Grants

The Bellingham Public School’s Foundation awards dozens of grants to individual teachers every year.  These grants enable teachers to provide their students with incredible, creative opportunities that would be impossible without the support of the foundation and the generous Bellingham community that gives to help fund exceptional education.

Our top funding priorities for this year include:

Mental Health and Social Emotional Learning

Projects promoting youth mental health and social emotional resiliency through creative expression in either the fine or performing arts

Libraries and Literacy

Projects that provide students with books and other supports to ensure that every Bellingham student can develop an appreciation for books while learning to read at a high level

Creativity in STEM

Projects that help provide outstanding experiences in STEM both in and out of the classroom.  Particularly focusing on those projects that expose younger learners to STEM concepts or help make the sciences approachable to a wider audience.

A few grants we are funding in 2023

In 2023 we are funding dozens of grants to individual teachers in the Bellingham School District

DRONES in MS?!

6th grade students will have the opportunity to flex their problem solving, safety, and responsibility muscles by working in pairs to learn to fly, maintain and code a drone!

Drones are a new an innovative teaching tool to help engage students in the classroom.  They will allow educators to teach an essential skill set in engineering and coding that is applicable to students futures and whose use is growing more and more popular every year

Shuksan Salish Sea Adventures

Shuksan’s students will work with The Community Boating Center’s Salish Sea Adventures program to provide environmental education opportunities through paddle sports and field research. Students will develop social-emotional and leadership skills, learn about the Salish Sea through hands on research building a connection to science practices, and have fun!

Students will participate in rotations which will include students kayaking on the bay and engaging in field research on the shore. In the water trained guides support students in safety procedures and equipment, exploring wildlife, overcoming fears, and teamwork to facilitate these new experiences for our students. On land, the second group is participating in an experiment with mussels! They will gain a greater understanding of filter feeders and their impact on our marine ecosystems. They will hypothesize, gather data, and explore interactions. They will be introduced to background information like ecological roles, water quality parameters, mussel anatomy and invasive species impact.

Solving Problems Through Dystopian Literature

In 8th grade, we like to explore the hero’s journey through the dystopian setting. Unfortunately, we have been using the same text for a lot of years (decades?).   Thanks to a BPSF grant our teachers will update our current texts to demonstrate the hero’s journey through more modern texts that also reflect more current issues in our world.

Students will be reading books in small groups in the spring of 2024. Then they will move into the final part of our year which will use informational texts to help us explore and discover solutions to real global problems correlated with issues found in the dystopian setting and overcome by the hero’s in the story.