16 Feb Carmin shares with the school board on Valentine’s Day!
Thank you for giving me a minute to reconnect!
Congratulations on the passing of the school bond and two levies – your staff and community leaders worked hard to get it done.
Thank you to Sandy Hayes for her continued service as our liaison.
I wanted to spend a few minutes and tell you what has been keeping the Foundation busy – what we are focused on – what grants we have funded so far this year.
Fully Funded Removing Barriers –
Our Backpacks for Kids program runs the entire year and beyond what we provided during the back-to-school event. More than 50 backpacks and bags of school supply kits have been handed out since the beginning of the school year
Our commitment to supporting our students’ experiencing homelessness continues to grow. Since September we have provided $17,500 to support them. In addition to the generous donors who always support us – we are especially grateful for the Human Services grants we received from the cities of Kenmore and Bothell.
Our Basic Needs Aid program and Opportunity Fund are more active than ever. We expect to spend more than $110,000 on direct support for our students and families. Many of whom are regularly falling short financially. These students are feeling heightened levels of stress while trying to get by. We are extremely grateful to the Care Teams and Care Team liaisons in each school that make that connection happen.
A little foreshadowing, while the Covid crisis had us funding home related issues. We are now setting our sights on in-school inequities and finding the kids who might have participated in a program if they had known a scholarship was available.
Need will continue to increase, but the perception that the crisis is over funding may decrease. This is why we will continue having fundraisers like our annual All in for Kids event. I hope you will join me on March 31.
We have placed a focus on supporting music
The district provided a ton of new instruments for schools. Thanks to the leadership of Patsy Treece, we have found a way to partner with schools to provide support. Just last month, the Foundation provided almost $3,000 in funds for music consumables at 8 schools that requested the support.
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Focusing on high-demand jobs of the future is another board priority.
We are excited to say that we will be launching our own podcast – Skills4Life at the end of March. Discussions will include interviews with people doing cool and future-forward jobs. This effort is being led by Mary Drews and our build skills for life team. We are excited that Northshore parent, Kira Dorian, will be hosting.
Our new granting process which allows teachers to apply throughout the year has resulted in more than $50,000 going into 39 classrooms or projects. The next deadline is 2/28!
Our Northshore Gives platform has helped 20 projects raise $20,000!
We continue to partner by supporting local programs like Northshore Rotary, the district ATI and ATP programs, Artspring, and the Inglemoor Summer Snack program.
District-wide
We were thrilled to make our final investment in the Art Docent refresh program that started 4 years ago.
We were happy to support safety by purchasing radios for use by the staff/support services at Pop Keeney. Recently we also paid off all outstanding school lunch balances to date for the year.
Finally, we were honored to partner with the district’s leadership cabinet
We worked together to offer support and hope to our teachers and staff working in the schools by providing pizza to every school building in the district. We have special plans for transportation later this week.
All in all, we have tried to keep our heads down focused on making the difference that we can, trying to remain as relevant as possible during all of this.
Thank you for your service, its an honor to partner with you for the good of our students.
