This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
Picture a classroom in urban Louisiana - the building is 50 years old, and has seen better days. There's not room in the budget for fixing the ceiling tiles that buckle in the corner, not unless they're in imminent danger of falling on someone's head. It is what it is, and the school deals with it, because the kids are awesome. They're there to learn, and the teachers are there to teach.
Into all this steps your humble narrator - a first year teacher who has found herself required to teach a scripted curriculum that requires all sorts of shiny equipment and books for all the students and playing DVDs before every lesson and lots of fun, awesome, exciting teaching tools. But alas, she has no projector with which to show these DVDs or PowerPoints or YouTube videos of cats playing pianos (kidding!) on anything larger than a 13-inch laptop screen.
But wait! There is one thing the teacher knows how to do. She may not be able to project from the laptop screen to the whiteboard using the power of her brain, but she is a champion beggar. And she is happy to come to DonorsChoose and tell the world about how her students have all, every single one, failed the iLEAP, how they wouldn't be in her class if they hadn't, and how she is determined to let this be the year that that doesn't happen, and how the internet at large can be a part of making that happen. She knows how to tell you about the amazing program she's using to teach them that requires all these shiny pre-reading film clips, about the writers workshop she's doing with her study skills class that will be so aided by the ability to use PowerPoint, how a multimedia projector would help her across the board when she can't get all the books she needs because her students could see what she sees.
She can totally do that. So she is.
So here's where you come in: give a little something toward the cost of this projector. She's already put a couple hundred dollars into setting up the classroom and making it a warm, friendly kind of place (even Fred and Lila the Cockroaches and Procopius the Spider live in perfect harmony under the useless sink!) but she can't afford any more, and this is something that will drastically affect her ability to create effective lessons. And it's all up to you. Without your help, she'll be using her messy handwriting on the white board that doesn't actually erase for the rest of the school year, and her students won't learn much of anything except how they really should study their penmanship or they'll end up like Ms. E. Which is really not the point of Reading and Study Skills classes.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Eaton and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.