Westmoreland Intermediate Unit impact grants open to all teachers

In 2019, the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit Foundation for the first time opened their impact grant program to any teacher, rather than just special-education teachers.

“We literally threw the rubric out,” said foundation board member Roberta Cook of Murrysville.

Cook and others in the foundation liked what they saw when choosing recipients for the grants, given out twice annually.

She pointed to a few that truly caught her eye, including a Penn-Trafford School District grant involving the study of DNA.

“It was very cross-curricular and showed good awareness of a social issue: should police be allowed to look at DNA to find a criminal?” Cook said. “There was a writing component, there was a biology component — we really liked it.”

Grants of up $1,000 are available to educators in both district-operated and WIU-operated classrooms throughout Westmoreland County.

Cook said she and foundation members were impressed by entries like the New Kensington-Arnold School District’s proposal for a grant to help promote nonfiction reading for high-school seniors.

The $845 grant proposes a selection of books chosen both by district faculty and culled from Time Magazine’s “All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books” list.

“What impressed me is that they’re non-typical for high-school kids to be reading,” Cook said. “It’s not ‘Great Expectations’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ it was things like ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ ‘A Brief History of Time’ and ‘Guns, Germs and Steel.’ This wasn’t a biography of Ben Franklin.”

Cook praised the district’s goal of selecting nonfiction “designed to inspire analytic thinking.”

While the foundation board plans to use the wide-open grant model moving forward, attention still will be paid to proposals that aim for inclusivity when it comes to special-education students.

“Several of the grants we’ve done last spring and fall were for a general student population, but included special-ed students in the proposals, which makes me happy,” Cook said.

Contracts for the grants will be sent out this month, and the spring grant cycle will begin the first week of March.

Grants like Penn-Trafford’s, for the DNA-focused “Great Warrior Caper” are exactly what foundation members are looking for.

“It was innovative, it was different, it was timely and it melded all of these different academic disciplines together to show how they’re all relevant,” Cook said. “It wasn’t just reading ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and writing a paper on it.”

For more on the grant program, visit WIU7.org.