Grant program will aid history, social studies teachers in CVSD
The Central Valley School District will benefit from a nearly $1 million teaching grant to help fund additional education for history teachers.
The $997,993 grant was awarded to Educational Service District 101 by the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of a consortium that includes Central Valley, Eastern Washington University, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, National Archives and Records Administration and the Washington State Digital Archives.
According to the federal government, the grant is designed to “support programs that raise student achievement by improving teacher knowledge, understanding and appreciation of American history.”
The grant is the third Teaching American History award received by the ESD-EWU-MAC consortium since 2001, but a first for Central Valley.
Central Valley teachers will use the funds in part to develop classroom based assessments for social studies as required by the state, said Marcy James, the social studies chair at Central Valley High School.
The classroom-based assessments were created to examine student knowledge in social studies, much like the Washington Assessment of Student Learning does with reading, writing and math. Central Valley is piloting the classroom-based tests for social studies in grades three through 12.
“By 2008, Washington state says that schools will need to start reporting those,” James said. “I went looking for some help to develop these tests in our classrooms and found this opportunity through ESD 101. It’s very exciting.”
The grant project, known as “Freedom Moves West: The Pacific Northwest in American History,” will fund three consecutive yearlong seminars in history for regional K-12 teachers, 45 of which will come from Central Valley School District. Each year, the program will target a different topic tied to the state’s Essential Academic Learning Requirements – or what students should know at what grade level – for specific grades.
The capstone of each year will be a weeklong summer institute including study at the MAC, EWU-Cheney campus and the National Archives branch in Seattle.
In addition to the teachers enrolled in each year’s cohort, the project will conduct quarterly workshops targeting another 200 teachers annually. The grant also will provide a training component for EWU education majors interested in historical writing, research and oral histories.
Teachers selected to participate will receive tuition covering 10 graduate credits at EWU, plus a $1,000 stipend, and reimbursement of up to $500 for materials used in the classroom, James said.
“This really is a wonderful opportunity,” James said. “I just think the thing that social studies teachers are so excited about is that we’ve had a lot of focus on reading and writing and science and math, because of the WASL, and now here we have this marvelous opportunity to bring social studies to the forefront.”