Carlton Rhodes saw a need for extra teaching materials in his classrooms.
Rather than wait for the school districts he’s worked for to find extra funding, he took matters into his own hands and has, in about six years, secured roughly $12,000 in grant funding through www.donorschoose.org, a site that allows individuals or groups to donate what they wish to various education projects.
Rhodes, a fifth grade math teacher at Overstreet Elementary School, learned about DonorsChoose at a conference in Salt Lake City about six years ago. At the time, he was teaching at East Oktibbeha Elementary School — where he worked for 13 years before coming to Overstreet.
Through that funding, Rhodes has been able to obtain tables, chrome book computers, clickers, math journals, a printer, math manipulatives and science centers for his classes.
“It’s a really good way to get things for the classroom that there’s just no money for,” he said.
On Saturday, Mississippi State University honored Rhodes before the Bulldogs’ football game against the Brigham Young University Cougars.
J.P. Abercrumbie, assistant athletic director for life skills and community engagement, said the recognition is part of the College Football Playoff Foundation’s Extra Yard for Teaching initiative.
Abercrumbie said the undergraduate M-Club, which is made of student athletes who have earned a varsity letter, selected Rhodes’ “DynaMath to the Rescue” grant — through which he’s seeking funding for a subscription to the DynaMath magazine for his classes — on DonorsChoose to recognize and receive $500.
“One of the things they wanted to do was make a donation to projects to impact local youth,” Abercrumbie said. “… Our students felt like Mr. Rhodes’ project has a lot of real world application and short- and long-term impact for students.”
Rhodes said he found out about his selection early last week. The news surprised him.
“I was shocked,” Rhodes said. “I had no clue it was even in the works. I’m not sure how they got wind of it, but it was very appreciated and very unexpected.”
More using DonorsChoose
Rhodes said several other teachers at the school have started using DonorsChoose, and a few have gotten grants. More teachers have seen writing grants for the projects isn’t as hard as it might sound, he noted.
“The idea of writing grants is hard because it’s so involved,” he said. “With DonorsChoose, you’re really just writing a couple of paragraphs on what you need, how you’re going to use it, who your students are — it makes the grant writing process easier and people are seeing that now, so they’re starting to write them.”
Rhodes said he’s learned what people tend to look for in the years since he’s started using DonorsChoose. People tend to like donating to technology-focused projects, and projects that cost less than $500 tend to see more success, in his experience.
Sometimes, he said, it comes down to the luck of if people see the project.
“You can write a grant and not get any action on it, just because people don’t see it or aren’t aware of the site, (but then) repost the same grant three months later and get it funded quick,” he said. “It really kind of depends on what people are looking for.”
DonorsChoose allows people to search by district, school or teacher. There were, as of Monday morning, seven projects up for the Starkville Oktibbeha Consolidated School District — two for Overstreet, two for Starkville High School, and one each for Henderson School, Ward Stewart Elementary and Sudduth Elementary.
Rhodes said the grants that have funded his classroom equipment have made a marked impact. With the chrome books, he doesn’t have to share the computer cart with other teachers, which in turn frees it for use in other classrooms.
The clickers, which students use to answer questions, allow him to instantly know how students are faring on a lesson, compared to when he would have to wait to see how they performed on pencil-and-paper work when he started teaching.
“You might get two days into something before you realize you need to go back and readdress some mistakes,” he said. “With the technology, you can tell almost instantly whether they get it or not, or whether they understand the concept. So you can adjust your lesson on the fly and go back and do more examples, remediate, or if they all get it you can move on to the next thing without wasting time.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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