The Department of Human Services is now offering new grants for classrooms that go above and beyond.
The Best in Class grants of 2022 will soon be given out to those who seek to make a difference in North Dakota’s early education.
“Best in Class is an opportunity that is for the year before kindergarten that embraces the whole child,” says Shonda Wild, program administrator of Best in Class, “and it embraces the whole child by offering a quality environment as well as through play-based curriculum, and materials and house screenings and interactions.”
As part of Best in Class’s grants, 30 different programs across North Dakota will be receiving funds from the North Dakota Department of Human Services’ Early Childhood Division, with 21 of the schools also receiving funding during the 2021-2022 year.
The aim of these grants is to not only reward those who have plans to improve early education but to encourage those who wish to put their own plans in place.
North Dakota is not the only state who has attempted to implement grants like these … and indeed, Best in Class has seen the good the programs seem to have done in Alabama.
“This is a grant that has been researched for 25 plus years before us in Alabama,” says Wild, “and it’s been taken off of that model, so there is outcome research that is known to be true. We feel that the program is stemmed from some very good components.”
The amount of the grants themselves span from $15,000 to $120,000 for every classroom, varying by the size of the program.
Funding for these grants also provides elementary and secondary schools with Emergency Relief and COVID-19 relief funds.
The grants are monitored and evaluated in each school to ensure the investment is making a quality impact on the school and its students.
But what exactly does ‘quality’ mean?
“It’s not only the environment where there’s a lot of different items for children to interact with,” explains Wild, “but also the interactions with the teacher too. It’s also those components of meeting all the domains of learning for a child that is in the year before kindergarten, looking at their literacy, looking at their math, all the developmental domains and the physical domains too.”
What exactly is done to do so depends on the school, but they’ve all got a common purpose: to help lead the next generation to a bright future.
Some previous schools to earn grants include Shiloh Christian Preschool in Bismarck, Mohall-Lansford Public School, and Westhope Public School.