Grants Earn Aide an ‘A’ in Oceanside

Over the past six years, the Oceanside Unified School District has acquired a computer lab and begun a special summer school and drug-awareness program for the hefty price tag of $1 million.

District officials didn’t spend much time worrying about the price of the valuable programs, though, because the district didn’t have to pay for a penny for them.

That’s because Sherry Freeman de Leyva, the district’s special-projects coordinator, has single-handedly obtained more than $1 million for the city’s schools by successfully applying for numerous grants.

According to her track record, it appears that when Freeman de Leyva asks for money, she usually gets it. Since 1983, she has applied for more than 20 state or federal grants, and in most cases, has walked away with a bundle.

Success Rate Impressive

“Let’s put it this way, I get money more often than I don’t,” Freeman de Leyva said. “I would say I’m successful about 75% of the time.”

Though her success rate is impressive in its own right, she and her colleagues are far more delighted with the results the money has delivered. Without the grants, several of the district’s programs--particularly those that cater to the needs of academically troubled students--could not be offered.

“In many cases, the money that I get is seed money for a new program,” Freeman de Leyva said. “Without it, we couldn’t get a new program off the ground.”

With the grant money she’s won, she has helped the school district get the computer lab, begin the drug awareness program and start innovative summer school sessions.

“The problem with establishing new programs is that start-up costs can be really prohibitive,” she said. “It’s so much easier to continue a program rather than start a new one.”

Persuading school administrators to finance a new, unproven educational program, is often a futile task, Freeman de Leyva said.

“You just can’t walk into their office and say, ‘Hi, can you give me $100,000 for this?’ ” Even if they like your idea, the district often just doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Recognizing the district’s strangling budget restraints, Freeman de Leyva decided that she would have to go elsewhere to find money for her programs. And so began her moon-lighting career as a grant writer.

Have a Good Idea

“Applying for grants was never one of my official responsibilities,” Freeman de Leyva said. “I heard about a grant that I thought I might be able to get, so I asked my boss for permission to apply.”

That was the first of many grants to be won. And now, she no longer has to ask permission to apply.

“Nowadays, applications for grants mysteriously appear on my desk,” Freeman de Leyva said. “People seem to think I have good luck, so they ask me to apply for them.”

But there’s more to winning grants than luck or good writing, she says. The secret of her success: have a good idea.

“The first thing is, you have to have a good idea . . . an innovative approach. And then you have to develop that idea from its inception, to the purchase of materials, to the implementation in the classroom, to its evaluation. All that has to come through in the application.”

William Bragg, the district’s associate superintendent, agrees with that theory.

“Her ideas are sound instructionally,” Bragg said. “She has a practical understanding of what teachers need in the classroom.”

Freeman de Leyva, who began her teaching career as an instructional aide and taught English as a second language, has always had a special interest in bilingual educational programs.

Last year, she won a federal grant to finance a summer school program that applied an innovative “thematic learning approach” to help students with limited English proficiency. Such students improved their basic skills by focusing all their educational lessons on a particular topic: space.

“Math, language arts, science (courses) . . . everything they did had something to do with space,” Freeman de Leyva said. “By intertwining all their subjects around a particular topic we believe it helps them to learn.”

Although having an effective educational idea is the path to grant writing success, the grants wizard offers other tips: “Have a catchy title and make sure you have a nice cover for your proposal.”