Small Grants Do Big Job of Enhancing Education : Schools: Private program channels money directly to teachers. They put funds to creative classroom uses.

Rose Fisher and Mary Lou Little bought lunch pails and stuffed them with kid-pleasing books and games dealing with math, science and social studies. Designed to be rotated among their kindergartners at Canterbury Avenue School in Pacoima, the materials the teachers created for their reading program include activities to involve parents as well.

Valerie Cannon and Jamar Cotton plan to have their ninth-graders at Mann Junior High School develop a drought-resistant landscape in the coming school year by planting and monitoring a test plot and calculating the water savings after several months. The science students (Cannon’s are gifted, Cotton’s are in special education) will produce a videotape of the project and a newsletter to help disseminate their findings throughout the surrounding southwest Los Angeles community.

Greg Young wanted to give his 10th- and 11th-grade biology students at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights a better grasp of genetics. So he bought drosophilae (fruit flies), helped his students breed them and study the development of two generations, then led class discussions on the pros and cons of genetic engineering.

These teachers are among more than 300 across the Los Angeles Unified School District who early this year received checks for between $400 and $800 to try out 146 innovations aimed at encouraging creative overhaul of classroom practices. The money comes from the privately funded Small Grants for Teachers program. In a time of shrinking school budgets, the grants are increasingly the only alternative to teachers’ digging into their own pockets if they want to bring life to their ideas.

“We found that putting small amounts of money directly into the hands of teachers could work miracles. It’s like pouring water on a flower in the desert,” said Peggy Funkhouser, president and executive director of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, which created the grants program in 1984. It is one of several projects run by the partnership, a consortium of business groups that seeks corporate dollars to help bring about reforms in the public schools.

To look through the catalogue describing this year’s 146 winning projects is to glimpse a dizzying array of dollar-stretching innovations that reflect much of the current thinking about education reform. They integrate several academic subjects, emphasize writing and thinking skills and pair teachers to take full advantage of the strong points of each.

Some combine classes--mixing subject, grade and ability levels and in some cases including disabled children--to encourage cooperative learning. Others seek to involve parents and to reflect the schools’ increasing ethnic diversity. Many provide hands-on lessons relevant to students’ daily lives.

Giving grants to teachers for education reform is not unique to Los Angeles. The partnership is a member of IMPACT II, a network of teacher-support groups that began 12 years ago in New York City with financing from the Exxon Education Foundation. Today, it operates with a mix of public and private funding in a score of cities and counties across the nation, including Boston, Miami, Houston, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Barbara and San Diego. Four states--Ohio, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey--also have embraced the program, which provides money to disseminate proven projects.

Milbrey McLaughlin, professor of education at Stanford University, said she favors such teacher-oriented programs because “they give support to the people who have the expertise. So many of the (other) reform efforts--even America 2000 (the Bush Administration’s proposals for improving schools)--try to do so much from the outside, from the top down.”

Of those efforts that emphasize teachers as agents for change, the Los Angeles project, with its emphasis on encouraging faculty members to try out their own ideas, is “among the very best in the country,” McLaughlin said. “It does a lot to recognize the professionalism of teachers, and it also recognizes that reforms must be done locally, classroom by classroom. It demonstrates what teachers can do with even small amounts of money and freedom.”

In the six years since the small-grants program began, the partnership has distributed $850,587 to 2,700 teachers in 502 Los Angeles district schools. When added to similar programs targeting science, mathematics and the humanities, the amount surpasses $2 million.

The process for tapping into the funds is deliberately simple. Each fall, teachers apply by writing descriptions of their projects, what they hope to accomplish and how much they will need. Each proposal is evaluated by three people--a business representative, an educator and a community leader--drawn from about 150 volunteers.

Those whose projects are selected get their checks in January, along with recognition and the means to share their winning ideas with other teachers. On Monday, for example, the partnership, along with the school district and the teachers union, held a conference that included workshops on the projects of many of this year’s grant winners.

Roosevelt’s science department chairman, Joe Roland, who got projects funded two years in row, said the grants and other partnership programs “are the reason I’ve remained with the district.”

“It is so rewarding to be a part of a network of teachers, to be able to work together and share ideas. It really makes a difference,” Roland said.

Others said they appreciate the trust that comes with the partnership funds.

“With other grants, the paperwork is enormous, and the district takes 3% off the top for administrative costs, but (the partnership) gives a check directly to the teacher, and that’s it. Plus, the teacher then owns the materials,” said Amanda Rubins, a social studies teacher at Van Nuys Junior High.

Rubins teamed up with English teacher Nancy Coble to design “The Middle Ages Around the World,” to help their seventh-graders learn about the Medieval lifestyles of the peoples of Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. They incorporated art, writing activities, literature and other disciplines into the project.

“It is amazing what you can do with $800,” Rubins said.

Diana Takenaga-Taga’s 3-year-old oceanography project, made possible by a partnership grant she got in 1987, is a case in point.

Her kindergarten classroom at Windsor Hills Magnet School is chock-full of intricate shells, National Geographic pop-up books and wiggly plastic replicas of ocean creatures. An aquarium sits along a wall and an empty wading pool rests in one corner, ready to be turned into a playground “tide pool.” Students’ sea-inspired artwork lines the walls and spills out of shelves that sometimes hold tuna fish sandwiches and other samples of goodies from the ocean.

Volunteers who evaluated the applications commented frequently on the projects’ creativity. Some other ideas that received funding were:

* “Bilingual Buddies” operated at two east San Fernando Valley elementary schools, Stonehurst and Apperson. The project pairs English-speaking students with Spanish-speaking youngsters from three grade levels to learn about each other’s culture.

* “Animals and Their Homes” brought lessons on endangered species to youngsters at Wilmington Park Elementary School in Wilmington. Emphasis was on habitats and how animals adapt. Teachers used a trip to the Los Angeles Zoo to let youngsters observe how zookeepers had attempted to replicate animals’ natural environments.

* “Women and Minorities as Scientists” provided role models as well as math, science and history lessons for Eastman Avenue Elementary in East Los Angeles. It is one of several grants funded by the Toyota USA Foundation, which this year contributed $61,000 for 82 math and science projects.

Seven teachers at Audubon Junior High School in the Crenshaw area were awarded funding for three projects that typified the grants program’s range--an exploration of the plague’s impact on history, a cultural exchange system with students in Osaka, Japan, and a program to enhance language skills through the study of African-American literature, art and music.

Even those projects that reflect today’s high-tech culture need not be expensive. Teachers at Gompers Intermediate School near Watts used part of their grant to refurbish a used video camera. Computer sciences instructor Hobart Cress teamed up with social studies and English teachers Carole Watts and Lanei Cross to help students produce and record their own “newscasts” based on their write-ups of current events.

John Dolan and Susan Serrano supplemented their grant with fund raising for an ambitious project geared toward building environmental awareness among their Pueblo de Los Angeles Continuation High School students in Lincoln Heights. Because many of the students had never been out of their own urban environment, the teachers began with a three-day trip to Yosemite.

“You can’t ask urban kids to care about the forests unless they’ve been there,” Serrano said.

Competition for the grants is tough. Funkhouser said the educational partnership gets 800 to 1,000 applications each year. About two-thirds “deserve to be funded,” but the organization usually has sufficient money for only about one in five applicants, she said.

“We think of ourselves as research and development people; we are not supplementing what the state took away. We look for projects that tie into a whole design for meaningful reform, that tie teachers together to work toward that,” Funkhouser said.

“We want a whole chain reaction from these projects.”