Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard highlighted the FY26 grant allocations from state and federal grants at Monday night’s school committee meeting.
“We submit a budget to and let them know how we plan to spend the money,” said Howard. “There are certain categories that they allow you to spend the money in. Again, grants are designed to supplement your current school district’s budget, not to supplant.”
The early childhood special education grant is $24,588, and Howard said that grant primarily pays for an educational support professional to support inclusion in the classroom, as well as some supplies and materials.
“The IDEA 240 grant, that is the biggest special ed grant that we receive every year; $655,107,” said Howard.
The superintendent provided the school committee with a supplemental packet showing how the grant breaks down because it is the district’s largest grant.
“We break it down into support staff, which includes funding 11 of our instructional aides, and then contractual services for special education services, such as paying for independent evaluations, some outside therapy contracts, (and) home and hospital tutoring for students,” said Howard. “We also provide some stipends for folks who do our district program monitoring, restraint training, and for those who support speech and language and OT providers in our district that require supervision as part of their licensure. We also have in this particular grant a line item called specialists, and that’s where we are providing some additional reading support for our students in the form of evaluating some of our programs, providing some direct service for students, and professional development for our staff.”
The grant also helps to pay for agencies that are sometimes used to fill open positions such as occupational therapists, or speech and language specialists.
“Some of the other grants, the Title grants, Title I, II, and III, those grants pay for services for our staff, some of our Title I support for our students, some materials, supplies, programs for the ELL students, (and) academic achievement programs,” said Howard. “Title V is the student support and academic enrichment and offsets the costs for that.”
The superintendent said the district also has a number of competitive grants, such as the 21st Century afterschool program grant and a behavioral health grant, which helps provide mental health support for students.
“And then we have an earmark, (state Senator) Lydia Edwards worked very closely with (school committee Chair) Jen Powell and myself, this is the (third) year we have received an earmark (from) Senator Edwards,” said Howard. “This year, that grant was very specific to technology. In years past, it is how we built the parent information center, it is how we funded multi-language support systems for our kids.
“Although that has not come into the town yet, we are anticipating it will, and that will primarily be used to upgrade Chromebooks and laptops for the students, and iPads, and translation programs … and some of the software that is involved.”