Educational administrators and technology leaders are constantly battling limited resources to support the maintenance, improvement, and daily operations found within educational settings today. Many schools and school districts have discovered that external funding is an effective way to fill the gap between what funding is needed and what funding is currently available to support educational endeavors. This chapter provides readers with an overview of external funding and how to secure external funding through the development and submission of grant proposals. Readers will also find the components needed to develop an effective grant proposal. These components are grouped into three categories: the idea/solution, the quest for funding, and writing the proposal. After reading the chapter, educational administrators and technology leaders will have a better understanding of the time, efforts, and resources needed to develop and submit competitive grant proposals, thus increasing the probability of securing external funding.
TopIntroduction
Funding continues to remain a major issue throughout educational entities in the United States. Financing educational technology is a particular challenge for administrators, teachers, and staff as it involves not only the initial purchase of technology equipment, but also continual training, professional development, support staff, and technology maintenance and upgrade costs. In his book, Educational Leadership and Planning for Technology, Picciano (2011) identifies four major types of funding sources for educational entities that include the school district budget, bond issues, governmental entities, and gifts and grants. This chapter will focus on one of these four funding sources, gifts and grants, which are commonly referred to as external funding. The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize teachers and administrators, mainly in P-20 educational settings, with the resources available to assist in finding funding opportunities and developing grant proposals.
One of the most common challenges educational technology leaders face in meeting the goals of strategic and technology planning is a lack of funding (Howell, Williams, & Lindsay, 2003; Owen & Demb, 2004; Pennington, Williams, & Karvonen, 2006). Securing external funding has helped fill the void between funds that an organization needs to operate effectively, and funds an organization is provided to operate effectively. This void is the result of a decrease in traditional funding sources such as state allocations for educational entities. Therefore, it is the utmost importance that teachers, staff, administrators, and educational technology leaders understand the need for external funding. They need to know how to stimulate and organize ideas into projects worthy of funding by various agencies, to match idea(s) with appropriate funding agencies, and to write a grant proposal.