What Can a School District Buy for $100,000?

With Patch organizing a holiday light contest that awards the , we wanted to see what that money could buy. If you simply take a photo of the great holiday lights at your house and add it to this page, that $100 grand could soon be in local school children's hands. 

Like kids heading off to the school store with a crisp $5 bill in their pockets, district officials in your town could be answering the question of what to do with that money. Instead of painstaking choices among rubber pencil grips, sweet erasable pens or Hannah Montana stickers, administrators will weigh among curriculum, facility or activity purchases for students at their elementary, middle and/or high schools.

For this exercise, I turned to the Los Alamitos Unified School District to find out what some of their current needs are. There are many – and they add up to a lot more than $100,000. However, Superintendent Sherry Kropp was kind enough to share with Patch the top three things that $100,000 could do for the students of the Los Alamitos school district.

Here are some ways the school district could spend the Patch donation:

• Class size reduction: The number one spending priority for the district is to hire more credentialed teachers in order to reduce classroom sizes, said Kropp. According to the district website, last year, the nonprofit LAUSD Educational Foundation helped raised $70,000 “to hire credentialed teachers to work with small groups during math and language arts instruction in 4th and 5th grades.” Having suffered more than $18 million in budget cuts from the state over the last two years, the district needs help hiring teachers for optimal student-teacher ratios.
• A renovation for the Los Alamitos High School Choir room. There are about 300 students in the school’s choir program. While the program may be the best in the nation (national champions two years running), their practice room is anything but state of the art. According to the Note-ables Booster Club, “Right now the kids are dancing on beat up cement floors (not good for the knees and feet), trying to practice with just a few mirrors taped in to place (safety hazard) and stepping over stuff on the floor due to limited storage.  We have ripped out the old built-in risers and carpeting, but much more needs to be done.”
• Purchase adaptive technology - equipment and software that allow for individualized instructions such as:
  10 iPads with charging stations—$7,200
  A SmartBoard, projector and 10 mini laptops —$5,523.90
  10 21.5-inch iMacs—$19,390
  Two interactive SmartBoards bundles with 32 remotes for formative assessment each—$11,677.22

For more information, visit the contest page. The submission period ends Dec. 26.