Animal Clinic of Kalispell - May 2021

Animal Clinic of Kalispell - May 2021

Pet Press KALISPELL MAY 2021

406.755.6886 WWW.KALISPELLVET.COM

A Great Way to Support Local Teachers

HOW KEF IS HELPING ENHANCE OUR SCHOOLS

I’ve talked before about how I’m a bit of a black sheep in my family. My dad was a school superintendent and teacher, my mom was a teacher, so many of my extended family members are teachers, and I married a teacher! So I have no lack of reasons to celebrate National Teacher Month this May. But as I got to thinking about the topic, I really wanted to highlight a community organization that is doing great work to support local teachers and students: the Kalispell Education Foundation (KEF). I joined the board of the KEF about a year ago. My kids are grown and out of the school district, but I have such a heart for kids and a great respect for this organization that I’m happy to devote time to the cause. A surprising number of people aren’t familiar with KEF, though there’s been some awesome leadership in recent years working to change that, and KEF has awarded Kalispell teachers and staff almost 100 grants totaling $118,255 since 2009! These grants are a big part of KEF’s vision, which I love so much that I’ll give it to you word for word: “Every teacher is afforded the resources to inspire and deliver the best education to each individual student.” Despite the fact that funding is routinely tight for local public schools, they’re still the best in the state. The teachers and staff dig deep to make our schools top tier, and KEF wants to make sure that they don’t have to fund any of the projects they want to do to enhance classroom learning out of their own pocket. Or as the website says, “A lack of funding should not be a barrier to a great idea.” We all know that teachers are being asked to do more and more every year with fewer and fewer resources. But we don’t want that to limit our teachers’ creativity or our students’ exposure to a variety of different ways of learning.

We all have the ultimate goal of providing the best academic experience possible. KEF’s Great Opportunities Grant Program is helping to support the district to make that possible. The KEF grants are supporting so many neat projects. Some are art-focused like the Hands On Ukulele grant, which is giving every fifth grader in School District 5 the opportunity to learn kinesthetically through playing the ukulele. Others are science-focused like the NASA GLOBE Program now available to Kalispell Middle School (KMS) students, which allows students to collect >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

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