The Deaf Education Advocates Foundation awarded $18,826 in mini-grants to teachers and staff at the Washington School for the Deaf to support extracurricular activities and innovative instruction practices.
The foundation, known by its acronym DEAF, is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that supports the School for the Deaf — which, based in Vancouver, is the only comprehensive pre-K-12th grade school for deaf and hard of hearing youth in Washington — through fundraising and event planning.
The foundation awards annual mini-grants of amounts around $100 to $1,000 for a handful of teachers for field trips and additional classroom materials. This past fall, it received the largest number of teacher applications for such grants — 29 — and eventually awarded grants after a panel review to 21 staff members in late December.
The largest grant awarded this year was to art teacher Billy Miles: $1,880 for a complete screen-printing machine setup. The machine will allow students to design and create T-shirts both for themselves and for the school, among other things. Other grants will go to field trips to yoga classes and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland for older students, as well as to purchasing new Nintendo Switch consoles for each of the residential cottages on the school’s campus — where 60 or so students live throughout the school year.
