GFPE Projects

CS4GA (cs4ga.org) is seeking sponsorship of its March 24th, 2022 annual summit.  CS4GA is a collective impact initiative that seeks to ensure that all of Georgia's K-12 students have access to a quality computer science education with equity.  Our anchor institution, GaDOE, and our backbone functions provider, GTech's Constellations Center for Equity in Computing, work with us to put on our annual summit.  The March, 2021 virtual CS4GA Summit had over 600 educators, academic professionals, industry professionals, and government representatives come together to learn about and work towards access to computer science education with equity. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the March 24th, 2022 virtual CS4GA summit, please complete our Sponsorship Prospectus Form.  If you have any questions about this project, you can contact Khurram 'Ko' Hassan (CS4GA Lead Facilitator) at ko@advantageconsultingllc.com or at 404.213.9825.

Launched in 2018, GFPE’s Rural Education Fund gives rural school districts – which face unique challenges and resource gaps – the flexibility to identify their area of greatest need and propose a project that will make an impact on students.

To date, we’ve awarded 63 grants to rural schools and districts totaling over $354,003.

As of January 2022, GFPE is the official home of the Qualified Education Donation Tax Credit (QED), a tax credit opportunity for Georgia residents and corporations. GFPE will use donated funds to provide innovative grants to public schools and districts to improve student achievement, with a priority on serving schools identified in the bottom 5% of performance. 

Since the QED launched, over $1.7 million in grants have been awarded to traditional schools and charter schools, school districts, and nonprofit organizations across Georgia. To date the QED has funded five grant programs: The Community Partnership Grant, Innovative Summit Pilot Grant, Governor’s Honors Program Educator Fellowship, COVID-19 Relief Fund, and Innovative Education Fund.

Innovation-focused grants give schools and districts the opportunity to tackle an existing problem in a unique way. One school – West Jackson Elementary School of Jackson County Schools – received a $74,000 Community Partnership Grant to address needs around positive school climate. With the grant, they have implemented a multi-tiered program that targets school based professional development in Social-Emotional Learning, addresses the non-academic needs of students, and develops a mentor program for at-risk students.

Smaller programs, like the COVID-19 Relief Fund, allowed schools to create programs to mitigate more immediate needs born out of the pandemic. One such program from Richmond County Schools provided eighth through twelfth grade students the opportunity to attend online summer school and receive tutoring to recover credits for courses they did not pass in the 2019-2020 school year.

In March, Georgia public schools had to do the impossible – with extremely limited notice, schools shifted to full-time distance learning, many for the first time in their history.

Students needed laptops and internet access. They needed to access meals, while suddenly cut off from their school buildings. They needed mental health support, and they needed to continue learning in an entirely new environment.

To help schools fill the gaps, GFPE immediately partnered with the Innovation Fund Foundation (IFF) to stand up a brand-new grant program, the COVID-19 Response Fund. Applications opened in April 2020, and by May, 11 grants were approved, providing funds for personal protective equipment (PPE), school meals, mental health services, supplemental learning resources, and supports for at-risk students.

An additional round of funding was made possible by donations from the R. Howard Dobbs Foundation, NCR Foundation, Rotary Club of Brookhaven, and the Jesse Parker Williams Foundation, funding school and district initiatives designed to mitigate the long-term impacts of the pandemic.

In the spring, as the pandemic started, an estimated 80,000 student households across the state did not have access to broadband internet services –making connectivity one of the most urgent needs facing the K-12 education system.

To expand connectivity, GFPE partnered with the Governor’s Office and the Georgia Department of Education to leverage a donation from AT&T and deploy 448 WiFi rangers to 36 school districts across the state.

The rangers were affixed to school buses to provide community-accessible mobile WiFi connectivity, with priority given to systems located in high-poverty and rural areas of the state.

“I am extremely grateful for the donation by GFPE and AT&T of WiFi Rangers,” said Chris Forrer, Superintendent of the Franklin County School System in northeast Georgia. “Whether they were used by students who were temporarily quarantined to keep up their classwork, or by students who chose to attend school virtually full-time, this donation was essential to their learning.”

GFPE regularly works with staff at the Georgia Department of Education to identify and fund key priorities – including Dual Language Immersion, or DLI.

DLI allows students to gain fluency in a foreign language as part of the regular school day. In Georgia DLI programs, students spend at least half of their school day in the target language, and the other half-day in English. Over the last three years we’ve awarded 20 grants totaling $30,000 to schools located around the state. 

The grants funded key resources to supplement existing DLI programs; for example, as Dunleith Elementary rolled its program up to first grade, they needed to equip an entire classroom with Spanish instructional resources. Similarly, Brandywine Elementary used its grant funds to purchase Spanish-language books to support math, science, and social studies learning.