Teachers to receive $300,000 in grants

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT-MESA -- Teachers throughout the district will receive more than

$300,000 in special classroom program grants and teacher excellence

awards tonight from the Newport-Mesa Schools Foundation.

Two first-grade teachers from Mariners Elementary School will receive

several of those grants -- but Noreen Kamimura and Marge Newman are not

yet aware of what they have been awarded.

“We’re kind of puzzled because we wrote three grant proposals together,”

Kamimura said. “We were on a roll, so we just kept going.”

Newman has concluded that the duo can expect to walk away with funding

for two new programs, but the foundation has decided to keep the rest a

secret. Kamimura and Newman put in for a physical education grant of up

to $500 to buy students’ gym equipment, such as balls, jump ropes and

Frisbees.

“We are required by law to do 100 minutes of P.E. each week,” Kamimura

said. “It’s awfully hard to do with no equipment.”

They also applied for a second grant for up to $2,500 to fund a program

they titled “Lets Read Together.” If awarded, they would use the money

for books that the children could take home as they learn to read.

Never lacking new educational ideas, the writing team also proposed a

typing program. For $791, the 240 first- and second-grade students at

Mariners could begin a program that would teach them their way around a

keyboard, keeping with the technological wave of the future.

Newman said if she had to choose which grants she really wanted to

receive tonight, she would pick the reading and physical education.

“Most people don’t take [physical education] as seriously as they should

-- I even use jumping rope and bouncing balls for spelling,” she said.

As for the technology grant, she said, “sometimes you have to try twice.”

This will be the 11th and 12th grant Newman has received and numbers four

and five for Kamimura.

With the funds awarded at a banquet tonight, the foundation will have

donated more than $1 million for local classroom programs in the 18 years

since it began giving grants to teachers, said Jo Meredith, a spokeswoman

for the foundation.

“We give it away until it’s gone,” Meredith said. “Whatever we raise, we

give away.”