Department of Education grants $3 million to Sonoma Valley schools

A breakthrough program piloted at El Verano Elementary School has resulted in the recent grant of $3 million to all five elementary schools in the Sonoma Valley Unified School District.  A program of the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry and El Verano elementary school, it involves all the teachers at El Verano in collaboration with the Exploratorium in an unusual pairing of inquiry-based science and English language development.  The program has been underway since February 2008 and is made possible through the Vadasz Family Foundation and the Sonoma Valley Education Fund.  It is funded through August, 2012.
“We are thrilled with this opportunity to continue our work with the Exploratorium,” said SVUSD Superintendent Louann Carlomagno.  “It presents so many opportunities for our students to learn science while learning language.  We look forward to our continued collaboration and expanding the program to all our district elementary schools.”
The grant is made possible through the U.S. Department of Education who recently announced Sonoma schools as one of 49 grantees out of a pool of 1700 applicants nationwide in competition for $650 million in grants from the “Investing in Innovation” or i3 fund.
The grant will enable the extension of the very successful pilot program from just El Verano to all elementary schools in the entire district over the next five years.  The major innovation of the project involves finding ways of integrating science and language development so that the value-added benefit science brings to language development outweighs the time it takes away from doing language development exclusively.
The thinking skills of science, such as questioning, predicting and interpreting, are also skills used in decoding and using spoken and written language. By giving students engaging science experiences, students are motivated to speak, listen, read and write about them, acquiring language in the process.
The i3 competition sought to reward districts, consortia of schools, and nonprofit organizations that proposed the most-innovative proposals focused on improving teacher effectiveness, low-performing schools, standards and assessments, and data systems. The $650 million pot of money is a relatively small piece of some $100 billion in education aid funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by Congress last year.