In a small office in a tiny school district in a county with no traffic signal, Michelle Wesner sits at her desk looking worried. On her computer screen is an application for an $80,000 state grant for a welding career tech program that the superintendent knows her 200 kids at Posen Consolidated Schools desperately need. It’s also a grant she frets she won’t receive, like some others she’s applied for in the past.
Many bigger districts across the state have an administrator or a team of staffers who craft grant applications. But in the many small districts in rural northern Michigan, school leaders squeeze such work between lunch supervision, substitute teaching and, in at least one district, running a front loader to remove snow from the parking lot.
