‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: Santa Barbara Unified Teachers Awarded $200,000

Last month, the Santa Barbara Education Foundation (SBEF) made it rain on Santa Barbara Unified teachers. Of the record-breaking $200,000 in grants awarded this year, many are funding essential materials, books, field trips, and classroom upgrades. 

But they are also supporting some seriously cool and creative projects around the district. 

Those projects include, but are not limited to, making “thumb pianos” and collaborating with Santa Barbara High School’s sewing class for puppet shows at Adams Elementary; a “claymation club” at Harding University Partnership School; wildlife habitat lessons and garden education at Santa Barbara Charter School; and “leather working” and “adult transition gardening” at San Marcos High School.

Every penny goes straight to educators — bypassing what PJ Carmean, a teacher at Santa Barbara Junior High, calls the “bureaucratic nightmare of public education.” This year, Carmean was awarded $5,000 to fund “field trips across the spectrum” for her students. 

On Wednesday, February 7, Carmean brought 40 7th- and 8th-grade ASB and journalism students to Disneyland for a leadership conference. It was $3,500 just for the bus, on top of $8,000 for the tickets. The SBEF grant was “critical to get them there,” she said. 

“When you take them out of the classroom, it’s so amazing because you see them interacting with the real world,” she continued.  “It gives kids an avenue for their ideas, to come out of their shells.”

Sure, they could’ve rented a run-of-the-mill school bus for $1,800 less, but she wanted the students to “feel like leaders” — appreciated and respected. “Like what SBEF gives us teachers,” she added. “It validates us for the work and care we put into our students.” 

She’s using the rest of the money to fund trips for her new emergent multilingual students to help them “develop a sense of place in Santa Barbara.” Speaking as someone who grew up in “a little town in the south,” she said, “It’s about knowing the natural places around where you live.” 

This year, she’s working with the Wilderness Youth Project to “help the kids feel comfortable outdoors” and connect with their new environment. Their first trip was to Schofield Park last week, and they’re heading to the Channel Islands at the end of the year. Last year, they went surfing. 

“It was mind-boggling for them,” she beamed. “Like, ‘Holy shit, this is what you can do in the ocean?’ It was life-changing.”

Eighty-three educators across 21 schools in the district received grants this year, serving 18,682 students, including a new, $10,000 tech-focused STEAM grant. The first of these grants was given to the Computer Science Academy at Santa Barbara High School.

Director Sky Adams accepted the grant and will use the money to improve the academy’s facilities and programs, as well as enhance extracurriculars serving 340 students. 

(This Indy reporter was once a student in the Computer Science Academy and took Adams’s class when she was still new to the school. The academy’s few classrooms were in a modest, paint-chipped basement adjacent to the parking lot. Also, back then, girls in the academy were like the needles in a sweaty, adolescent haystack. However, Adams is expanding outreach and support to underrepresented students of all gender identities.)  

The Teacher Grants program, started in 1985, has come a long way from its humble beginnings of asking local businesses for donations to fund grants of only $250. Since 2018, the program has awarded 387 grants totaling more than $675,000.

“You take this mission beyond our expectations for fundraising,” said former board president Joni Meisel during the January 24 awards ceremony, “and you have an impact beyond our wildest dreams.”

SBEF will be raising funds for its Teacher Grants program during its HOPE Awards event on April 25, 2024 at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. More information to come.