Mass IDEAS Awards Planning Grants to Five Teams Across Massachusetts

Mass IDEAS (Innovating Design in Education for All Students) is excited to announce our first cohort of planning grantees, teams that are working to redesign schools across Massachusetts. The grantees include:

The five grantees were selected from a pool of teams across the state that were seeking resources to help them plan to redesign existing public schools or create new ones. The planning grants of up to $150,000 per team, combined with direct supports from Mass IDEAS, will provide teams with the knowledge, skills, dedicated time, financial resources, and support to do so effectively. The grants and direct supports will work in tandem to ensure effective school model planning. Generous funding for these grants was provided by the Barr and Nellie Mae Education Foundations. Mass IDEAS continues to appreciate both foundations’ support of this critical work across the Commonwealth.

The selection of these teams comes at the culmination of a process throughout the fall where teams from across the state responded to a Request for Learning focused on stakeholder input and community engagement in school design. Grantees were selected from among a subset of applicants who both completed the application and an in-person team interview process. Two of the grantees, Mohawk Trail and Salem, participated in previous Mass IDEAS School Design Institutes, supporting earlier steps in their school redesign work, while the other three grantees connected with Mass IDEAS for the first time through the planning grant application opportunity.

Later this month, Mass IDEAS will convene the grantees for their first collaborative professional learning opportunity at Babson Executive Conference Center in Wellesley, MA. Throughout the grant period, teams will benefit from professional learning, coaching, and other resources designed to support their school redesign work.

Mass IDEAS (Innovating Design in Education for All Students) is an initiative of Next Generation Learning Challenges designed to incubate high-quality, innovative school models in order to transform K-12 public education across the Commonwealth. By offering a variety of entry points into school model design, we support communities across Massachusetts that are ready to learn from each other, share ideas, and turn great ideas into great public schools. More information about Mass IDEAS is available at https://massideas.org/.


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