The Community Foundation's Education Initiative is intended to help improve academic achievement for Erie County students in grades K-12. Our goal is to provide, and to encourage others to provide, private support for public education as a means to enable our students and schools to achieve a margin of excellence through projects and programs that would otherwise be out of reach within their regular school budgets.

Education Challenge Grants
The Sandusky/Erie County Community Foundation awarded challenge grants totaling nearly $250,000 to five public and three parochial school systems in Erie County to establish permanent endowment funds for K-12 education. The challenges were issued to all Erie County schools in early 2007, with the Community Foundation offering a 1:1 match on dollars raised by December 31, 2009. Each school’s allocation was based on student enrollment data. The endowment funds will generate an annual grant to each participating school, to be used for purposes determined within each district.

Schools that have raised matching dollars are public school districts: Berlin-Milan, Margaretta, Perkins and Sandusky City Schools, Vermilion Schools; and parochial school systems: St. Mary School in Vermilion, St. Peter School in Huron and Sandusky Central Catholic Schools. Of these, with the exception of Margaretta, all met or exceeded their challenge grant goals, and received an additional $3,910 bonus award for their fund.

Endowment funds have been established with a challenge grant and donations from each school community as follows:

Berlin-Milan Education Fund

$71,526

Margaretta Education Fund

$46,840

Perkins Education Fund

$80,809

Sandusky Education Fund

$139,174

Sandusky Central Catholic Education Fund

$29,974

St. Mary School Education Fund

$13,910

St. Peter School Education Fund

$13,910

Vermilion Education Fund

$86,570

Area schools receive matching dollars to establish endowment funds to provide support for school projects.

Interactive SMART Boards in Sandusky City Schools enhance learning experiences for students.

The second component of the Education Initiative is a $1,000,000 grant for academic achievement. This year's grant of $250,000 is the 4th and final year of the program for the benefit of the 14,000 young people attending Erie County schools.

Each school district is unique and each faces its own challenges, so in designing our program, we believed it was important to allow each school system to address its own needs and dreams for the future as they best saw fit. We asked only that the grants be used to help students improve academically and that the schools solicit community input in their decision making process.