Wake Education Partnership

Programs: Teacher innovation grants - teacher innovation grants recognize, honor and award funding that incentivizes innovative classroom instruction and collaboration among and across subject areas and grade levels. These grants provide a foundation for establishing best educational practices that can be replicated systemically in wake county. Wakeed and wcpss entered into a public/private partnership for 2016-2017 whereby the school district will match private funding from wakeed for the grants program up to $50,000. Academic improvement is based on and measured against smart goals generated by the individual teacher or professional learning team for each grant.

first steps in literacy - wakeed works closely with the school district, non-profits, and community leaders to help coordinate efforts and provide resources to improve early literacy skills. Wakeed launched the partners read program in 2014 and initially placed more than 30 volunteers in 8 elementary schools to dedicate 30 minutes per week for 10 weeks reading to "at risk" first grade students. Today, the program has grown to 18 schools and over 100 volunteers. In addition, wakeed worked with the wake up and read collaborative on their annual book drive. The drive collected almost 110,000 books which were provided to underserved elementary schools in wake county. Students at 10 schools chose 10 "free" books each to add to their home libraries.

education policy and advocacy - wakeed works to influence and champion community discussion and actions by elected leaders regarding crtical education policy issues. This includes emphasizing the economic impact of an excellent public school system. Wakeed worked with members of the wake county legislative delegation and community members to advocate for increases in teacher and administrator compensation, funding for a teacher career pathway program, flexibility in implementing the new k-3 class-size mandates, and funding for program enhancement teachers. Wakeed worked with the wake county board of commissioners to resolve budgetary gaps in their recommended school funding versus the proposed budget submitted by the board of education. Local funding for our public schools has increased by over 30% during the past four years.