California Foundation Funds Back-to-School Projects for Teachers on DonorsChoose.org

Sept. 2, 2010 — -- A generous donor is helping tens of thousands of school kids in California with their back-to-school shopping.

Teachers and students across the state posted wish lists for everything from pencils and paper to digital projectors on the website DonorsChoose.org, and earlier this week, they learned that a foundation agreed to fund all of the requests statewide, worth some $1.3 million.

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Some 67,000 California students will be impacted by the donation, according to figures from DonorsChoose.org. The 2,233 projects from more than 1,000 teachers mostly requested either classroom supplies or technology.

Rebecca Fulop, a 10th-grade science teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco, was among those making requests. Fulop asked for three digital cameras for less than $600 that will allow her biology students to create stop-motion videos of cell animation.

"Without this funding, there really wouldn't be a way to do this project in this way," Fulop said, noting that her school can supply day-to-day material but could never fund this kind of technology. Now, she said, students could be using the cameras in her classroom in the next few weeks.

Hilda Yao, the woman behind the donation, said, "The reason I wanted to do it at the start of the school year is that it can set the tone for the entire year."

Yao administers the Claire Giannini Education Fund, named for the daughter of the founder of Bank of America. Claire Giannini Hoffman died in 1997, but she asked Yao and her late mother, Dorothy Yao, to succeed her as trustees of her foundation.

The $35 million fund looks for ways to help public education, in particular. While Yao has overseen large gifts to educational organizations in the past, this is the first time that a donation will go directly into classrooms.

"The beauty of what DonorsChoose does is that it allows teachers to post projects directly," said Yao, who selected the site based on her own research. "You're cutting out a lot of layers."

The donation comes at a particularly tough time for California's students and teachers. Faced with a budget crisis, state officials have made billions of dollars in cuts to public education.

Local school districts have been forced to pare spending dramatically. In Los Angeles alone, the city's school district faces a $640 million budget shortfall and has laid off 3,000 teachers.

"It's great to feel supported," said Laura Edeen, a teacher in the Monroe Elementary School in San Francisco, who had six projects funded, including requests for printers and bilingual software to help teach her students English.