Before and After School Enrichment Programs for GATE Kids at low or no cost

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I am the chair of our school's GATE committee. This year we sent a survey to our GATE identified students and parents.

Students are interested in writing and editing books, creating websites, conducting science experiments on people's affect on the Earth.

Parents are asking for more seminars on helping their GATE kids succeed at School and at Home, their social and emotional needs and how to find summer programs.

We are in Oakland CA. Our school district focus' on the needs of the underachieving students, English language learners and getting out from under State control. GATE students are often left as an afterthought.

Any ideas on how to get low cost programs, or grants to offer the programs our students and parents need?

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Parent Replies to "Before and After School Enrichment Programs for GATE Kids at low or no cost"

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Hi. It seems to me that the type of programs you're proposing could easily be done with minimal funding, so long as you have willing parent volunteers.
At my son's gifted elementary school, they offered "after school specials" where kids wrote poetry and stories, and other kids did illustrations, and it was published and distributed to all the families with children in the program. There are even some websites where kids' submittals may be selected for broader publication. Some kids did "book discussions" where they all read the same piece, and then talked about their perspectives on it. A mom I know was a corporate I.T. person, and she taught the kids HTML and they created websites. I volunteered to coach a Lego League team, while other parents coached Destination Imagination teams. There were some costs associated with going to the competitions, but you could just run the programs internally at your school, and not deal with the formal registration fees, if cost is an issue. We had classes on "kitchen chemistry" where kids created goo, sillyputty, playdoh, etc. from common househould ingredients.
To me, the biggest problem with any enrichment program is just getting volunteers; if parents want it, hopefully they'll commit to helping out with it.

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