ClassTag Announces $20,000 in Grants for Teachers to Transform Their Classrooms
The ClassTag Transform Your Classroom grants come as a small but much-needed relief amidst unprecedented teacher shortages across the nation.
NEW YORK, August 9, 2022 (Newswire.com) - ClassTag today announced it will be awarding $20,000 in grants to teachers to support their students' academic and social development, as well as their mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. This comes as the company's latest initiative to address the education funding crisis, which last year is estimated to have driven teachers to spend $2.76 billion of their own money on school supplies and other essentials*.
"These funding shortfalls are an outrage," says Vlada Lotkina, founder & CEO of ClassTag. "Teachers are underpaid. They're overworked. They're supporting a generation of students that have endured unprecedented hardship, and for all their hard work we're making them use their own money? No wonder they're quitting in record number."
55 percent of educators surveyed in February said they were thinking about leaving education, up from 37 percent in August of last year. Today, at the start of back-to-school season, districts across the country are reporting hundreds—even thousands—of teaching vacancies. While low pay and burnout have always been the leading causes of teacher turnover, these trends have been further exacerbated by the pandemic and rolling quarantines, which have impacted student behavior, mental health, and have widened socio-economic gaps, creating even further need for teachers to spend their own money on classroom supplies.
"Teachers need our help now more than ever," says Lotkina. "Students are showing up hungry, and without basic needs met. I think snacks and personal hygiene products have been the top requests since we opened the grant."
The grant is open to public school teachers in K-12 schools across U.S. To enter, teachers can simply visit ClassTag's Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and share their story and how $1,000 would transform their students' lives. Teachers can also create a wishlist of supplies using ClassTag Goods for a chance each day to have up to $100 dollars cleared from their list. Between list clearings, grants, and donations raised through their automated fundraising tool, ClassTag has helped teachers receive over $3.5M in free supplies, impacting over 20,000 teachers and 500,000 students.
"Our goal is to support 5MM students and their teachers with supplies this academic year, leveraging the automated fundraising built into ClassTag's community engagement platform and the breadth of our corporate partnerships. We invite you to support teachers as they support the next generation so together we can solve this old problem once and for all," says Lotkina.
About ClassTag
ClassTag is an all-in-one community engagement platform for teachers, schools, and districts. With automated fundraising, language translation, and a host of helpful tools, ClassTag has burst onto the scene as the fastest growing ed-tech platform for K-12 educators and is used by over 25,000 schools and 5 million parents and teachers. Learn more at: www.classtag.com or connect@classtag.com
Source: ClassTag