Salem’s teachers are getting a million-dollar gift to help build connections with families and sharpen their skills running a classroom. The Salem Keizer Education Association announced Thursday, March 5, it has received a grant from the Mountain West Center for Community Excellence, the philan thropic arm of the real estate company run by Salem businessman Larry Tokarski. Union leaders said they’d been talking to Tokarski for several years in general terms about ways to support local teachers, but were floored early in the year when he asked them to come up with a plan to spend seven figures. “We didn’t think it was real,” president Maraline Ellis said. That money will support multiple paid trainings for hundreds of teachers focused on classroom management and how to better tailor lessons to help students with disabilities and those learning English.  Training will take place over the next year and a half. The grant will also pay to reinstate a home visiting program the Salem-Keizer School District ended years ago, and provide smaller grants to teachers for classroom libraries. The hope is to give teachers, particularly those newer to the profession, better tools to make sure they can lead dozens of students to focus on lessons for the day. That’s especially needed because more teachers are entering schools while they’re still completing teacher training programs, said Tyler Scialo-Lakeberg, the union’s vice president.  That means fewer have had experience as student teachers or gotten robust training in setting up systems so classrooms run smoothly. The push comes as school district leaders are focusing heavily on improving student reading, investing in a major curriculum upgrade and training for all elementary school teachers.  “Classrooms that don’t have the systems and management means those kids aren’t really going to get to the literacy skills,” Scialo-Lakeberg said. Ellis and Scialo-Lakeberg said the unexpected size of the grant forced them to think outside the box. They were used to scrimping on a budget.  They proposed spending about half the money to offer multiple classroom management training sessions. About a quarter of the money would go toward a training focused on strategies to help all kids learn, even when they struggle with understanding English at the level of their peers. “Today, more students are entering our schools without a strong foundation in academic language. At the elementary level, this often means children arriving in kindergarten and first grade without basic letter recognition skills. Engaging instructional strategies are essential to reaching all learners,” the union wrote in its plan. Another training is planned on deescalating students who struggle with behavior due to past trauma. The union also plans to reinstate the teacher home visiting program that sends teachers in pairs to student homes to speak with families about their hopes and dreams for their child.  Union leaders said the program was popular in the past and helped engage families in school, improving attendance and academic success. The grant will pay for training in the program and about 1,000 home visits over the next school year, a total of $122,000. That’s substantially more than the school district has allocated previously, Scialo-Lakeberg said. “This enables us to have a really robust program going,” she said. Another $100,000 will be used to provide classroom library grants, letting teachers get more books into students’ hands. The overall focus is on “proven strategies that will make a difference in the long-term,” said Salam Noor, who works on education initiatives for the Mountain West center. Tokarski is behind several other initiatives supporting school district programs. Mountain West was a major contributor to the Career Technical Education Center, and Tokarski is currently funding a program at Highland Elementary School to invite community and families into the school to help address student challenges so teachers can focus on teaching. But Noor said he was interested in giving money directly to support what teachers said they needed. “They really will expand the capacity of teachers,” he said. Contact Managing Editor Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241. LOCAL NEWS DELIVERED TO YOU: Subscribe to Salem Reporter and get all the fact-based Salem news that matters to you. Fair, accurate, trusted – SUBSCRIBE The post Salem’s teacher union plans to use major grant for a year of training supporting educators appeared first on Salem Reporter. ...read more read less