Now We’re Playing a Different Game

I Was Supposed to Be Taking a Year Off

At the beginning of the summer, I realized something strange: for the first time in a while, I was not preparing to manage a grant during the coming school year. I should have felt relieved.

Grants are stressful. They add meetings, timelines, purchasing rules, budgets, reports, partners, transportation, scheduling, documentation, and a wonderful assortment of problems that did not exist before someone gave you money to solve other problems. I knew all of that. I had lived all of that. And yet I was a little disappointed.

So I did what any responsible person trying to reduce his workload would do.

I started Googling grants.

What I found was a wetlands-mitigation funding opportunity that seemed almost suspiciously well matched to work already happening in Point Pleasant. The relationships were there. The American Littoral Society had already become a trusted partner through our earlier climate-education work. The Point Pleasant Environmental Commission was already part of the conversation. I had relationships with the Barnegat Bay Partnership, which was involved in major marsh-restoration work in town. Slade Dale Sanctuary was already part of our students' environmental learning. Nellie Bennett Marsh was already undergoing a much larger restoration effort.

I did not invent a new problem because money appeared. I found money that might help people who were already working on a real problem.

That distinction has become one of the most important things I have learned about grants. The opportunity worked because it grew from a real local need and relationships that already existed.

The Room Was Familiar

The first meeting took place at Town Hall. That matters because, several years ago, a multimillion-dollar environmental conversation at Town Hall would have felt like somebody else's meeting. This time it did not.

I had been there before. I had attended stakeholder meetings there before. The people around the table were familiar. There was nobody in the room I had not already worked with in some capacity. I had hoped to meet the executive director of the American Littoral Society, but she was not there. I still hope I get the chance. But I also realized something that would have sounded strange coming from me earlier in my career: I did not need to meet her in order to feel legitimate.

I knew what I was there to do.

I was not chairing the meeting. I was not pretending to be a wetlands scientist. I was not volunteering the school district to manage a restoration project that belongs in the hands of environmental professionals. I mostly represented the educational arm of the discussion, asked questions, organized pieces of the conversation when useful, and took detailed notes.

My supervisor trusted me to do that. I was particularly pleased by that trust because she had been understandably nervous that I was getting us into something the district could not handle. A grant of this scale could become a bureaucratic disaster if a school district accidentally positioned itself as the lead applicant for technical restoration work.

But that was never the plan. The American Littoral Society should lead. This is actual marsh enhancement and restoration. They are the professionals. Our job is to help connect students and schools to the work.

The opportunity is collaborative by design. Bringing the idea to the table does not require the school district to own every part of the work.

I did not feel like I had somehow snuck into the room. I felt like I belonged in it. Belonging in the room did not mean knowing everything; it meant knowing why I was there and what I could contribute.

Knowing When Not to Lead Is a Professional Skill

That may be the biggest change between my first grant and this one.

When teachers talk about leadership, we sometimes imagine leadership as taking charge: writing the plan, running the meeting, making the decisions, owning the project. At this scale, that would be a mistake. The more complicated the opportunity becomes, the more important it is to understand the limits of your own expertise.

The current funding pool is roughly $2.5 million and will likely be distributed among multiple projects. The environmental questions are not superficial. The group discussed wetland enhancement, runnels, dredged material, coir logs, shoreline stabilization, boat-channel access, accretion, mitigation credits, permitting, and whether portions of the Nellie Bennett Marsh project could or should be incorporated. There were professional-courtesy issues around work already being led by other people. There were open questions about how mitigation credits would even be calculated for the proposed enhancement work.

I understood most of the conversation. A few ecological and restoration details were outside my expertise, and I still do not know exactly how the mitigation-credit calculation works. The reassuring part was that the American Littoral Society needed to contact the grant administrator for clarification too.

That was a useful perspective. There is a difference between not knowing something because you do not belong in the conversation and not knowing something because the answer is genuinely unresolved.

There was another kind of uncertainty that had nothing to do with ecology. Some of the discussion involved professional relationships and jurisdiction: who was already working where, who should be involved, and whether a particular idea was something that belonged in formal meeting notes. I asked. Carefully, but directly. If I was going to take comprehensive notes for everybody, I wanted to know what should and should not become part of the record.

That is not wetlands expertise. It is professional judgment. And it matters. The strongest version of leadership sometimes means putting the right expert in charge and making your own contribution count.

The Education Arm Can Be Small and Still Be Transformative

At one point I was asked what I would want in an education budget. My first reaction was that I did not need very much.

That was not entirely true. Once we started thinking about it, there were plenty of legitimate possibilities: student transportation, field trips, teacher stipends, classroom visits from scientists, equipment, an environmental-club experience, ongoing monitoring, perhaps a five-year education component, and potentially a LIDAR-equipped drone with training and a licensed operator.

I am intrigued by the drone idea for a selfish reason: I may pursue the pilot certification myself. A district-operated drone could support mapping, documentation, repeat photography, monitoring, and student data analysis. It could also create another point of connection between classroom science and the professionals doing restoration work.

But my original answer was still true in a more important way.

If every dollar from this grant ultimately went into improving the local ecosystem and none of it purchased a single piece of classroom equipment, Point Pleasant students would still benefit. A healthier marsh is an instructional resource. A restored shoreline is an instructional resource. A monitoring program is an instructional resource. A partnership with working scientists is an instructional resource.

The classroom gets bigger when the community gets better.

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When Students Stop Pretending to Do Science

The part of this project that excites me most may never become a major budget line.

During the meeting, we discussed the possibility of incorporating aquaculture into the educational work, including raising ribbed mussels and eventually transplanting them into local marshes. The transplantation piece is difficult. The science is not settled. Someone in the room joked that if we figured it out, we would be famous.

I am not particularly interested in being famous. I am very interested in putting students near a scientific question whose answer is not sitting in the teacher edition.

That is a fundamentally different experience from many school labs. In a traditional investigation, students may be asked to determine how light affects plant growth, but everyone in the building knows roughly what the graph should look like before the first seed is planted. The activity teaches important skills, but the uncertainty is partly theatrical.

Authentic research is different. Research on student-teacher-scientist partnerships describes authentic investigations as work in which students help design, conduct, and interpret investigations with unknown outcomes while receiving support from teachers and scientific experts. Other research on K-12 scientist partnerships similarly argues that students can move along a continuum from guided inquiry toward increasingly open inquiry and ownership. That is much closer to what I want here. Peker & Dolan (2012); Komoroske et al. (2015).

If we can raise marsh organisms in the classroom, test conditions, revise procedures, work with scientists, transplant organisms, monitor survival, and change what we do based on evidence, then students are not reenacting someone else's discovery. They are contributing to a question that remains open.

I already tease students with this idea when we talk about biodiversity and trophic structure. We have many ways to measure biodiversity, but I point out that ecological communities are not just lists of species. The number and roles of producers, consumers, and predators matter too. Maybe someday someone will devise a better measure. Maybe one of them will. Will there be a Point Pleasant Method or a Panther Method or… a Pirl Method?

That is deliberately grandiose. It is also the message I want students to hear: science is not finished. The possibility that students could help answer a genuinely open question is exactly what makes the work worth pursuing.

“I Put That There.”

If I let myself dream five years ahead, I can picture Slade Dale and Nellie Bennett Marsh functioning as living laboratories for local students.

They could visit repeatedly instead of taking a single field trip. They could monitor water, vegetation, elevation, erosion, biodiversity, shoreline change, and restoration success. Younger students could be introduced to the sites; middle-school students could collect and interpret data; high-school students could take on deeper research questions. Professional scientists could move in and out of classrooms. Environmental-club students could participate in longer-term projects. New grants could build on the infrastructure and data created by earlier ones.

Point Pleasant loses some strong students each year to the Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science, or MATES, a county technical high school built around marine and environmental science. I once wrote on an environmental-club form that the club could help students strengthen a MATES application. My supervisor told me to take it off. I understand the point better now.

The bigger dream is not to become a feeder program for somebody else's exceptional environmental opportunities. It is to build more exceptional opportunities here.

I am not pretending a middle-school science program will become MATES. But we can ask a useful question: what would make a student who loves environmental science feel that serious work is already available in their own community?

Maybe part of the answer is a restored marsh.

Maybe it is a scientist who knows them by name.

Maybe it is a dataset they helped collect for three years.

Maybe it is a patch of Spartina they planted.

Maybe it is a ribbed mussel they raised in a classroom, moved into the marsh, and found alive during a monitoring visit the following spring.

There are plenty of facts I am required to teach. I would trade the memory of one isolated factoid for the memory of a student standing in a marsh and saying, “I put that there,” almost every time.

Because that sentence means the student is not merely learning about coastal resilience. They had a hand in strengthening it.

A restored ecosystem can become a curriculum, laboratory, data set, field site, community project, and professional network all at once.

The Grant Is Not the Story

The preliminary proposal is due October 15. We do not know whether the project will be competitive. We do not know exactly which restoration components will make the final plan. We do not yet know whether Slade Dale alone can generate enough mitigation value, whether the Nellie Bennett island can appropriately be incorporated, or how large the education component should become.

That uncertainty is why I do not want to write this as a success story.

We have not won anything.

The more useful story is that the opportunity exists because someone looked for it, recognized the alignment, contacted people who already had the expertise and relationships, and was willing to start a conversation before every question had an answer.

That is replicable.

Teachers often imagine grants as contests won by people with extraordinary ideas, sophisticated professional grant writers, or districts with resources they do not have. Sometimes that is true. Competition can be intense. Some proposals are simply better than yours.

But there is another reality I did not understand early in my career: plenty of funded projects begin with an ordinary professional who notices that a funding priority overlaps with a problem worth solving and decides to pursue it.

The application still has to be good. The budget has to make sense. The partners have to be credible. You have to execute what you promise. And as the dollar amount rises, those requirements become more—not less—important.

But none of that matters if you eliminate yourself before the competition begins. The useful move is to give a worthwhile idea the chance to compete instead of eliminating it yourself.

Bet on Yourself — Then Build a Better Team

As a science teacher, I spend my career teaching ideas that now feel obvious but were once bold, disputed, or simply unknown. I am not suggesting that writing a grant proposal is equivalent to proposing a new scientific theory. I am suggesting that education improves when people are willing to test possibilities that do not come with guarantees.

It has taken me about fifteen years in this profession to become comfortable saying that I will bet on myself.

That does not mean assuming I am the smartest person applying. I have met too many grant recipients—including myself—to believe every funded applicant is a genius with a flawless master plan. More often, somebody had a good enough idea, matched it to the opportunity, assembled credible partners, did the work, and went for it.

If the competition is excellent, good. I want to become a great teacher. Measuring my work against other strong educators is not an insult; it is useful. And if another group wins because their project is better, students or communities somewhere else benefit. I can live with that.

It also takes a lot of no's to get to yes. The difference now is that a no no longer feels like evidence that I never belonged in the process.

I knew the original climate grant idea deserved funding, even if I had no idea how much we would ultimately receive. I have no idea how competitive this wetlands-mitigation proposal will be.

I cannot wait to find out.

And the funniest part is that the answer may take a long time. Long enough, probably, for me to get bored.

Long enough to open Google again.

Long enough to start searching for whatever comes next. The next opportunity is no longer something to fear; it is something to go looking for.

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A Practical Playbook: From “Interesting Grant” to Credible Opportunity

Sources & Further Reading

• Houseal, Abd-El-Khalick & Destefano (2014), Impact of a student–teacher–scientist partnership on students’ and teachers’ content knowledge, attitudes toward science, and pedagogical practices. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 84–115.
• Peker & Dolan (2012), Helping students make meaning of authentic investigations: findings from a student–teacher–scientist partnership. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 7, 223–244.
• Komoroske et al. (2015), A Scientist’s Guide to Achieving Broader Impacts through K–12 STEM Collaboration. BioScience, 65, 313–322.
• Rollwagen-Bollens, Holmlund & Wait (2022), Actively Participating in University-Sponsored Ecological Research Increases High School Students’ Knowledge of and Attitudes About Science. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 9, 797769.

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