The Grant I Almost Didn’t Apply For

Before I ever won a grant, I lost one entirely inside my own head.

Years ago, I saw an opportunity connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I had what I assumed was a ridiculous idea for it: glass in the enormous courtyard at my school and turn the space into a professional-scale hydroponics farm, science laboratory, nutrition lab, interdisciplinary learning space, and fresh-food pantry.

I never applied. I never even made anyone else tell me no.

The Grant I Never Applied For

The courtyard was probably 1,500 to 2,000 square feet. In my head, it was already glassed in. Hydroponic towers. Grow lights. Plant science. Cycling of matter. Energy flow. Nutrition. Health classes. Civics. A student-run fresh-food pantry. A science lab every grade could use.

It was the kind of idea that was simultaneously impractical and expensive, but also benevolent, technological, cross-curricular, and exciting enough that it might actually have been exactly what a foundation looking for innovators and dreamers wanted.

And I killed it myself.

In retrospect, I think that may have been exactly the kind of grandiose idea they were looking for. I never saw a dollar value attached to the opportunity. In my memory, that was almost the point. Bring the wild idea. Let somebody else decide whether it is worthy and what it would cost.

Maybe I am romanticizing it now. Maybe they would have said no immediately. What bothers me is that I will never know, because the foundation never rejected the idea. I did.

That’s not me. That’s not this district. Smarter people are going after this. People will laugh. I won’t know where to start.

I can generate a thousand reasons not to do something ambitious. Back then, I did. Pessimism, lack of confidence, laziness, fear, lack of experience. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I never looked deeply into the application. I never found out whether the idea was competitive. I never learned what kind of budget they expected. I never made anyone reject me. I did it for them.

Years later, another grant appeared. This time the connection was almost comical. An ambitious idea deserves the chance to be evaluated outside your own head.

Somebody Had Basically Written the Grant Around My Classroom

I had already been teaching a locally-focused, Barnegat Bay unit. Climate change, coastal resilience, living shorelines, marshes, ecosystems, human impacts - the intellectual skeleton already existed. I had written much of the curriculum myself. What I did not have was money.

Then the New Jersey Department of Education released a grant requiring a locally focused, standards-aligned, interdisciplinary climate-change unit paired with experiential learning and a student-led community resilience project. It required community partnerships. It emphasized real local problems and real local solutions.

The original NJDOE Notice of Grant Opportunity: 24-WB05-G02, a 53-page document for a 12-month climate education and community resilience program.

I remember reading it and thinking: This feels like somebody knows what I am already doing and wants to give me money to kick it up a notch.

And my first response was still basically: Nah. Luckily, my director and supervisor saved me from myself. They brought it up by email, which I promptly ignored. GO AWAY! Then they kept it up, including in person. I’m a big fan of this strategy. It is hard to say no to someone’s face. I’m not sure if they saw the obvious connections or if they believed in me or if they saw the benefits for the district but it felt like they weren’t going to let me stand idly by. Thanks guys!

My supervisor and curriculum director pushed me toward applying. I think I accepted the challenge begrudgingly, with a convenient little safety net beneath the tightrope: We probably won’t get it anyway. Sometimes the opportunity is closer to your existing work than your fear allows you to see.

A 53-Page Invitation to Be Intimidated

Do it for the kids. This’ll make me look like a genius. Pad your resume. Impress your bosses. All of the above. For whatever reason, I was all-in. Even with lingering doubts, I’m not going to half-ass it. I started exploring connections. I started shopping. I held meetings. I sent emails. I scheduled Zoom calls. I looped in my bosses, took meeting minutes, shared the minutes, generated grand ideas, and then watched those ideas get pulled back toward reality by cost, expertise, permitting, time, and the people who actually knew how coastal restoration worked. This was frustrating at times but I was undeterred. No one said this was going to be easy.

The application itself did not help. Government grants are extremely good at taking an idea you are excited about and surrounding it with enough headings, requirements, assurances, goals, objectives, indicators, budgets, reporting structures, and submission rules to make you wonder whether you should have kept your mouth shut.

The RFP was explicit. The state wanted a statement of need, a detailed project description, goals and objectives, a project activity plan, organizational commitment and capacity, a budget, community collaboration, data collection, sustainability, and a plan for disseminating the work.

LEFT: the NJDOE requirements for the Statement of Need. RIGHT: the opening of our working application, translating those requirements into a locally specific case for Point Pleasant, Slade Dale Sanctuary, and Barnegat Bay.

The form was intimidating, but the work became manageable once I treated each requirement as a problem I could solve.

The Important Lesson: The RFP Was Not Asking Me to Become Someone Else

Once I stopped looking at the application as a giant bureaucratic obstacle and started treating it as a translation problem, it became much more manageable. Part of that change in mentality was realizing how much work I’d already done. They wanted a curriculum unit… DONE! They wanted a community partner… I already had at least three! They wanted a project… I am ambitious and already have big ideas. At some point, I felt like I was bragging about what I have accomplished and then telling them how I would spend the money that I had already spent in my head… several times over.

The state was telling me what questions it needed answered. I already had most of the answers. My job was to organize the ideas in a way reviewers could follow.

Grant writing started to feel less like inventing a magical proposal and more like translating work I already cared about into the language of the RFP.

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Before There Was a Plan, There Was This Mess

The polished application makes the project look inevitable. It was not.

Before the goals and timelines and indicators came a much less elegant process: emails, Zoom calls, half-formed ideas, permits we did not understand, places we might work, people we might call, things we could build, things we definitely could not afford, and a heroic number of question marks.

Working Community Partnership Notes. Floating islands, rain gardens, living shorelines, marsh monitoring, viewing platforms, field trips, professional development, permits, partner ideas - and a lot of “?????”

I actually love these notes now because they show what the finished proposal hides. We did not begin with Slade Dale as a perfectly defined centerpiece. We explored floating islands. Rain gardens. Lagoon monitoring. Public access. A viewing platform. Phragmites removal. Living shorelines. Growing Spartina in classrooms. Community science. Field trips. Teacher training.

Some ideas died because of cost. Some died because of permits. Some changed shape when somebody with more expertise explained what was realistic. Some simply got replaced by better ideas. A strong proposal can grow out of messy thinking as long as you keep testing ideas against reality.

Grand Ideas, Then Reality

My first instinct was to use the grant to build an actual living shoreline in our community. That quickly became a lesson in scale. Even when the available funding later grew dramatically, an actual shoreline project could burn through that money in surveying, design, permitting, engineering, and other work before you bought much material at all.

That did not mean the idea was bad. It meant this was not yet the grant that could do it.

A failed idea is not always a bad idea. Sometimes it is just an idea that belongs to a later grant.

AI Did Not Come Up With the Grant. It Helped Me Survive the Form.

This was around the time I started paying for ChatGPT. One of the things that intimidated me most was the organization.

The state wanted goals, objectives, indicators, sub-indicators, timelines, and a numbering structure that made my brain immediately decide I was going to screw something up. I could see myself losing a grant because I put 1.2.3 where the form wanted 1.3.2.

The useful thing was that I did not need AI to invent a climate project. The ideas were already spilling out of me. I could write ugly bullet points about what I wanted to do, paste in the state’s organizational rules, and ask ChatGPT to turn the mess into the required structure.

A later goals/objectives/indicators document. The numbered hierarchy that originally intimidated me became mostly a formatting problem once the underlying ideas were clear.

That freed me to focus on the part I was actually good at: the ideas.

That sounds like a small thing, but it changed the whole experience. I could dump my rough thinking onto the page without stopping every thirty seconds to ask whether it belonged under Goal 1, Objective 2, Indicator 3, or some other box I was afraid of screwing up. I could think first and organize second.

The connection to my classroom is almost embarrassingly obvious now. I tell students all the time that I need to know what is going on in their brain. A beautifully organized product with no thinking behind it is not more valuable than a messy page containing a genuinely strong scientific idea. The organization matters, but it should serve the thinking rather than suffocate it.

There is an interesting classroom parallel here. I spend a lot of time trying to separate the thinking I actually care about from the production demands surrounding it. If a student has a strong scientific idea but struggles with organization, I want to know what is happening in the student’s head - not punish the kid because the page is ugly.

AI did something similar for me. It handled a chunk of the organizational friction so I could spend more energy on the intellectual work.

The strongest application was not strong because AI had better ideas than I did. It was strong because AI made it easier for my ideas to survive the application process.

We Got It. Then They Gave Us More Money.

Submitting the application was one of the proudest moments of the whole process, and we had not won anything yet. I had done the thing I had once talked myself out of doing.

Then came edits. We fixed them. Then came the award.

My memory is that the first version of the award was roughly thirty-five thousand dollars. I am very good at spending money, so that amount disappeared on paper almost immediately. Then the state came back with an opportunity to increase the award dramatically - ultimately to roughly seventy-five thousand dollars if we could justify the additional spending.

I do not remember exactly how long I had to revise the budget. In my memory, it was not long - maybe less than a week. That matters because my thinking changed from, What would make this project better? to something closer to, How can I responsibly spend a whole lot more money very quickly? Those are not exactly the same question.

The doubling of the award was exciting, but it was also strangely stressful. If you offer me thirty-five thousand dollars for a science program, I want every penny of it. If you suddenly tell me I may be able to justify seventy-five, I am not naturally inclined to say, “No thanks, we’re good.” Ambition is useful. It can also make you start shopping by price tag instead of by instructional value.

“How can we spend the most money the fastest?” is a terrible purchasing philosophy. It is also, for a short period of time, more or less where my brain went. More money created more responsibility, but it also gave us the chance to turn good ideas into student experiences at a scale I had never had before.

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This Is Where Ambition Became Logistics

One of the smartest things I did was stop thinking only in terms of one demonstration model and start thinking in groups of six.

I have six lab stations. If I owned one Enviroscape, I could demonstrate. If I owned six, every group could touch it, manipulate it, argue about it, and use it. That changed the instructional role of expensive equipment from teacher demonstration to student experience.

The Enviroscapes are the example I remember most clearly. I had originally budgeted for three. When the award expanded, I added three more. Suddenly I was not standing at the front of the room moving little pieces around while twenty-five kids watched. I could put a model at every lab station. Every student could touch it. Every group could manipulate the landscape, add water, trace runoff, and debate what the model was showing them.

I repeated that logic with other materials: whenever six copies could transform something from a teacher demonstration into a student tool, six became a defensible number. That is one of the places where the extra money genuinely changed instruction rather than merely adding nicer equipment to a storage room.

The Lending-Library Idea

I also justified some of the additional equipment by proposing a lending library for other districts. We created lists, surveys, and paperwork. I have not fully actualized it.

That is uncomfortable to write because it was something I said we would do. There is no clever spin. It is an unfinished piece. I also know exactly why I have avoided it: I am weirdly terrified somebody is going to borrow expensive equipment and destroy it.

But unfinished is not the same as impossible. This may be the year I finally push that work outside my own classroom.

For what it is worth, nobody ever came knocking and demanded the equipment back because the lending library had not taken off. I do not say that as permission to make promises and ignore them. I say it because ambitious projects evolve, and the people funding them may be more realistic about that than the anxious person writing the application imagines. The obligation is to be serious about the intent, honest about what happened, and willing to keep moving unfinished pieces forward.

Saying that publicly still makes me uncomfortable. That is probably a good reason to leave it in the article.

There is another part of that discomfort worth naming. This was state money, so the strings were real. There were reports, approved activities, documentation, purchasing rules, and expectations about dissemination. A private foundation might operate differently. But even here, the project was not treated as if every early brainstorm had to survive unchanged. The serious expectation was that we pursue the approved purpose, document the work, and act responsibly with public money.

That distinction matters to me now. When I first saw the RFP, I imagined grant accountability as a giant trapdoor: make one imperfect decision and the whole thing collapses. The reality was more human. We revised. We adapted. Some ideas worked better than others. Some pieces are still unfinished. The grant became a real program, which means it became messy in the same way every real program becomes messy.

A grant proposal is a promise to do serious work. It is not a prophecy that predicts every detail of the next year perfectly.

A real grant project is an implementation story, not a perfect replay of the proposal.

The right response to an unfinished promise is not embarrassment; it is a credible plan to keep moving it forward.

How to Spend $75,000 - and How Not To

The doubling of the award exposed a weakness in the way I was thinking. I suddenly had to fill a much larger budget, and my brain drifted toward expensive technology because expensive technology fills a budget quickly.

We spent a substantial amount on high-end water-quality monitoring equipment. It is all excellent equipment and the vendor was easy to work with. Some of it is also far more sophisticated than what we needed for ordinary seventh-grade instruction.

In retrospect, lower-cost test strips and simpler water-quality kits might have created more day-to-day use and left more money for other materials. I cannot unspend the money, but I can make a different promise to myself: use the equipment we bought enough that the purchase earns its keep. There is also a useful consequence to admitting the mistake: I now feel a responsibility to make the expensive equipment earn its place. We own it. It should not sit in a cabinet as a monument to grant spending. We need to learn it, use it, and build it into the program.

We probably put something in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars into water-quality monitoring technology. That number makes me wince a little when I say it now. The equipment is not bad. The mistake was assuming that more sophisticated automatically meant more useful for seventh graders.

A cheaper tool that students use twenty times can be a better educational purchase than a laboratory-grade instrument they use twice. I wish I had understood that distinction more clearly while I was staring at a suddenly expanded budget. Maybe I would have bought more hydroponic systems. Maybe different field equipment. Maybe a pile of simpler kits that could be abused by middle schoolers without making me nervous. I do not know exactly what the better purchase would have been. I only know I would ask a different question now: How often will a kid actually touch this? The better question now is simple: how often will a student actually use this?

Bureaucracy Is a Real Cost

The state-approved vendor system was another education. I would find exactly what I wanted, often at a better price, and discover that I could not buy it. Sometimes a vendor was willing to become approved. Sometimes not. Eventually I had to accept that the best theoretical product was irrelevant if I could not legally purchase it.

Purchasing also ran through another person. I am grateful for the work Christina Keane did because it kept an enormous administrative task off my plate. At the same time, I learned that if I ever manage a grant again, I want much tighter visibility into purchase orders, vendor follow-up, spending totals, and what has or has not actually arrived.

To be clear, having purchasing handled for me was a gift. It was also probably an annoying job that landed on someone else’s desk. I would send what I wanted and wait. I often did not know the purchase-order number, exactly where an order stood, whether something had been backordered, or how the running total compared with what I thought we had committed.

In retrospect, I wish I had learned more of that machinery myself. Partly because I think I could have tracked the grant more tightly, and partly because grant management is a professional skill. If I ever moved toward curriculum leadership or administration, knowing how to navigate that system would matter. My curriculum director, Dr. Christine McCoid, took on much of the accountability and state reporting and made my life dramatically easier. I am grateful for that. I also recognize now that the parts she shielded me from were parts worth learning. The more I understand the machinery behind a grant, the more effectively I can protect the creative work it is meant to support.

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The $5,000 That Still Annoys Me

We ultimately returned roughly five thousand dollars. That burned me up. I knew exactly how many useful things a science teacher can buy with five thousand dollars.

The irony is that I later got some of the products I wanted through other funding. But that does not change the lesson: understand the purchasing rules early, know the approved vendors, build contingencies, and keep a live picture of the budget.

What made the returned money especially frustrating was that I did not lack ideas. I knew what I wanted. The obstacle was getting from “I found the thing” to “the district can legally buy the thing” before the clock ran out. I found products I liked better for less money and still could not purchase them because the vendor was not approved. Occasionally a company would go through the approval process. Often the practical answer was simply to buy what was available from large approved science suppliers and move on.

Had I accepted that reality earlier, I suspect we would have spent more of the award. Five thousand dollars is not an abstract accounting remainder to a classroom teacher. Five thousand dollars is microscopes, models, probes, field gear, hydroponics equipment, replacement supplies, buses, or the next idea you have not had yet.

What teacher doesn’t need another $5,000? The frustration became a lesson I can carry into every future budget: know the rules early enough to make the money work for students.

The Part That Actually Matters

All of that bureaucracy matters because public money should be accountable. The purchasing mistakes matter because teachers should learn from them. The equipment matters because it is expensive. But none of those things are the reason I would do this again. The grant changed what science felt like for students.

That is the part I care about most, and it is the part I have the hardest time reducing to a grant metric. It brought science to life in a way that none of my other units really can.

Most of my units are rooted in real phenomena, but eventually the work still happens inside a classroom. We cannot casually take seventh graders into an emergency room during the injuries and healing unit. We cannot tour a surgical procedure. We cannot fly to Biosphere 2 because I am teaching hydroponics.

Barnegat Bay is different. We can go there.

We did go there. We have now gone back. Students have stood in the place they were studying, used real equipment, listened to people whose careers revolve around the coast, collected data, and done versions of the work professionals actually do. If there were budding environmental scientists, climate scientists, or wetland scientists sitting in those classes, I do not think they are wondering what the job feels like anymore. They have at least tasted it.

And there is value in discovering that you do not want that career, too. A vivid experience lets a kid say, “This is fascinating,” or “Absolutely not for me,” with more information than a textbook paragraph could ever provide.

The guest speakers mattered for the same reason. Students were not hearing me explain what a coastal scientist might care about. They could hear directly from people working in restoration, monitoring, education, and conservation. The vocabulary and concepts we had been using in class suddenly belonged to adults doing actual work in places the students recognized.

The field work changed my role, too. I was no longer the only expert in the room - or even necessarily the expert. I could learn beside the kids, ask questions of our partners, help students collect data, and then bring those experiences back into the classroom. That is a very different kind of science teaching from designing a simulation that approximates professional work.

I still love models. I still love classroom investigations. I still think a good simulation can teach something beautifully. But once you have watched students put on field gear, walk into a marsh, collect data, and realize that the numbers they are recording are not pretend numbers created for a worksheet, it becomes difficult not to want more of that.

The grant did not just buy equipment. It changed the boundary of the classroom.

The Barnegat Bay unit that grew around the grant work. The unit uses local phenomena and hands-on modeling, including Estuary Jenga, to connect ecosystem science, climate change, human impacts, and resilience.

The grant brought professionals into the classroom and students out of it. It supported field trips, field work, guest speakers, models, monitoring tools, and repeated visits to an actual marsh. Students could interact with people who do environmental work professionally and then go into the field and do versions of that work themselves.

If there was a seventh grader quietly wondering whether environmental science, wetland science, or climate work might be a future career, we gave that kid something much more useful than a description.

We stopped telling students what environmental science looks like and started letting them experience it.

We have now returned to the field across multiple years. We are gathering data. We are learning to monitor. The work is beginning to feel less like a one-time grant activity and more like something our science program actually does.

Start From the 25-Yard Line

If there is one practical lesson I would offer another teacher considering a grant, it is this: do not start with the money. Start with the thing you already care about.

I was extraordinarily fortunate because this grant aligned with work I was already doing. I had taught coastal resilience, local ecology, climate change, and living shorelines for years. I had a curriculum. I had questions. I had a local context. I had opinions. I had ideas I could not afford. The grant did not create the passion. It put muscle on the bones.

Before there was money, there was already a skeleton: years of coastal-resilience lessons, local ecology, living shorelines, climate-change instruction, Barnegat Bay examples, and a running mental list of things I wished I could do if resources were not the limiting factor. The award did not need to manufacture authenticity. It funded authenticity that was already there.

That is why I worry about chasing grants only because the dollar figure looks exciting. If the RFP forces you to invent a passion on Tuesday that you have to implement for a year starting in June, the money may become the least difficult part of the project.

That meant I was not truly starting at square one. I was starting from the twenty-five-yard line. Somebody starting from zero could absolutely write a great grant, but there is simply more work to do: finding the idea, finding the partners, learning the content, building the curriculum, and planning the implementation at the same time. The strongest grant opportunities often add resources to work that already has roots.

Do Not Apply Because You See Dollar Signs

Money can make an existing idea dramatically better. It can also create a giant pile of obligations around an idea you do not actually care about. I would rather see a teacher chase five thousand dollars for something they are obsessed with than seventy-five thousand for something they invented because an RFP happened to exist. Chase the work you care about first; the right funding should help that work grow.

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And Do Not Reject Yourself

This is the lesson I wish I had learned when I saw that Gates opportunity years earlier.

I have no idea whether they would have funded the hydroponics courtyard. Maybe the proposal would have been laughed out of the room. Maybe it would have been too expensive. Maybe I misunderstood the entire opportunity.

But I know what happened when I did not apply: absolutely nothing.

The climate grant was different only because other people pushed me hard enough that I finally let someone else make the decision.

The first grant did not teach me how to write grants. It taught me to stop deciding my ideas were not enough or too big before anyone else had the chance to decide for themselves.

And that is a useful place to end Part One, because the strangest thing about this story is that seventy-five thousand dollars no longer feels like the big idea.

Now we are looking at what comes next: not just modeling resilience in a classroom, but doing real monitoring, real restoration, and potentially helping build real solutions in the community.

Apparently the teacher who once could not bring himself to apply is getting a little harder to scare.

Source Notes

NJDOE, Notice of Grant Opportunity 24-WB05-G02: Expanding Access to Climate Change Education and the New Jersey Student Learning Standards through Interdisciplinary Learning and Community Resilience Projects (2024).

Working application materials: Completed Grant Components; Final Goals/Objectives/Indicators; Community Partnership Notes.

Personal narrative and retrospective reflections recorded August 2026. Dollar figures described from memory are identified as such in the article.

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