Edison Elementary teacher finds help is just a web away

SALT LAKE CITY — Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is teaching fifth grade during a tight economy in a state that has more kids than the Salt Flats has salt.

Aubrey Vance — Miss Vance to her students at Edison Elementary on the west side of Salt Lake City — chose to accept the assignment.

And she's thriving.

Her classroom is packed with teaching aids and learning tools. Everywhere you turn there's some new product that helps educate kids. FedEx and UPS are constantly rolling up to the school and asking, "Where's Miss Vance's room?"

Great Recession? What Great Recession?

How does she do it? Is she independently wealthy? Does she know someone in the state budget office? Extortion maybe?

Nope. None of the above.

Miss Vance has discovered the wonderful world of charitable giving.

There are many corporations and individuals around the country who are more than willing to help a teacher out. All she (or he) has to do is ask.

It was Aubrey's father, Dell Vance, a retired Chevron executive, who first tipped her off to the possibilities. She was fretting over not having this and that in her classroom and he told her, "We're giving to schools all the time."

(An example is Chevron's current Fuel Your School program that donates a dollar to area school projects for every local gas fill-up at a Chevron station during October).

Then Aubrey learned of the website, donorschoose.org, a clearinghouse where teachers can spell out their wish list for materials and teaching aids and donors can select the projects they choose to help with contributions.

"Basically, you go shopping," Aubrey explains. "You write a grant explaining what you want and why you want it and then you wait and see what happens. Companies often match any individual donations, which really helps."

Within a month of writing her first grant, she had the vocabulary building materials she wanted — a $250 kit containing word-play games and sentence-building cards that showed up in her classroom, no questions asked.

Next she wrote a grant for magnet kits. In no time she had the magnets, a $350 value.