Kids & Family
Chicago Ag School Teacher Needs Your Help to 'Raise the Barn Roof'
The local teacher has a dream for an indoor riding arena for the school's special needs equestrian program—but she can't do it on her own.
A Chicago teacher vying for a $100,000 grant from Farmers Insurance for a poignant project needs your votes.
Maggie Kendall of Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences is a finalist in the Thank a Million Teachers Dream Big Challenge, putting her in the running for one of five $100,000 “Dream Big” grants rewarding winning teachers for their ideas to transform their classrooms, schools and communities.
Kendall dreams of using the money to build an indoor riding arena for the school, 3857 W 111th St., Chicago. The arena would allow the school—Chicago’s only working farm and location for an equestrian program for kids and adults with special needs—to extend the riding program year-round. Currently, students can only ride outside and, with another brutal Chicago winter in the forecast, this limits the time the students have with the specially-trained horses, Kendall said in her proposal.
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“We have students that start the program, and are virtually non-verbal and have very poor communication skills,” Kendall said. “Through working with the horses in a short time, we see huge leaps in their development of speech and communication. We’re going to teach them horsemanship, it’s going to give them job skills that they can transfer to the real world.”
Voting ends Nov. 30. Click here to vote.
The Thank A Million Teachers program was launched earlier this year, inviting individuals across America to offer heartfelt thanks to teachers, present and past, for their positive impact on students and communities. Teachers were then invited to participate in the Dream Big Challenge, submitting proposals for their chance to be one of five outstanding teachers nationwide awarded with a grant to help them transform their school community. Since the launch of the Thank A Million Teachers program in late December, more than 760,000 teacher thank you’s have been received, putting the national effort far ahead of its stated goal of thanking one million teachers in 2014.
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