Melissa Julien's pre-kindergarten classroom in Gainesville's Myra Terwilliger Elementary School has five wooden tables, three dry-erase white boards and nine paper goldfish taped to the floor. Her special-needs students paint at the tables, write on the boards and sit on the fish when they line up for lunch.
But one thing would complete Julien's classroom: a rug. A $344 rug. A rug she did not have the money to buy - until a colleague told her about DonorsChoose.org.
Local teachers like Julien post projects daily. Julien's rug features 40 colored squares with white rims around them. The rug helps students with autism establish their own defined space while sitting with peers.
Nearly 600,000 people nationally have funded about 205,000 projects through donations totaling $88 million, according to information provided by Katie Bisbee, chief marketing officer for DonorsChoose.org. In Florida, more than 9,000 teachers have posted projects to benefit their 184,000 students, according to the website.
Julien chose to use the website because she could not afford to buy the rug herself.
The state of Florida provides each teacher with a stipend of about $100 at the start of each school year, Julien said, but this money goes quickly. The budget is "nearly non-existent," she said.
This lack of funds is difficult to work with because Terwilliger Elementary is a Title I school, Julien said. This means that about 40 percent or more of its students come from low-income families.
"Something as simple as this can be used as a sense of comfort and predictability for these students," Julien wrote on her project page. "Students can learn the boundaries of personal space and what it means to work together as a class for the first time in their lives."
