November 10, 1999

ACE Night fund-raiser rousing success

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       For Traverse City Area Public School parents, Hudson's was the place to be Sunday evening. Dressed up or dressed down, the crowds flocking to the store after hours were shopping, eating and schmoozing for a good cause- their children's education.
      The fourth annual ACE Night at Hudson's was another rousing success, raising $25,000 for the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation's ACE fund. The ACE fund gives teachers money for special programs not covered by the district's operating budgets. The money raised during the evening will be divided between the ACE endowment fund and grants that are given directly to the schools and teachers.
      "I came tonight because this program supports the schools and the money goes to a good cause," said Tim Perry, who has two children in local schools. "The projects this funds are good for the kids, both from an academic and non-academic perspective."
      The evening featured gourmet hors d'oeuvres, drinks, live entertainment and models (usually seen as area teachers and administrators) roaming the store displaying the latest in holiday fashions. Nearly 60 parent-volunteers kept everything going, doling out the donated food and wine to attendees to minimize the administrative costs of the event.
      "Every dollar we raise here goes back to the schools," said Pat Lewallen, special programs principal at Traverse City Area Public Schools. "There's good competition among schools to sell tickets to tonight's event because the amount they get is based on how many tickets they sell."
      And sell tickets they did, as 450 parents came by to support the ACE fund. Parents also checked out the displays of projects created by last year's grant recipients. One project at Norris Elementary School was the nine-week Exploring Mythology and Arthurian Legend unit geared to fifth-grade students.
      The $500 dollar grant from the ACE fund allowed the school's fifth-grade teachers to purchase books about mythology for their classes. The students are also participating in an online mythology class, connecting with students from all over the world to learn their weekly lessons.
      "We pulled together three classrooms to make a computer lab for the project," said Connie Boylan, a fifth-grade teacher at the school who spearheaded the grant proposal. "They do online research and use the new books to write reports on Greek gods or legends."
      For the 1998-1999 school year, ACE gave out 18 grants for programs ranging from science projects to reading enrichment, from purchasing snowshoes to funding an elementary school student newspaper. The uniting element to these projects was an idea to give students some of the extras that go beyond the normal curriculum - and can be used again.
      "We look for grants for programs or materials where the materials will last more than one year," said Jean Howard, chair of this year's fund-raiser and a member of the ACE founding board. "Like the AlphaSmart computers, they are just some of all those extras that just don't get funding in the regular budget. I just had a note from a parent about the AlphaSmart computers and how impressed they were with them."
      Since it was founded in 1992, the ACE fund has given out $70,000 in grants by the end of the last school year. The idea started with Kent Underwood after his children kept coming home from school with yet another request for funds for a special program. He wondered if there could be a centralized fund to cover these requests, that parents could support in chunks instead of piecemeal.
      "Kent started the fund with money from Taco Bell," Howard said. "He wanted a vehicle for teachers to have money for these special projects."