How a $50K grant will combine literacy with learning about animals

Elementary students will be growing their reading skills while they experience up-close learning around animals thanks to a recent grant.

The Mary Chilton Daughters of the American Revolution Foundation in Sioux Falls has awarded $50,000 to the Promising Futures Fund, which is teaming up with the Sioux Falls School District and the Great Plains Zoo to leverage animals as a way to improve literacy.

The program will include a field trip to the aquarium at Sertoma Park in the fall, a Zoomobile visit to the school during the winter and a stop at the Great Plains Zoo in the spring. All three visits will include a curriculum and reading materials that incorporate the zoo and animals.

Each year, the Mary Chilton DAR Foundation awards a $50,000 grant in honor of Dorothy Day Davenport, a founding member of the local Mary Chilton Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Dr. Michelle McElroy, regent of the Mary Chilton DAR Chapter, said the program led by the Promising Futures Fund was a natural selection for the Dorothy Day Davenport Grant.

“The grant specifically has the idea to follow Dorothy Day Davenport’s will to ‘make Sioux Falls a happier place,’” she said. “When you think about school kids having the opportunity to experience the zoo and aquariums, you can certainly picture the smiles on their faces. Knowing that kids who have books in their homes become better readers, this grant also places a book in their hands.”

The curriculum also can be shared with other school districts to have a wider impact, she said.

Dr. Michelle McElroy, regent of the Mary Chilton DAR Chapter; Steve Hildebrand, founder of the Promising Futures Fund; Leigh Spencer, education director at the Great Plains Zoo & Aquarium; and Rob Swenson, chairperson of the DAR Foundation grants committee.

The Promising Futures Fund has helped pay for field trips to the zoo before, so adding the literacy component was a natural next step, founder Steve Hildebrand said.

“The Sioux Falls School District has a very high rate of poverty at 47 percent,” he said. “A lot of those kids, as they enter kindergarten, they are behind in vocabulary. It’s an important time, in kindergarten and first and second grade, and we need to put a huge emphasis on reading, vocabulary and writing so kids who are behind have a chance to catch up.”

The program will start at Garfield Elementary this fall and be phased into all Sioux Falls elementary schools in grades kindergarten through second by 2027-28.

The zoo’s education director, Leigh Spencer, and the school district’s coordinator of elementary curriculum, Linda McDaniel, are working together to develop the curriculum for students that will be used by teachers before and after the visits.

A book that focuses on the Great Plains Zoo and its animals also is planned. McDaniel said poetry also could be incorporated, though she emphasized details could change.

“As we grow this program or this partnership with the zoo, it’s going to touch a lot of students in Sioux Falls,” McDaniel said.

While many schools already visit the zoo, Hildebrand said students aren’t getting as much out of the trips as they could. That was a driving force behind the project.

“In discussions with the zoo, you learn that the field trips are a lot of fun for the kids, but they are not really learning much,” Hildebrand said.

“Literacy is such a challenge of kids with poverty, so I went to the zoo and asked if there is any way to provide an intersection where there would be curriculum materials created so when teachers do bring kids to the zoo, they are using those materials to teach the kids in a greater way.”

Hildebrand, Spencer and McDaniel said the grant is key in getting the program started.

“We started discussing this project before I knew about the grant proposal,” Spencer said. “At that point, it was one of the big questions was how are we funding this? The initial thoughts on it were a much longer process to start because of the need to find the funding. This will allow us to get it off the ground more quickly than we originally planned.”

The DAR Foundation grant for the zoo literacy program will be used to produce, print and replicate the curriculum that students and teachers will use.

In addition to grants to nonprofit and civic organizations, the DAR Foundation provides funding in Sioux Falls for first-year teacher grants and for scholarships.

Mary Chilton was a passenger aboard the Mayflower and is believed to have been the first European woman to step ashore at Plymouth Rock in 1620. She was 13 at the time.

Dorothy Day Davenport was an original founding member in 1915 of the local Mary Chilton Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.