IBJNews

Lilly Endowment gives $4.9M for teaching fellowships

Back to TopCommentsE-mailPrint

Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc. is giving $4.9 million to fund the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which prepares career changers and college graduates to teach math, science, engineering and technology in rural and urban schools.

The Endowment gave $10 million four years ago to launch the program, which trained its first crop of teachers in 2009. The new grant will fund two more classes of teachers.

The New Jersey-based Woodrow Wilson foundation has partnered in Indiana with Ball State University, Purdue University, IUPUI and the University of Indianapolis to train teachers. The universities revamped their programs to prepare teachers in local classrooms, similar to the way physicians learn in hospitals and attorneys in law offices.

Fellows receive a $30,000 stipend to complete a special intensive master’s program at one of the universities. After a year of classroom-based preparation, the fellows commit to teach for at least three years in an urban or rural school, with ongoing support and mentoring from the foundation.

There are 104 Woodrow Wilson teaching fellows working in Indiana schools, with another 54 doing their master’s training and in-classroom preparation. The program claims it has retained 99 percent of its fellows in the teaching profession.

Fellows are now progressing through the program, doing master’s work and clinical preparation in Indiana classrooms. To date, the program has a 99-percent retention rate for teachers.

“The program is an important part of the Endowment’s efforts to improve education,” said Sara Cobb, vice president for education at the Lilly Endowment, in a prepared statement. “The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellows are finding this program a challenging and exciting experience, and they are transmitting that excitement in high-need schools across Indiana.”

After launching its program in Indiana, with more than $3 million in support from the state of Indiana, the Woodrow Wilson foundation has replicated it in Michigan and Ohio, and is planning to expand it to other states.

ADVERTISEMENT

Post a comment to this story

COMMENTS POLICY
We reserve the right to remove any post that we feel is obscene, profane, vulgar, racist, sexually explicit, abusive, or hateful.
 
You are legally responsible for what you post and your anonymity is not guaranteed.
 
Posts that insult, defame, threaten, harass or abuse other readers or people mentioned in IBJ editorial content are also subject to removal. Please respect the privacy of individuals and refrain from posting personal information.
 
No solicitations, spamming or advertisements are allowed. Readers may post links to other informational websites that are relevant to the topic at hand, but please do not link to objectionable material.
 
We may remove messages that are unrelated to the topic, encourage illegal activity, use all capital letters or are unreadable.
 

Messages that are flagged by readers as objectionable will be reviewed and may or may not be removed. Please do not flag a post simply because you disagree with it.

Sponsored by
ADVERTISEMENT

facebook - twitter on Facebook & Twitter

Follow on TwitterFollow IBJ on Facebook:
Follow on TwitterFollow IBJ's Tweets on these topics:
 
Subscribe to IBJ
  1. These higher rates Co. e about only because physicians are now hospital employees. otherwise physicians couldn't charge these rates and share the windfall with the hospital. Community/rural hospitals probably not buying physicians practices and thus weren't getting the windfall anyway.

  2. The incentive for poor people to get themselves off public assistance and "no longer be poor" is even with help...they're STILL POOR! Being poor, even with some assistance, isn't all that pleasant. (I speak from experience) It's a stubborn myth that poor people, who are on public assistance, are sitting in the lap of luxury. You should try living on just those "freebies" that you mentioned and see how meager they actually are. By the way, I didn't mean you had to buy/own a puppy...just pet one. :)

  3. As near as I can tell the minority has ZERO constitutional obligation to offer a quorum to the majority. A requirement for quorum was inserted into the constitution so that tyrannical majorities could not simply shove through odious and objectionable legislation (which is exactly what they did.) By allowing a tyrannical majority to charge fines against the minority for exercising their constitutional prerogative to deny quorum the court as made a mockery of constitutional governance in the state of Indiana.

  4. The voters elected the Reps to make a vote not walk out on the vote. They had to the right to exercise their opinion and vote "no" to the bill. Let me ask you this if you walked out of your job for 5 straight weeks would you get paid? Would you even have a job to go back to? If any elected official walks out on the people they should be arrested for stealing tax dollars from the public. They were elected to do a job and not leave when the job gets stuff.

  5. I have been to several of their locations in Pennsylvania and always go in for 1 item and leave with a basket full of things. I'm very happy they decided on Indiana, now if only they would put the other store in eastside.

ADVERTISEMENT