Jean Graham Fund Story

​​Jean’s State Street School colleagues spoke about how she taught third grade at the college level. When my daughter came home from Jean’s class asking me to join her in a search for monarch caterpillars and chrysalis behind the house, I realized her teacher was someone I wanted to get to know. Jean made learning come alive by bringing her vast experience from traveling and growing up outside the US into appropriate parts of the curriculum. She welcomed a child with severe autism in the classroom and taught her students not only how to respect people with different abilities, but to learn from them. By making her classroom a microcosm of the world around us, she ignited a love of learning and world citizenship in her fortunate students.

 

This is why Jean Graham’s unexpected death in the spring of 2011 left those of us who had the privilege of working with her looking for ways to honor her memory and extraordinary vision. When her family suggested creating the Jean Graham Fund at the Education Foundation, we knew they found the perfect way to keep Jean’s passion for learning alive.

 

Jean taught at State Street for 22 years. Before that she taught in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Japan. She epitomized lifelong learning, often through international travel and was passionate about global studies, nature, and the environment. She understood firsthand an educator’s need to continue to learn and grow, and the impact real world experience can have on student learning.
Initially the Jean Graham Fund (JGF) offered grants for summer sabbatical projects that gave teachers opportunities to broaden and deepen their curricular knowledge through international or domestic travel. The JGF sent a language teacher to teach children in the slums of Mumbai, India. The entire 4th grade team at State Street rented an Erie Canal boat and traveled together through time to enrich their local history module.

 

JGF Summer Sabbatical grants also help teachers explore innovations in teaching in their field of expertise. A special education teacher studied at an Italian Montessori learning center. A physics teacher and golf coach attended a conference on the physics of golf in Scotland. The Technology team visited Tech start-up companies and connected with SCSD alumni working in tech fields in Silicon Valley. A music teacher spent weeks with master instrument builders in Europe.
All these Summer Sabbatical experiences were immersive, lasted at least two weeks and the JGF committee as well as the students delighted in the insights and innovations the teachers came back with.

 

When the pandemic made global travel more complicated, Jean’s family suggested implementing the Summer Passport Mini-Grant program. Summer Passport Mini-Grants gave teachers the opportunity to take short, domestic trips offering immersive, experiential learning related to their teaching subjects. Through the Summer Passport program, teachers enriched their teaching through experiences like climbing high peaks in the Adirondacks, visiting pollinator gardens in New York and Canada, visiting Jamestown, Hyde Park, Kansas marching band camps, Boston’s Freedom Trail and reenact elements of its famous Tea Party. Grade level teams have explored ways to integrate travel together as grade level teams into their Wit and Wisdom learning modules through experiences like exploring immigration and Art in New York City (3rd grade), and experiencing the culture, food, and language on a trip to Montreal (Kindergarten).

 

Jean’s passion for integrating her experience growing up in Columbia and traveling around the world into her State Street classroom set her apart as an extraordinary teacher. She loved teaching and this remarkable world we live in. Making enriching travel experiences for teachers possible is a terrific way to honor a remarkable woman and to build her legacy of lifelong learning in a community she cared so much for! The Jean Graham Committee looks forward to seeing all the creative ways SCSD teachers can dream up travel experiences that reinvigorate their passion for their work.