The_Guest said:From my experiences you'd be suprised. Last year I created a proposal to the district's educational foundation and got $5,000 out of it. This is was after several months or research and pricing. It's a all matter of being professional. You can't appear like a student wanting gadgets to play with. You have to have the whole thing figured out: storage, training, benifits, money, maintaining, and most importantly applacations. Districts prefer to fund things that will make a noticiable difference. Particularly major improvements. A good reason why districts often decline student funding requests because it's just simply not organized. So what if you get approved for a batch of mac2ks. How will they get used, are they even compatable with your existing system. Will they continue to get used after you graduate. Educational funding is entirely about long term funding. No school board wants to grant money (which mind you is tax money) and grant money once more because you made a mistake. This type of funding must be secure and efficient. These sort of things are incredibly audited, if there is a single hole you could receive nothing. A final tip, it does help to get staff/faculity to assist or endorse your efforts. And most likely your TD will. Of course they like getting money for new equipment why shouldn't they. If you want it bad, you gotta push for it.
I wasn't talking about purchasing anything - our purchase order system I actually sort of for the most part understand, and they'll sign just about anything. I meant in terms of allowing students to save the school money by putting knowledge to use that we've gained outside of the normal means (ie, they don't teach how to change fuses in the tech theatre class). It's not difficult, and if you know enough to be changing them in the first place there's a good chance you know how to go about it - but I realize the potential for error and don't blame them wanting to protect their equipment. Thus, I only do things like this when I'm 100% sure they'll work, when time's running out (can't rush a repair order through the opening night of the show no matter how hard you try) and when nobody's looking (or at least, nobody that'd care what I'm doing).