The Hamilton Southeastern School Board has accepted  a $2.1 million grant from the Lilly Endowment as part of the foundation’s Comprehensive Counseling Initiative for Indiana K-12 Students.   The funding will go to expanding students’ learning opportunities outside of the four walls of the classroom. Schools officials say they want to enhance college and career readiness for all students with various learning opportunities, an initiative Hamilton Southeastern Schools is already working on.

Grant money will also go outside the schools to improve counseling practices and access within the Fishers and surrounding communities.

HSE School Superintendent Allen Bourff told school board members the grant writing team of school administrators continued to re-write the grant application several times  right up to the filing deadline.

Lilly Endowment officials were asked by Dr. Bourff why HSE was selected for this grant.

“They said this is an out of the box submission,” Bourff said.  “It’s not like any of the other grants that we received and it was one of the best written, high quality grants that we received.  They said it was an easy approval.”

“The response from school corporations and charter schools far exceeded the Endowment’s expectations,” said Sara B. Cobb, the Endowment’s vice president for education. “We believe that this response indicates a growing awareness that enhanced and expanded counseling programs are urgently needed to address the academic, college, career and social and emotional counseling needs of Indiana’s K-12 students. We were most pleased to see how the schools engaged a wide variety of community stakeholders in assessing their students’ counseling needs and developing strategies to address them.”