Education exchange

New Jersey school principal gets grant for education exchange

South Brunswick resident Sharon M. Biggs is one of about 30 New Jersey school principals who was awarded a 2009 Geraldine R. Dodge Principal Fellowship Grant in April. Mrs. Biggs, a lifelong learner and educator, is currently an elementary school principal, and formerly a Montgomery Township Middle School Assistant Principal; and a South Brunswick and New York City Elementary Teacher. The Dodge Foundation/FEA Principal Fellowship Program includes a competitive selection process, and provided approximately $125,000 in grants to full-time New Jersey PK-12 principals in public and public charter schools this year. Funds are intended to support non-traditional, imaginative, professional development, and personal and intellectual renewal endeavors, which enable principals to grow as educational leaders to better impact their schools and communities. Beverly Hetrick and Diane Whitt, county-level education specialists in New Jersey, celebrate these types of accomplishments achieved by school principals, which are designed to help improve 21st century learning and student achievement across the globe.

All grant recipients submitted written proposals in January 2009 detailing the intended purpose of the grant if awarded. Sharon’s grant proposal, entitled “Extension of a Lifeline --- From a Suburban Town in New Jersey to a Rural Village in Panama,” focuses on the application of Mrs. Biggs’s “servant leadership and quality American higher education, to help start a lifeline connection between a suburban New Jersey town and a rural village in the Central American country of Panama to provide children’s books to help combat the deadly social disease, illiteracy.”

Panama reports an 80 percent literacy rate. However, “the 20 percent falling between the cracks is of great concern to me as an instructional leader with 23 years in education,” expresses Mrs. Biggs.

Inspired by her husband, Terence, a native of Cativa, in Panama's Atlantic side province of Colon, Sharon applied for the grant as a way to say “thank you” to her best friend for 35 years and husband for almost 24 years, for the years of mentoring, life-coaching, supportive love, and continued provisions of “lifelines” to Sharon and to so many others. Terence and Sharon met at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York, and live in New Jersey with their 15-year-old daughter, Danielle.

The Dodge/FEA Fellowship Grant will cover expenses of Sharon’s travel to Panama this summer, as well as the purchase of 110 children’s books to be personally donated to Terence’s former elementary school, Esculea Manuel Urbano Ayarza. Sharon intends to meet with Panamanian instructional leaders to share ideas about effective reading instructional strategies, and she will share with them copies of her own balanced literacy (reading workshop and writing workshop) professional development materials. In addition, the trip will allow for visits to the Panama Canal, of which Terence’s grandfather was one of the builders, the rainforest, and other historic and cultural sites on the isthmus.

Photographing, videotaping, and oral interviewing of diverse Panamanian citizens will occur during the entire trip. Additionally, Sharon will keep a daily journal to chronicle the experience, and will share her data via a presentation to the fellowship group, to various school communities, and other groups.