Hamilton County school board member announces grant program for district schools

The Educate 2 Elevate Fund, a grant program created by Hamilton County school board member Karitsa Mosley Jones, aims to provide funds and resources to schools in District 5 outside what’s provided in the Hamilton County Schools budget.

Jones told the Times Free Press on Tuesday that members of her community – which includes Brainerd, Lakeside, Harrison, Tyner, Washington Hills and Woodmore – always come together to support one another, but that the fund will provide a safe and vetted way to centralize donations.

“I represent a body of schools where students come from a variety of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but mainly from backgrounds where there is socioeconomic hardship, so they come from communities where there are deserts financially, educationally, socially and food deserts, even for physically thriving,” Jones said. “So what I wanted to do was establish a way and a means in which there was a way and a process that the community could donate, and people could donate to those schools and that money be used to support the needs that we cannot financially support as a district, that were beyond what our budget could support.”

Jones works in the city of Chattanooga Office of Early Learning and was elected to the school board in 2014. She said the idea for the fund came in 2016 and that she made a personal investment in 2018, but life events over the next two years and the coronavirus pandemic postponed the formal announcement of the program.