CS Partners maintains a vigilant quest for grant opportunities to assist our schools.  We subscribe to newsletters, use the Internet, and other personal connections to identify appropriate grant opportunities.  For smaller, non-competitive grants, our staff will write the application or work with the school staff to complete the application.  We have been successful the last two years at two of our schools bringing in over $60,000 per year in rural education grants in this way.  In a third school we were awarded close to $500,000 in charter school start up grants writing the grants ourselves.  On larger projects we look to professional grant writers to assist in the completion of applications.  We work closely with SmartWorks in Grand Blanc.  SmartWorks is proficient at writing competitive federal grants.  Chuck Stockwell will chair a brainstorming committee of CS Partners leaders and school leaders to identify the outline of a particular project and then work directly with SmartWorks on the grant writing process.  Using this format we applied for and were awarded a $1.6 million, four year grant to develop a new Character Education program at all three of our schools, and a $270,000 two year grant to expand a foreign language instruction program at one of our schools.  We will also look at who is best to write a particular grant application. Last year we found that an independent writer had been successful writing charter school dissemination grant applications.  We engaged her last fall to write a grant for one of our schools.  Mr. Stockwell designed the application response and worked with the writer and the school was awarded a $140,000 grant in December.  Our experience to date is that the investment in professional writers is well worth the cost.