Last week the United States Department of Energy announced the selectees for the Renew America’s Schools grant. This grant provides funding for infrastructure upgrades at K-12 public school facilities, prioritizing high-need communities.
In total there were $5.5 billion in requests from 236 school districts across 48 states and two territories. Only 2% of those who submitted a concept paper were ultimately invited to negotiations, for a total of 24 selectees.
Mangrove Strategies was proud to support three schools - two in Baltimore City and one in Baltimore County - with their grant applications.
All three of the schools we worked with serve high-need communities and were excellent candidates for the grant.
We are so proud that one of our clients, Watershed Public Charter School, was one of the 24 selectees.
Contingent on successful completion of the “negotiation” phase of the process, Watershed will receive $1,273,989 in federal funds to upgrade their HVAC, upgrade their lighting systems, replace exterior doors, install parking lot and rooftop solar, and install EV charging stations.
Mangrove Strategies assisted the school with their application and connected Watershed with another one of our clients, the Climate Access Fund, to receive a quote and letter of support for the solar project.
While we are disappointed that our Baltimore City clients did not advance to the negotiation round, we are proud to have supported Baltimore County’s Watershed Public Charter School to become one of the 24 selectees for this extremely competitive grant award.
The Department of Energy will open another round of applications for Spring 2024. We encourage schools and school districts interested in applying to get started early on conducting their facilities needs assessments, identifying the types of infrastructure work they’d like completed, assembling partners to serve on the project team, getting quotes from partners to begin building your budget, and quantifying the energy and cost savings that could be achieved as a result of the grant award.