How to fund your STEM project

Nearly every equipment funding rule in US education turns on one question that most teachers never think to ask first: when the project is finished, does the student take it home, or does the school keep it?

Get it wrong and a request that looked perfect comes back rejected, often after the planning window has closed. Decide it before you write anything.

Perkins funds cannot be utilized for any items retained by the student.

New York State Education Department, Perkins guidance

If your students keep what they build, plan around Perkins from the start. The routes in the tool above do not carry that restriction. State programmes that pass Perkins money through inherit the same bar, and the tool flags those too.

None of these runs on a grant cycle. If you need money for this term rather than next year, start here.

A student materials fee. Standard practice in CTE woodworking, welding, automotive and culinary programmes: students pay a materials fee for the project they keep. Pair it with scholarships from a local source so nobody is priced out.

An adult evening class that subsidises the school class. Run the same build for adults at a paid rate. It needs no application and it repeats every year.

A raffle or an end-of-year auction. Raffle a handful of finished student projects to the community, which pays for the next year's materials. Check your own state's charitable-gaming and raffle-licence rules first, because they vary a great deal.

Your local education foundation. The most overlooked source on this page. Districts commonly have one, they are used to small equipment requests, decisions take weeks rather than quarters, and they place no restriction on who keeps the finished work.

Teachers often assume a purchase this size means competitive bids and months of paperwork. For an order in the low thousands, it usually does not.

Two caveats. The test is the total transaction, so an order cannot be split to duck the threshold. And some districts set their own lower internal floors, where three quotes are still required even though federal rules would not ask for them.

The single most useful reframe: you are not proposing a new programme of study. Documented programmes run the build inside a course code that already exists, in woodworking, manufacturing, engineering or music technology.

That makes this a project inside your existing course, which needs far less approval than a new pathway. If your paperwork asks for a federal classification, the relevant code is CIP 47.0404, Musical Instrument Fabrication and Repair, covering programmes that make, repair, maintain and tune acoustic and electric instruments including amplification.

Check the current list before you build a plan on any credential, because state lists move independently of the awarding body. Wisconsin has sunset the Woodwork Career Alliance Sawblade Certificate on its CTE incentive-grant list: it counts only for certificates dated before 1 July 2023, so a student earning it in Wisconsin today would not count towards that grant. The WCA Core Credential sits above Sawblade in the WCA ladder and is the step to look at instead.

This is a Wisconsin decision, not a national withdrawal. WCA's own materials still describe Sawblade as actively issued elsewhere.

Confirm what your own state currently recognises with your CTE director rather than relying on any list, including this one.

ESSER is finished. Final liquidation ran out in March 2026 and the remainder returned to the Treasury. Any guide still listing ESSER as available is out of date, and there are many.

Perkins will not buy a build the student keeps. We looked for a counter-example and did not find one. This is the most common reason a well-written request gets rejected, and it is the one thing general grant lists never warn you about.

This page is deliberately narrow. For a broader sweep of what is open to educators right now, these are free and worth bookmarking.

• WeAreTeachers grant roundup, the best-maintained free list we found
• STEMgrants.com, a free guide to STEM grants
• TeachersFirst, curated grant sources and contests

One warning about all general grant lists, including the good ones: they will point you at Perkins without asking who keeps the finished work. Check that first.