cathy hunt
Cathy Hunt has taught at Mendota Elementary School in Madison for 20 years, but the two years the school has been enrolled in the SAGE program stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the amount and quality of teaching she has been able to do, she said.

Hunt teaches about money.

"By the end of November of the first year in SAGE I had taught everything I had taught the previous year, and that was purely because of the smaller class size," Hunt says.

In addition to lowering the size of her kindergarten class, SAGE money allows Hunt to buy desperately needed materials for the classroom, provides a mechanism for designing teaching goals and meeting them, and encourages all of Mendota's teachers to meet regularly and work together toward the same educational goals.

For a teacher like Hunt, a class size of 14 or 15 students was like an answer to a prayer.

"You just can't provide good instruction when there are 23 kids or more in a classroom," Hunt says, "and that's what it was like before SAGE."