The Baldwin County School District and Baldwin College and Career Academy is participating in the Georgia Foundation for Public Education PEACH Education Tax Credit program to raise funds for three causes.
Georgia's PEACH Education Tax Credit, previously known as the Qualified Education Donation tax credit, is a program that fosters support for public education through allowing donors to invest in specific projects and programs.
“The PEACH Education Tax Credit allows the unique opportunity to choose where your state tax dollars go and is the result of lawmakers understanding the value of providing a vehicle for citizens to easily support Georgia’s more than 1.7 million public school students,” states the Georgia Foundation for Public Education website. According to Baldwin College and Career Academy Director and CEO James Lassetter, schools must apply to get into the tax credit and must name up to three projects to fund.
Each project must have a detailed description of what will be done and how much money will be needed to complete the project.
“We go into a database, once approved, and industries or individuals can allot their Georgia state taxes to pay into this educational tax credit and choose us to receive it,” said Lassetter. “This is our first year doing this and we requested about $82,000 in total with our three projects.”
The first project will use its funds to support the Career, Technical and Student Organizations.
Funds received will assist students to attend conferences and competitions for organizations such as SkillsUSA, National FFA, Distributive Education Clubs of America, Family Career and Community Leaders of America, and the Health Occupation Students of America.
These organizations build leadership skills, offer career guidance, and prepare students for the future, according to Lassetter.
“We are a Title I school, which indicates that a majority of our students meet or are below the poverty threshold.
Because of this, many students are unable to get the best out of these organizations, being unable to attend field trips, competitions, and events,” said Lassetter. “It’s hard to fund every student without a small budget, so this will pay for those students to join and have these experiences.”
The second project will use funds to upgrade the district’s school garden.
This will include making it handicap accessible, adding more fruit trees, adding raised planters, and more.
“We have an operational Farm to Table program, which means we can serve our students anything we grow in the garden or sell that produce, so we wanted to ensure we get the best benefit from the garden,” said Lassetter.
“We had some University of Georgia students, who focus on landscape design, come in and submit a plan on how to improve our garden and make it more functional.
These funds will bring those plans to reality.”
The final project will fund the purchase of two agriculture drones for the Unmanned Flight program that will provide drone students real-life skills as they use these drones to service the garden.
“Students gain FFA certification to fly commercial drones by completing this program,” said Lassetter.
“Thus, we would like to give them real-world experience and add further support to the garden. The drones can put out fertilizer, pesticides, and assist with landscaping. Teachers can review the video footage to offer further feedback to students based on their performance as well.”
According to Lassetter, the PEACH Education Tax Credit Program is very flexible, offering a range of ways to support programs and projects in need of funding.
“This is going to allow us to fund projects and build labs and even fund new programs down the road. This is money used to build experiences for our students,” said Lassetter. “It’s a great program and I hope we can get the community involved with it.”
To learn more about the program visit gfpe. org/tax_credit/page/ georgias-peach-education- tax-credit. To follow these projects, visit Baldwin College & Career Academy on Facebook or baldwin.collegeandcareeracad on Instagram.