Frequently Asked Questions About ELF

Our school wants to apply for a scholarship to help pay tuition for ELF next year. What should we include in the Letter of Need? This letter should be addressed to the Scholarship Committee and should include any information that will help us assess your scholarship needs – let us know if you have asked your school board for full funding and whether you have a designated Fundraising Coordinator. Are there extraordinary circumstances that necessitate financial support if ELF is going to happen in your town? The maximum scholarship for a single ELF town is $700, and $300 for each school in a double ELF program. We are unable to award scholarship dollars to triple or Graduate ELF towns. Late applications are not eligible to receive scholarships.

I've lost that yellow postcard you always ask for in September; and I never know how to fill it out anyway. Do you REALLY need it? Many of the materials we prepare are based on the number of volunteers or students doing ELF in your school. Owl pellets is a good example. We also use these numbers when we write grant proposals or reports to granting agencies to describe the impact of ELF. We have even had instances of schools calling us asking how many students have been through ELF in their school over some period of years. Please do your best to return the postcards promptly. The school office staff can help you determine the number of students in the school and in ELF.

If I have ELF materials for the spring units, is it all right if I just return them to my trainer at the regular workshop in September or October? NO!!! The ELF trainers only get together in August to pick up materials for the fall semester and again in December to pick up the spring materials. During the summer and fall, we in the office are cleaning up, revising, and re-stocking the kits, slide shows, etc. Whatever materials your trainer gets from you in September don't get back to VINS until the trainer comes here in December, which is too late to get it revised, re-stocked, etc. to go back out with the other December materials. Every year we have to add new materials to replace things that are not returned in a timely fashion, which increases the overall cost of ELF.

When I visit the website, the print is so small and blurry it is almost unreadable. How can I fix that? If you go to the View menu at the top of your browser page and select a text size of 'medium' or larger, you should be all set.

Why does VINS require that a part of the payment for ELF come from the school budget? ELF works best when it is a team effort by the volunteers, the school, the community, and VINS. To ensure that the school recognizes the value of the program and is committed to their part in it, we ask that about one-third of the cost be borne by the school budget. Of course, many schools pay the full ELF tuition, and that's great! It relieves the volunteers from the burden of fundraising, and lets them concentrate on bringing ELF to the classroom.

What is 'Graduate ELF' and why is it so much cheaper than 'Regular ELF'? When a school has been through all five of the ELF concepts and has a core of committed volunteers, it may want to consider Graduate ELF. The biggest difference is that only two of the eight training workshops are led by VINS staff; the other six must be led by volunteers. This puts substantial additional workload on the volunteers. Grad ELF schools receive the same materials (slides, sets, etc.) as regular schools do. The cost of Graduate ELF is $1150 per year, compared to $3360 per year for a single school doing regular ELF.

We have a large school and it would be really helpful to have a second set of the materials that VINS normally provides (for example, skull sets, slide shows, birds' nests). Can we get that? With almost 100 schools in the ELF program, maintaining and improving ELF materials is a significant part of our effort in the office. If we know in May that a school would like a second set of materials for the following school year, we can plan for that; but there will be an additional charge for the extra materials. The charge will depend on the concept being taught, since different concepts have different amounts of materials, but is generally around $400.

I've heard that there is a new edition of Hands-On Nature, but the copy I have looks just like the old one. How can I get a new version? In 2000, VINS produced an updated and revised second edition to Hands-On Nature. We reprinted the second edition in 2003 with only minor changes, though one activity was changed significantly (Scrambled Eggs, page 269). To tell if you have a first or second printing of the second edition, look at the back of the title page under "Printed in the United States of America". If you see "5 4 3 2 1" below that line, it is a book from the first printing (2000). "5 4 3 2" is from the second printing (2003), and "5 4 3" is from the third printing (2006).

Have a question about ELF? Email us at elf@vinsweb.org. Thanks!

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