Seattle Public Schools and its fund-raising partner, the Alliance for Education, are discussing how to sustain the progress attributed to a nearly $26 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The grant, awarded in 2000, is over for some schools, and educators say they're hurting. While some schools have money left over from last year, others don't.

The five-year grant, one of the largest ever to a school district on a per-student basis in 2000, was primarily aimed at helping teachers become more effective at challenging all students and closing the gap in achievement between whites and minorities.

Under Seattle's decentralized approach, schools decided how to use their share of the grant within certain parameters. Officials at the Alliance for Education say the grant's most important effects were to instill a culture of collaboration among teachers, focused training and the use of student data to improve decision-making.

The grant "has definitely changed the culture of the school," said Lisa Hechtman, Nathan Hale High School's principal. Once a poor-performing school, the Northeast Seattle school now boasts a strong graduation rate, a very low dropout rate and a wait list, she said.

"By not having those funds we have lost collaboration time that is desperately necessary for us to continue the work that we're doing," Hechtman said.

Wing Luke Elementary Principal Ellen Punyon echoes that sentiment. The Southeast Seattle school used much of its grant to train the entire staff in Guided Language Acquisition Design, a research-backed strategy for raising the achievement of students whose first language isn't English. The grant also helped pay to send some teachers to conferences and share new ideas with staff.

"I'm really struggling this year because we don't have it," Punyon said.

Continued training is important because of staff turnover and new research, Punyon said. For instance, almost one in five teachers at Wing Luke was new to the school every year between 1996 and 2002, according to a University of Washington study.

The sunset of the Gates grant comes at a time when rising costs for fuel, health benefits and utilities are eating into school budgets. And revenue from the district's largest grant, the federal Title I program for serving low-income students, dropped 6.5 percent last year, or by more than $850,000, state records show. (The district expected to get about a $345,000 increase this year.)

"The money gave us capacity, and I think that most teachers feel grateful that they had the opportunity to learn some of the things they did," said Wendy Kimball, president of the Seattle Education Association. "But ultimately the results are derived through the work of the individual teachers or the teachers together."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com