NASHUA — The school district is set to apply for a $27-million chunk of the Race to the Top Fund, a $4.35 billion education component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Superintendent Mark Conrad presented on the grant proposal before the Board of Education Wednesday night.

“We said if we're going to go this large, think big, and put some resources into really transforming the district,” Conrad said. “That's what this is about, transforming the next four years of how we do business, so at the end of four years we have a very different district that continues the focus we have on personalizing instruction, engaging students, but really provides resources over the next four years for us to think about doing this in new ways.”

The Race to the Top grant aims to support educational reforms through innovative strategies that will improve results for students. It is designed to encourage states to improve education through adopting standards and assessments, building data systems that measure student growth, successfully recruit, develop and retain teachers, and turn around the nation's lowest-achieving schools.

The Nashua school district's proposal contains nine projects it hopes will be funded over a four-year period. The first deals with management of the grant, proposing to fund a grant manager position at nearly $90,000 a year, in addition to a secretary and a team of teachers funded through stipends.

Asked why a grant manager requires such a high salary, Conrad said the individual hired would need to be highly qualified.

“This is a highly sophisticated position because you're really trying to do a change effort in the district, and there's nothing more sophisticated than trying to bring about change in education,” he said.

About $3.6 million of the grant would go toward building a standards-driven curriculum, with the hiring of 20 specialized teachers. Each school would get one of the consulting teacher leaders, with the exceptions of both high schools and Elm Street Middle School, which would get two each.

“These positions are really, I think, the key positions in the grant because they're the folks who work with teachers to embed what occurs during the summer workshops into practice in the classroom,” Conrad said.

The standards driven curriculum portion, which would come in at nearly $10 million, would speed the curriculum writing process with writing teams and institutes. It would also expand Extended Learning Opportunities through hiring a coordinator.

The proposal seeks also to raise enrollment in advanced placement classes, through participation in SpringBoard, an online English-language arts curriculum focused on professional development.

The fourth aspect of the proposal deals with integrating technology into instruction. Teachers would be supported by a “technology instructional coordinator” at each school, in addition to three full-time assistant systems administrators to support the technology and work a help desk Furthering the integration of technology into the city's classrooms, the district budgeted $8.7 million to plan for a new era of internet usage in school.

Wireless upgrades would be carried out at both high schools, and 3,5000 portable devices would be purchased to support a 3:1 student/device ratio. Devices could include laptops, netbooks or tablets. Five-hundred computers would also be replaced.

“I think the curriculum process has to drive where the technology goes now, which is different than it used to be,” Conrad said.

The fifth part of the proposal seeks to implement a comprehensive career exploration and planning process, including partnerships with post-secondary institutions and employers.

Other aspects of the Race to the Top grant proposal seek to build a data-driven infrastructure, develop effective teachers and administrators, and turn around low-achieving schools.

Lastly is a community outreach component, which would be carried out by creating an off-site community learning center for parent workshops, registrations and other services. An outreach director and secretary would be hired as part of this initiative.

Still being finalized, the school district's grant proposal will be subject to a 10-day review period by the mayor and the N.H. Department of Education.

srios@newstote.com