Campfire Session — Funding Flint

Listen to how schools can fund Flint using public, private, and international funding streams, including pricing guidance and vendor procurement pathways.

Jacob Edington, Head of Customer Success at Flint

In this Funding Flint Campfire Session, we focused on practical ways schools can identify, justify, and apply for funding to support Flint adoption or renewal. The session combined an overview of Flint pricing and purchasing resources with a walkthrough of common U.S. funding streams, selected international opportunities, vendor procurement considerations, and a new Flint-built funding application assistant designed to help schools draft first-pass grant language more efficiently.

Content covered in this session includes:

• Flint pricing and renewal context, highlighting current pricing visibility on the Flint website, renewal timing, and a reminder for long-term partners that older grandfathered pricing can be locked in through multi-year agreements before future increases take effect.

• Public, private, and international funding pathways, outlining several routes schools may use to fund Flint, with special emphasis on U.S.-based funding streams while also acknowledging selected Canadian and UK opportunities that may apply to international schools.

• Perkins funding as an often-overlooked option, especially for schools using Flint in Career and Technical Education contexts, with Jacob noting from prior edtech experience that Perkins can be a meaningful and sometimes underused path for funding AI-supported career readiness work.

• Vendor procurement as part of the funding conversation, explaining that Flint is already an approved vendor in states like Pennsylvania and New York and encouraging schools to reach out if they want Flint added to state or local procurement systems, since that process often begins with school-level advocacy.

• Flint’s existing purchasing support guide, showing that schools do not have to start from scratch when making the case internally, since Flint already has a resource hub that organizes purchasing support information by public funding, private funding, vendor procurement, and selected international opportunities.

• A new federal funding application assistant built in Flint, designed to help school leaders answer a sequence of questions about their school context, intended use case, and student population so Sparky can identify the strongest-fit funding streams and begin drafting application language.

• How the funding assistant works in practice, beginning with questions like location, school type, student population, free/reduced lunch context, CTE presence, and intended Flint use cases, then narrowing likely funding matches based on those answers.

• Funding stream recommendation logic, where Sparky surfaces the most relevant options based on the school profile and explains why they may be a fit, helping educators focus their time on the grants or funding sources most likely to align with their goals.

• Draft-writing support for applications, where the assistant goes beyond suggesting possible funding sources and actually begins generating first-draft language for selected opportunities such as Title I, Part A and Perkins, making the grant-writing process more approachable for school staff who may not have extensive experience with funding applications.

Slides from the presentation can be found here.

Got more questions, comments, or feedback for this topic? Feel free to raise them within the Flint Community.

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Introduction • 00:00

• Jacob introduces the session and agenda.

Flint pricing • 02:24

• Flint offers current customers lower pricing, which will increase in the next school year (not 2026-2027, but 2028)

• Multi-year deals can lock in current pricing

• Jacob shares more details by looking at the pricing page

Funding Flint resources • 03:24

• Funding streams highlighted are primarily US-specific

• Perkins Funding for Career and Technical Education (CTE) is an often-overlooked avenue

• International funding streams include:

• Canadian opportunities with Global Affairs Canada

• Great Britain's Tech First program

  • Flint offers support for grant applications

• Resources available for funding include:

• A purchasing support guide on the Flint website

• A Fed funding application assistant, which is an activity within Flint

• This tool helps users identify suitable funding streams and drafts application language

• It asks questions about school type, free/reduced lunch programs, and CTE programs

• It identifies funding streams like Title I, Part A, and Perkins Funding

• The AI-generated language serves as a starting point and requires review for specific school/district needs

• The tool aims to reduce the time and effort involved in grant applications

• Flint is working to increase vendor procurement

• Currently an approved vendor in Pennsylvania and New York

• Schools can advocate for Flint to become an approved vendor in their state by contacting support Flint K12

Reviewing additional Flint resources • 25:21

• Jacob shares more information about the Flint Innovative Educator program for teachers interested in doing more with Flint

• The Flint Student Ambassador Program is a grassroots initiative for students to increase awareness and ownership of AI

• Jacob also shares more about the AI literacy for teachers and AI literacy for students courses and certification programs

Conclusion • 32:59

• To learn more, folks can go to the Campfire Calendar, Flint's Instagram (which has a bunch of teacher-facing content), and the Flint Community.