Pupils in Agnes Dodd’s class at Embden Elementary School were learning about endangered species when one student asked what they could do to help save these animals.

Dodd told the third- and fourth-graders in this small town about 10 miles north of Madison to pick an animal they would like to draw and learn more about.

The research reports and hand-drawn illustrations were compiled into a calendar that the pupils sold to their parents and friends. The youngsters raised $545 which they voted to donate to the National Wildlife Federation.

A representative of the wildlife organization made a trip from Washington, D.C., to Maine to collect the check in May 1995.

This chain of events began with a $400 check from the Trout Foundation, a volunteer organization based in Yarmouth that gives small grants to teachers at rural schools. The foundation has given more than $600,000 to small schools in Washington, Waldo and Somerset counties over the past eight years.

The unique foundation was created by people who felt children should not be doomed to an inadequate education because they live in a poor part of the state, said Charles Callanan, the group’s president.

“I don’t think the state … can be as strong, as healthy as it can be as long as one segment of the population operates at a disadvantage,” the 71-year-old former educator said.

Working out of a small office in Yarmouth, Callanan and a corps of volunteers raise money and distribute it — a few hundred or a couple of thousand dollars at a time — to rural schoolteachers who submit grant requests.

Proposals are accepted only from teachers in elementary schools with 100 or fewer pupils or up to 150 pupils with one or more multiage classrooms, and from high schools with fewer than 300 students.

In January, the foundation got a major shot in the arm with a $50,000 donation from Stephen and Tabitha King.

“We’re still reeling from that,” Callanan said of the surprise donation which came in a simple white envelope. “It’s a tremendous gift for … a small, hardscrabble institution.”

He said he hoped the gift, the third from the Kings who previously had made two $6,000 donations, would allow the foundation to give money to schools in other rural counties and to support more projects in the three counties it serves.

The 250 projects the foundation has funded are as varied as the schools that have received its grants since 1989.

Elementary school pupils in the Washington County town of Alexander, for example, soon will be learning French, and students from other Down East towns will head to Orono to see a play at the Maine Center for the Arts. For many, it will be the first live performance they have seen.

“I love that place,” Linda Renaud said of the foundation. Renaud, a third-and fourth-grade teacher at Alexander Elementary School, and her colleagues at the small school in Washington County have received numerous grants from the group.

The latest will enable the school to buy children’s books written in French. The school’s principal, who is of French heritage, will start the project by teaching the language to children and teachers at the 90-pupil elementary school. Later in the project, the pupils will write their own books in French.

Few school districts in Maine offer foreign language instruction before high school.

“We never, ever could have done it without the Trout Foundation,” Renaud said. “We haven’t had money to buy anything for the past seven years.”

That, says Callanan, is the foundation’s aim — to help schools buy the small things they can’t afford as state funding for education in rural parts of the state has declined.

“If we make enough little things possible … maybe we will begin to affect a whole area,” he said.

The organization gives out three types of grants. Large grants of up to $3,000 are given in the fall. Last October, 23 such grants were awarded. The Machias Memorial High School library, for example, received $2,961 to expand its collection of science books, videos and software, and an industrial arts teacher at Jonesport-Beals High School was given $2,151 for a boat building project.

Twice a year, the foundation gives out $600 grants for smaller projects such as the purchase of a telescope and trips to the University of Maine planetarium for students from Alexander.

The foundation also gives out grants of up to $500 throughout the year. This money is meant to make last-minute projects or field trips possible.

“These small grants are great,” Dodd said. “They’re easy to administer and you can really see the results.”