Highland Elementary School received additional Federal Title Grant money this school year and one area that money has been applied to is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programming. The school was also able to purchase a new SMART Board and increase the time Jessica Shockman, mental health practitioner from Northwest Mental Health Center spends at the school said Highland Principal Chris Trostad. “Our Federal Title Grant dollars went up this year,” said Trostad. “One of the things they added was a category called Title IV. It’s general use for the whole school with things like safety, also science, technology, engineering things like that. We had an increase of $24,000, so we were able to purchase the majority of one SMART Board, add some more time from the (Northwest) Mental Health Center to get Jessica Shockman here four days a week. We have Tara (Rodriguez) here five days a week.”
According to Trostad each grade level also received about $2,000 to use to purchase various kits and supplies for applied learning in STEM. “We were also able to add about $2,000 per grade for STEM activities and projects,” said Trostad. “That’s science, technology, engineering, manufacturing. It’s incorporating math and science into the classrooms. Lots of really fun activities where kids are being challenged scientifically by implementing the application of math and science into things. Each grade level got $2,000 so I think we’re seeing doing lots of computer programming, called coding, with robots, where they program it. They think it should do something and then see what it actually does. Lots of fun things that we’ve been able to add and hopefully that funding continues and over the course of time we’ll have lots of different kits for each of the grades. A lot of the grade levels have been purchasing kits so they can share among the teachers with some pretty high-end, good technology to implement in the science, technology, engineering, and manufacturing kits.”
Trostad said it’s fun to see the students applying math and science together through the projects the kits provide. “Lots of hands-on related things, fun, challenging activities to figure out how to do something with very limited restraints,” said Trostad. “Also, the science piece as to making a guess what you think is going to happen and what actually did happen. A lot of implied math in there as well. They have to do lots of calculations to determine things. Fun to see the implementation of the math and science together.”
Highland provided a list of all the kits and activities that have been purchased used the new federal grant dollars for each grade level.
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