The sustainability bug has spread beyond the West Windsor and Plainsboro government and found a new target in the WW-P school district.
The theme for grant awards that seemed to be getting the most attention from the West Windsor-Plainsboro Education Foundation this year was environmental sustainability. Out of 14 programs proposed by teachers and their students around the district that received grants from the WW-P Education Foundation — totaling $18,000 — five were for environmentally-friendly projects.
The three “green” projects that received the most attention are the gardens. The first will create “Stepping Stones” at the Wicoff Elementary School. The second will create a courtyard garden at Village School, and the third will create a “Gator Garden” at Town Center Elementary School.
The grants are funded on a competitive basis during two grant periods each year. The 14 grants are the result of both of those application cycles.
According to Marcia Fleres, the executive director of the WW-P Education Foundation, officials at the education fund look to fund projects by teachers who have innovative approaches to teaching and learning, and “not just buying books for a bookshelf or wanting to have an LCD projector in their room.”
The green theme that resulted came from teachers themselves, and not suggestions from the WW-P Education Foundation, she said. “We did not encourage that in any way. The grants that we funded really stood out in terms of being innovative and creative.”
What did catch the foundation’s eye were the gardens. “We provided funding for Dutch Neck Gardens a few years ago,” Fleres said. “We wanted to make a commitment to what was done in Dutch Neck, but no one applied” in the subsequent years for similar ideas, she said. “We were really pleased when we saw that three schools would be doing something maybe not as elaborate as Dutch Neck, but the creativity behind them. They each have different themes.”
Teachers Lizbeth Reil, Melissa Collins, and Gregory Rauch at Wicoff will engage the students in creating the “Stepping Stones” pond and rock garden with plants indigenous to the local area, which will enable science exploration and experiments by students. This project received a grant of $940.
At the Village School, teachers Marie Bresnahan and Kelley Coyne will work with students in grades four and five to create an outdoor classroom used for science and social studies. The project, which received a $1,500 grant, includes the creation of a Colonial and Victory Garden, complete with a pond and courtyard.
At Town Center Elementary School, students will work with teacher Kathy Schmidt to create a raised bed garden reflecting various cultures within the school. In addition to the environmental aspects of the project, lessons in science, mathematics, and language and community-building activities will be taught. The grant for this project was for $1,000.
In addition to the gardens, the WW-P Education Foundation also granted $1,750 for a Grid-Tied Solar Renewable Energy project at High School South. Science teacher Brendan Field will install a solar panel with an inverter on the high school roof. The panel will provide power directly to a grid so that the physics classes will collect and analyze the power production data.
At Millstone River School, students in grades four and five will hatch brook trout from eggs and raise them to fingerling size before releasing them into a state-designated waterway under the Trout in the Classroom project, run by teachers Danica Taylor and Sven Strnad. Grant money for this project was $981.
The WW-P Education Foundation also funded: Book Buddies at Maurice Hawk Elementary School, $600; Getting Dressed Up at Millstone River, $250; Fifes and Drums at Grover Middle School, $1,000; Measuring Cell Respiration and Photosynthesis Rates at High School North, $2,064; Junior FIRST Lego Robotics at Dutch Neck Elementary School, $430; Tunes in Teacher: iPods in the Classroom at Community Middle School, $719; Fostering Fluency at Town Center Elementary School, $371; Human Skeleton Model at Grover Middle School, $786; and Service Learning Project — Bridging the Generation Gap at High School North, $300.
For the Book Buddies program, Teachers Enid Perry and Barbara Sheridan will create a summer reading program for children who need extra help in developing their reading skills. Getting Dressed Up will allow Diane Kosar to prepare a special section of her preschool classroom for dress up and play activities. The money will be used to purchase dress-up clothes and costumes.
The Fifes and Drums program will allow music teacher James Fultz to expand the newly-created Grover Fifes and Drums with the addition of authentic reproductions of drums, specifically to target the importance that music played in the American Revolution. Students will perform at concerts and special events.
With regard to the cell respiration and photosynthesis project at North, the grant money will allow science teacher James Looney to utilize new Vernier probes to investigate the relationship between dissolved oxygen and the level of photosynthesis and productivity in aquatic samples.
In the Lego Robotics program at Dutch Neck, Mary Jo Gonsiorowski will work with students to design and build challenging solutions using LEGO Education Simple & Motorized Mechanisms Set. Students will also learn team-building and presentation skills. In the Tunes in Teacher program at Community, teachers Donna Gil and Mary Santiago will use iPods to help English as a Second Language students to strengthen their listening skills and broaden vocabulary.
In the Fostering Fluency program at Town Center, teachers Janet Bowes and Stephanie DiLorenzo will use the Read Naturally computer-based program to help students develop skills to read with fluency. At Grover, teacher Shirley Allen purchased a new life-sized skeleton model to use in the human body systems curriculum. This grant was co-funded by the school’s PTSA.
And the Service Learning Project at North will allow teachers Todd Robinson, Joseph Cifelli, Alba Flynn, Deb Radice, and Donna Ritz to work with high school students to link community services and the academic curriculum.
To date, the foundation has awarded over $220,700 in teacher grants for more than 275 innovative programs in the schools since is founding in 1995. The money comes from corporate sponsors of the foundation’s “Excellence in Education” grant program, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Integra Foundation, and Janssen, division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals. “We couldn’t do this without the support of the corporate supporters,” Fleres said.
