The Bartholomew Consolidated School Foundation will fund nearly $30,000 in programming, outreach and learning opportunities for students, faculty and staff across Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. this spring.
Thirty BCSC employees received Innovative Teacher Grants this year, totaling $28,866.67 for 19 projects and programs. The gifts support educators who wish to explore innovative ideas with their students which may exceed the BCSC general budget.
“Thanks to donations to BCSF, we are able to continue to grow our impact each grant cycle,” said Suzi Bruin, executive director of BCSF. “There is a great deal of positive energy around our innovation grants. As we continue to increase our awareness and impact, grant applications have increased dramatically.”
The recipients, amount received and an overview of the projects include:
Shannon Martin and Amanda Hunter — Busy Bees: $426. This grant enables materials to be purchased that help minimize threats and distractions and helps with communication of feelings, wants and needs. These materials include books, blocks, tiles, images and games that all represent emotions using both drawings and images of real people.
Brenny Kummer — Administration: $2,400. This project will help provide a new, innovative technology tool, Ricoh Theta SC panoramic video cameras, so that all BCSC schools can access these video cameras in order to further Universal Design for Learning in the classroom and provide students with new, innovative methods for showing their understanding of topics.
Alan Birkemeier and Drew Foster — Central Middle School: $2,450. Students will create Central’s Tour History and World Day via Google Tours. All students will be able to experience the tours, and teachers can collaborate and create a program to have their students create their own.
Courtney Foreman — Mt. Healthy Elementary School: $2,500. This grant will supply a small group set of Virtual Reality headsets to be used by all Mt. Healthy students.
Meredith Blackerby — CSA Lincoln Elementary School: $2,500. This grant will bring the art room into the 21st century with the addition of an area with iPads, styluses and a photography station for students to use different apps and programs to create digital artwork.
Vanessa Fledderman-Gutierrez — Clifty Creek Elementary School: $1,200. The Art of LEGO project will provide art students with LEGOS to create artwork throughout the school year. The goal is to create an ever-changing interactive LEGO mural wall built of LEGO base plates to display student creations, messages and information.
Jill Bless, Kaity Day, Patrick Mahaffet and Kate Edgren — Schmitt Elementary School: $1,000. Grant funds will be used to purchase SWIVL robots to aid in recording learning environments for many different reasons, as well as a recording document camera to capture additional learning experiences and reading fluency and expression.
Deepika Kapoor and Misty Stamper — Rockcreek Elementary: $1,000. This grant funds a multi-sensory corner in the classroom to increase sight word fluency. The sensory corner will encourage students to use visual, kinesthetic and tactile elements to enhance memory and learning of sight words.
Amelia Shaw — Columbus North and East high schools: $1,118.42. This grant will enrich the German students experience through both a pen pal exchange and acquisition of the German language through book clubs.
Desiree Shaw — CSA Lincoln Elementary School: $464.95. This grant will fund Snap Words complete classroom kits, comprehensive sight-words-to-reading collection.
Suzanne Diehn and Jennifer Tekulve — Clifty Creek Elementary School: $2,500. This grant will be used to improve the courtyard at Clifty Creek by fifth grade students. It will also allow for an exploration trip to see the building trades students at the house they are building in the community.
Kimberly Chamberlin — Busy Bees: $715. With this grant, teachers will incorporate more natural materials into the classroom in order to provide opportunities for learning through things like shells, moss, rocks, pebbles, pine cones and gems.
Jenny Goggin and Shawna Nester — CSA Lincoln Elementary School: $1,375. This project will help students learn how they can promote sustainable gardening in an urban setting that promotes healthy nutrition for the surrounding neighborhood.
Ruth Blair, Heather Coryea, Johnathon Ooms and Kaity Day — Schmitt Elementary School: $2,000. This grant will allow for Schmitt buses to be equipped with attachable book boxes and a small collection of books, magazines and LED drawing and writing tablets.
Krea Hill and Julie Giggy — Rockcreek Elementary School: $880.50. Through this project, students will be provided with engaging, high-interest, collaborative activities through the year that are innovative and challenging, as well as purposeful and standards-based.
Mindy Hartwell — Busy Bees: $1,650. This grant will allow the creation of an engaging and active sensory hallways, both indoors and outdoors, to increase each student’s physical activity throughout the day.
Brenny Kummer — Administration: $2,200. This grant will help 20 BCSC instructional technology leaders in schools earn their Google certification by offering in-house training on how to pass the Google Certified Educator exam during the summer and a paid stipend for those who participate in the training.
Christy Meek — Clifty Creek Elementary School: $467. This grant will launch a multi-sensory program to improve communication skills at Clifty Creek. Students will learn to navigate through a conversation starting at a basic greeting and work toward the most complex conversation the student is capable of having.
Jennifer Morlok and Sue Edwards — Parkside Elementary School: $2,019.80. This project will allow for the purchase of pedal bikes and other gross motor activities for the outdoor Pre-K area at Parkside.
Central Middle School media specialist Michelle Fee also received the “Good, Better, Best — Out of the Box” Innovation Award for her efforts to create innovative programming in the library. The award is given each year to educators who exemplify the energy, creativity and problem-solving skills of the late Ross Wallace, a former BCSC teacher and administrator, and Chuck Grimes, also a former BCSC teacher. There is always something cool, fun and innovative happening in the library,” said Alan Berkemier, a social studies teacher at Central Middle School. “Michelle Fee is the person who is responsible for that.”
