FAYETTEVILLE -- Teachers have the chance to push their boundaries with grants awarded each school year by the Public Education Foundation.
"It's so empowering," Brooke Buckley, a fourth-grade English teacher at Asbell Elementary School, said of the grant program. "It pushes my thinking to be innovative. I'm encouraged to try new things. It was truly quite a gift."
Fayetteville teacher grants
• 65 grants awarded totaling $186,532.71
• 24 grants awarded in the fall
• 22 grants awarded in the spring
• 15 gifts awarded from businesses, foundations and individuals
• 4 projects funded through new Neal R. Pendergraft Endowment, a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation
Source: Fayetteville Public Education Foundation
Buckley was the first of 65 teachers recognized Monday night during the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation's annual Celebration of Excellence banquet. A total of $186,533 in grants was awarded in the fall, spring and through separate gifts from businesses, foundations and individuals.
The Monday night event drew 350 guests for dinner and a ceremony at the Arkansas Air and Military Museum at Drake Field in Fayetteville.
Through the donors, the foundation is able to support schools and teachers in implementing innovative and creative projects that fall outside of school district's operating budget, said Sara Eichmann, vice president of the foundation and the grant chairwoman. The creativity of teachers gives children the chance to blossom, she said.
Teachers applied for grants to buy books, robots, lighting systems, basketball goals, computer programs, potter's wheels and a kiln, pedometers, archery equipment and marching band music.
Sitting still is a struggle for some 9- and 10-year-olds. When Buckley asked students to sit still and focus, she noticed sitting still required so much of their concentration, they couldn't pay attention to what she was teaching, she said.
Buckley began encouraging her students to find their most productive work space, whether that meant sitting in a beanbag chair, lying on the floor or sitting at a desk.
She researched other options, finding "Stand2Learn" desks, tall desks giving students the option of standing or sitting on a stool, she said. She applied and received a $3,800 grant to outfit her classroom with 14 standing desks. She kept 10 traditional desks and purchased bouncy stability balls for seating. Chairs were moved to two tables in her room.
Buckley encourages her students to move about the classroom. She has seen a change in her students' ability to regulate their behavior, she said.
"I won't ever go back," she said.
The foundation also announced five new endowments for the teacher grant program. They are the Jean Pharr Memorial Endowment given in memory of a former Fayetteville High School math teacher who died in January after battling breast cancer, the Tammy and Read Hudson Family Endowment and two endowments for the district's gifted and talented program, said Cambre Horne-Brooks, executive director of the foundation.
The Curtis and Jane Shipley family established the Irma Boyer Gifted and Talented Fund, named for Jane Shipley's mother who is a retired teacher, Horne-Brooks said. The family challenged the community to raise enough money for a second endowment named for Barbara Pritchard, director of the gifted and talented program for more than 30 years.
Pritchard was surprised and grateful, she said.
The fifth endowment announced is an endowment campaign started for the theater program at Fayetteville High School, said Greg Lee, a former education foundation board member now on the Walton Arts Center board.
Another teacher recognized Monday was Woodland Junior High science teacher Billy Maxey. Maxey likes to involve his seventh-graders in activities that give them experience with abstract concepts, such as Newton's Laws of Motion. A $1,447 teacher grant given through allowed him to purchase materials for a new lab on motion, momentum and acceleration.
Maxey purchased blue tracks fitting toy cars, but that are designed to have very little friction, he said. The lab involved his students running the cars on the blue tracks into a plastic picnic cup. Students used washers from a hardware store to change the weight of the cars and to see how the changes in weight affected how far the cars pushed the cups when exiting the blue tracks.
Maxey also used the lab to explain how science affects students' everyday lives, he said.
"When you do things like this that are hands on, students remember it better instead of teaching out of a book," he said. "They get to see it for themselves."
NW News on 04/26/2016