The foundations that support the Bentonville and Rogers school districts distributed more than $400,000 in grants this school year.
Rogers Public Education Foundation officials, in their most recent round of grant announcements, went from school to school May 8 surprising teachers with a total of $128,016 for various classroom needs not covered by school budgets.
Angela Nhu, an art teacher at Oakdale Middle School, was one of 115 Rogers educators to receive a grant. She received $1,500 to pay for two Apple iPad Pros students may use to create works of art digitally. She already had two of the devices for her classes, paid for by a foundation grant she got last year.
"This is the future of art. This is where it's probably going," Nhu said. "There might not be anymore art on paper because everyone could be doing this digitally. So I thought, as a teacher, I need to be exposing my students to this technology."
One good thing about using the devices to draw pictures is the ability to "undo" any kind of mistake, she said.
Bill Dark, a Rogers High School chemistry teacher, received about $700 for a hot air balloon activity he has done with past classes. The activity is part of a unit on gas laws. He's very grateful to the foundation for the grant, he said.
Students work together building hot air balloons with tissue paper. They use an apparatus attached to a propane tank to launch the balloons. The launcher he used in the past was not as safe as Dark would have liked, so most of the grant money will go toward a new launcher, he said.
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More information on the Bentonville Schools Foundation and the Rogers Public Education Foundation can be found at the following websites:
"It's an activity kids really enjoy," Dark said. "I'm going to try to do it at the beginning of the school year to get the ball rolling in the class."
In addition to these grants, the Rogers foundation handed out about $94,000 more in other grants this school year. The largest was the $23,875 George Merwin grant awarded to Oakdale Middle School teacher Amy Lee for outdoor education equipment, according to Karyn Tecle, the foundation's development and outreach manager.
It was the foundation's biggest year of grants and awards, Tecle said.
Fundraisers such as the Wall of Distinction, an annual golf tournament and the Thank A Teacher program, as well as donations from Tyson Foods, Walmart Community Grants and the Soderquist Family Foundation made the foundation's grants possible.
The Bentonville Schools Foundation this month distributed 11 grants worth $16,045 to teachers.
That's on top of $191,600 the foundation distributed to most of Bentonville's schools earlier this school year based on proposals they submitted on how they would use the money on science, technology, engineering, arts and math education.
The foundation received 31 applications for the teacher grants, according to Marcus Osborne, foundation board president. One of the largest was $3,000 that went to Tara Pfeil, an anatomy and physiology teacher at West High School.
Pfeil will use the grant to buy three human body models equipped with muscles. Students can touch the muscles and pull them off to study them and reveal inner muscles, she said.
"I'm trying to build up the lab here. This kind of stuff is extremely expensive," Pfeil said.
Foundation officials visited her classroom May 11 to surprise her with the grant in the form of an oversized check. Pfeil said it was the first grant she's received in her 19 years of teaching. She estimated she spent between six and eight hours writing the grant proposal.
"When I won it, my students were excited for the next batch of kids, because they said the muscle models should really help them," she said.
The Bentonville foundation gets much of its money from an annual fall fundraiser and its Gold Rush Fun Run and 5-kilometer race, held each spring.
NW News on 05/29/2018
