SPRINGDALE -- Junior high schools in Springdale will add hands-on classes for students this fall, administrators announced during Tuesday's School Board meeting.
Central, George and Southwest junior high school will add Environmental and Spatial Technology Initiative, or EAST, classes this fall. The program has thrived at Har-Ber High School for years and there are middle school and two elementary school programs, but now all secondary schools in the district will offer EAST classes.
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Learn more about the Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) initiative at www.eastinitiative.….
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State contributions to school district building programs were announced April 30. Springdale was approved for a state contribution of $9,025,000 toward a building for the School of Innovation and nearly $7,7 million toward an elementary school that would open in 2016.
Source: Staff Report
Victoria Burton, a senior at Har-Ber, told School Board members she will study cartography and remote sensing at the University of Arkansas this fall. Her career path and the public speaking skills she now has both came from EAST, Burton said.
"It has changed my life," she said.
EAST is a community-based class using advanced technologies to solve problems, Burton said. She was a shy sophomore when she started taking EAST classes. She soon realized the required presentations were pretty cool. She took on the project of using global positioning coordinates to map the more than 200 graves in Tontitown's White Oak Cemetery. It took her three years. It wasn't an easy project, she said. But she couldn't quit because she realized if she didn't take the records from a pair of crumbling poster boards to a digital record no one else would do it.
"I've developed kind of like a care," she said.
It's that combination of projects and community involvement that make the program valuable, said Kathy McFetridge, longtime School Board member.
"They're real world projects," McFetridge said, " They're not just kind of make believe."
Adding programs at the three remaining junior high schools allows students from Hellstern Middle School to build on what they learned in EAST once they arrive at Central and continue to build through classes at Har-Ber, said Anne Martfeld, assistant principal at Central. Lakeside Junior High School has an EAST program.
"There's no more gap," Martfeld said.
The program keeps students connected to community, schools and to success in learning, Martfeld said.
Josh Worthy, who has an EAST classroom at Sonora Elementary School, said the projects keep his students interested. His students have been planning an irrigation project but right now they are deciding a schedule of who will come to school in the summer to water the garden, harvest the produce and feed the fish in the aquaponics system. The projects are motivation, he said.
"The world isn't flat anymore," Worthy said.
The EAST facilitators from all the schools meet together. Sonora won the Timothy R. Stephens Founders Award last year and Har-Ber has won it on two other occasions, but it could be any Springdale EAST classroom, he said.
He taught junior high school for six years before moving to the elementary level and the involvement would be especially valuable for junior high students, Worthy said.
The most timid student in a class can find a role to play in EAST and that will keep them involved, he said.
Burton, for her part, said she would have been glad to join the program in junior high.
"I'm so jealous of the kids," she said.
The three programs were financed through a combination of Arkansas EAST grants and EAST grants written into the district's Race to the Top application. The grants outfit each classroom with a prescribed list of material valued at $100,000, said Kelly Hayes, comptroller. Traditionally the district has paid a quarter of that cost, he said.
Administrators said it is unusual to see so many programs added to one district in a year.
There were 14 EAST programs announced in Arkansas on Tuesday, according to a news release from the EAST Initiative. In Northwest Arkansas, Springdale had three, Gentry one and in Lincoln the middle school joined the program.
It took more than 10 years of planning to get EAST programs at all secondary schools in the district, said Jim Rollins, superintendent. The program has what the district is looking for to connect students to schools: community service, computers and projects, Rollins said.
"Once introduced it sold itself," he said.
It will take careful planning, budgeting and partner organizations, but he wants to see the program at every school, Rollins said.
NW News on 05/13/2015