By Lopez Island Education Foundation
When financial support from the community is made available to teachers at Lopez School, how do you think they would spend the money?
An espresso machine? Stress-relieving massages?
Very tempting, but no. These choices may have been justified given the daily demand on the teachers’ presence and patience maintaining peace in classrooms, nurturing curiosity in children, making the most of the constrained budget while meeting the state’s many educational and administrative requirements.
What Lopez school teachers chose to do instead with a little bit of financial boost was actually extra work on the teachers’ part. But the huge rewards were smiles, excitement and educational enrichment opportunities for the children at school.
Here is a sampling of what community support through Lopez Island Education Foundation thas enabled Lopez teachers to do in the past year.
Elementary science teacher Lorri Swanson arranged to have 28 third graders aboard the Centennial, a 58-foot research vessel, mingling with graduate students from the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories and learning about marine invertebrates and our ecosystem.
Music teacher, parent and robotics coach Ingrid Vliet roused interests among 3rd and 8th grade students, organized and trained them into competing teams and hosted Lopez Island’s first ever VEX Robotics tournament earlier this year bringing teams from as far away as Seattle. Team Lopez Lobos went on to win the tournament!
“It was cool learning how to program the robot and watching it run by itself,” said first-time programmer Uli Velaquez, a proud team member.
For math teacher Alex Nelli, one of her passions was to make math fun and meaningful. She helped coach a team of nine students weekly after school and entered them into a Math Olympiad competition in Arlington.
“Math Olympiad is hard, challenging, great practice and fun. It makes you smarter,” said Levi McClerren.
Besides funding teachers’ activities, LIEF also sponsored Special Services teacher Kathy Booth to attend the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Denver, Colorado. Booth took the opportunity to learn about instructional technology initiatives around the world and networked among over 10,000 participants.
Among several contacts made, Booth connected with Boni Hamilton, author of Integrating Technology in the Classroom, who offered to work with Lopez School on a book study.
She also made contact with Verizon Mobile Learning Academy and arranged Lopez school to participate in their 10-week course to help develop curriculum to integrate communication technology in classrooms.
“The knowledge and connections made during the conference will help the Lopez School move forward as we implement our improved technology integration funded by the Technology Levy,” said Booth.
Because of generosity of our community members, LIEF was able to fund many other activities as well, including field trips, purchase of essential equipment and books, and 2016 Elementary and Secondary Intensives and Discovery Days.
To learn more about the foundation or make tax-deductible contributions, visit www.lopezeducation.org/.
