Education Grants Total $51,299
By Michael P. McKinney; Journal Staff Writer
The money, from the Barrington Education Foundation, will benefit programs in town schools that are traditionally not covered by the school district.
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BARRINGTON – MP3 systems and CD recorders will let middle- and high-school teachers immediately critique music performances and prep students for college auditions. Hampden Meadows School will see a technology to improve creative writing. Third graders will get workbooks written and illustrated locally that teach Barrington history.
And high school staff will receive training from the Katie Brown Education Program to teach date-violence prevention to ninth graders, incorporated into the health curriculum. Katie Brown instruction of varying kinds is used in middle school and later in the high school.
The $51,229 in grants bestowed by the Barrington Education Foundation, announced yesterday, will go toward those and other items, and in some cases be combined with other financing to obtain them. Now in its 15th year, the foundation finances things the town’s education budget can’t cover.
“The foundation funds programs that traditionally are different what the district would cover. We don’t fund textbooks or salaries,” said Zoe Alley, publicity chairwoman for the foundation. This year, the grants are for 18 items, the majority of them technology, with literacy the second-most numerous.
The local history workbook for third graders is expected to be ready in August. Alley said the 20-page book is being done by a local author, illustrator and designer. Along with the education foundation’s $1,000 – split among the three schools – the workbooks are also being paid for with money from the Trust for Historic Preservation and the Rhode Island Council for Humanities.
The Sowams, Nayatt and Primrose Hill elementary schools are also receiving $2,000 each for library books designed to entice “reluctant readers.” It means helping students who read well but haven’t shown that they enjoy it, and those who find reading difficult and have avoided it, Alley said.
At Primrose Hill, a “sound field” technology will amplify a teacher’s voice, something to be used for hearing-impaired students but more generally to keep students’ attention on the tasks at hand.
Alley said that, according to the grant information, the amplification system “has been proven through research to really help students who are auditorily impaired.”
Other grants the Barrington Education Foundation awarded this year are:
Nayatt School:
Six fitness stations, which Alley said are scaled-down, playground-like equipment that get youngsters to exercise, $3,176
Two digital cameras, $70
Sowams School:
Liquid-crystal-display project, $1,227
Two digital cameras, $702
Primrose Hill School:
Two digital cameras, $701
Hampden Meadows School:
Portable projection screen for library, $630
Games, literature and music to be used by guidance office for individual and group therapies, $1,200
Barrington Middle School:
Comic-book-style graphic novels for library, $2,000
Eleven liquid-crystal-display projectors for social-studies classes, aiming to improve multimedia study in the new social- studies curriculum, $10,483
Barrington High School:
A listening library of CD players that can vary the speed of spoken text and do other things to help students who need it, $1,025
Tablets and a photographic negative scanner, to be used in graphic-design and digital-imaging courses, $1,700
DNA biotechnology, chemistry and physics equipment for use in those courses, $2,144
An “interactive whiteboard” that hooks to a computer and can project visual lessons and save them, rather than being wiped away on a traditional blackboard, $3,016
Adobe software and a digital camera for Talon, the high school newspaper, $525
mmckinne@projo.com / (401) 277-7447
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