Area schools receive grant money for educational tools

High school students at Nodaway Valley and Orient-Macksburg will benefit from expanded educational opportunities soon that have been made possible by mini-grants that were received from the Green Hills Area Education Association and the Regional Planning Partnership for Region 14.

O-M students dive into hydroponic system

With their grant money from Green Hills, Orient-Macksburg agriculture students received a new hydroponic system they’ll be able to use in their classes.

“Here at Orient-Macksburg, this is very unique for all of us,” said student Wiley Ray. “It’s a great opportunity for all of us to work with this type of equipment. We’ve had a smaller system before and that worked pretty well, so Mr. [Bill] Umbaugh thought if we got a larger one we’d see how that went for us.”

What is hydroponics? It’s a method of growing plants in a water based, nutrient-rich solution. There’s no soil involved in the growing process.

“We first heard about this one day, just a select few of us students,” explains Keegan Russell, another student. “It’s all water. There’s zero soil. All the nutrient will go down to the septic which will provide the water throughout the whole system.”

A natural response to hearing that plants can be grown without soil is skepticism.

“That sounds a bit odd to me,” student Gavin Holste admitted. “We haven’t done much with it yet but I’m excited to seeing how it all will go.”

Students filmed a short video for Green Hills employees that showed what they had learned thus far through their hydroponic system.

Umbaugh said the mini-grant from Green Hills was in the amount of $8,000. He was approached by O-M Superintendent Dr. Norene Bunt to help her write the grant and obtaining a bigger hydroponic system seemed like a good fit for the available money.

“This hydroponics is something we didn’t have in our curriculum and it’s a very timely topic right now,” Umbaugh said. “I was very skeptical and didn’t think we’d get the grant, but we did. We’re excited about it. We’ve got it in the shop, can control the temperature, and we have a lot of controlled variables we wouldn’t have in the greenhouse.”

NV students will share child development items with other schools

Nodaway Valley educator Karen Schulteis was one area individual involved in obtaining a grant for 11 area schools from the Regional Planning Partnership for Region 14 that will mean students in those schools will have at their disposal 18 different pieces of educational tools.

“You go through from when they’re a newborn and learn what you need to do,” said McKynna Newbury, a student who has taken the Child Development class in the past, the course that will be impacted the greatest by this grant.

“I took it my freshman year and the class teaches you about all the birth control there is, which is really important,” Ashleigh VanderPlume added.

According to Schulteis, the model sets that were purchased with the grants will supplement the school’s textbooks well. They make subjects like infant development make sense in a much clearer way than pictures in textbooks or videos do.

“Seeing the special needs babies makes a much stronger impact on students than just reading about the condition or watching a video,” Schulteis added. “The shaken baby doll allows students to see how what they consider to be mild shaking can cause serious brain damage to an infant.”

The total list of items purchased includes five RealCare babies with software, accessories, car seats, front packs and suitcases that house the dolls and are used to charge them; three special needs babies, including those with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, those that are drug affected and those who are premature; one Shaken Baby Syndrome doll; one fetal development model set; one full-term birth process model set; one birth torso model; two pregnancy simulator bellies; one CPR baby model and one choking baby manikin.

Schools these items will be shared between include Clarke, Creston, East Union, Lamoni, Lenox, Mormon Trail, Mount Ayr, Nodaway Valley, Red Oak, Southwest Valley and Stanton.

“This is allowing us to use things that as a school district we would never buy because we only use it for a few days a year,” Schulteis said. “When you can share it between 10 schools, it makes a big difference.”