Gill Foundation drops $400,000 on STEM labs for every elementary school in Englewood

Jayce Prante and Gage Luna, both 11, took turns drawing small, multi-colored dash marks on a sheet of paper during their first-ever STEM class at Bishop Elementary School in Englewood. They made a winding track across the white paper and then dropped a small robot on the course and watched it navigate to the end of the line.

“Whoa, look at how fast that made it go,” Prante said, crouched on his hands and knees, watching the Ozobot — a learning tool designed to introduce STEM students to robotics and coding — as its detecting sensors “read” the dotted line and kept it to the course. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Teachers and officials for Englewood Schools are expecting a lot of reactions like that from their elementary school students this year.

Thanks to a grant topping $400,000 from the Denver-based Gill Foundation, the district created STEM labs in Bishop and Clayton Elementary schools and Charles Hay World School — the last three campuses in the district to be outfitted with the specialty gear. 

The funding effectively made Englewood the first school district in Colorado to provide a complete, integrated STEM curriculum and STEM lab classrooms for all students from kindergarten to grade 12. 

“We built our first STEM lab at Englewood High School (six or seven years ago), and then each of our schools got them (in succession),” said Bill Gilmore, STEM coordinator for the district. “We built a STEM Lab in Cherrelyn Elementary two years ago, and so we had this gap of three elementary schools that didn’t have the labs. That’s where the Gill Foundation came in and enabled us to become a true K-12 STEM district.”

The foundation, which is a national leader in funding for LGBT causes, chose Englewood Schools as its first recipient of STEM program educational grants in schools. The funding supports one of the foundation’s four priorities: equal treatment for all people; safe schools; recognition of all families; and a prosperous Colorado. In its support of a prosperous Colorado, the foundation funds STEM education, LGBT advocacy and services, financial services and public broadcasting.

“All the pieces came together in this district,” said Denise Whinnen, director of Colorado progressive strategies for the Gill Foundation. “There is such a commitment to STEM in Englewood — from the buildings all the way up to the superintendent.”

The Gill Foundation helped outfit the three elementary school classrooms with state-of-the-art computers, curriculum, software and other tools for hands-on coding, engineering and design as well as new furniture. 

“What made it particularly exciting for us is that this completes their STEM lab program,” Whinnen said. “Every kid in every grade level in Englewood Schools has access to STEM labs now. And it’s the first district in the state where that’s really true, and so (that) makes it really interesting to us. And from a learning perspective, it’s really exciting.”

Gilmore said the district is always looking toward the future and plans to continually improve its STEM labs.

“Our vision is to expand these labs from STEM labs to true maker spaces that will enable our elementary students to follow the design process, taking their ideas and physically prototyping them,” he said. “But in order to meet this vision, the district needs assistance getting these tools in the hands of our young inventors.”

The district is asking community members and business leaders for equipment and other donations to build maker spaces at every school. They’ve identified tools and materials for each elementary school — Cherrelyn, Bishop, Charles Hay and Clayton — worth about $3,600. A list of the sought-after items is posted on the Englewood STEM website. 

“We would like to outfit each of our four elementary schools with maker spaces that provide this access and environment,” Gilmore said. “So, we’re asking for funding assistance to provide hand tools, power tools, bench tools and workbenches for each elementary school.”

And while space has been carved out for the STEM labs and maker spaces, more appropriate housing is a part of future site plans, which include demolishing the four elementary schools over the next two years to make way for new, 21st-century learning buildings. 

District voters approved a $97.5 million-bond last fall to rebuild Englewood’s four elementary schools and one early childhood education center. The buildings were constructed in the early 1960s, and none include space considered conducive to STEM education. In fact, the new STEM lab at Bishop is housed in a small, retrofitted computer lab.

“I can’t wait to see what all of this will look like in the new space,” Whinnen said. “We believe the students will really thrive with all of these tools and programs in a modern, upgraded setting.”

The new elementary schools will have open, collaborative learning spaces bathed in natural light — a stark contrast to the low-ceiling, florescent-lit classrooms today. The four STEM labs will have state-of-the-art technology and tools arranged in deskless, active-learning spaces. Students will be encouraged to roam the labs with their iPads, get down on the floor with engineering kits and work with each other to solve problems. 

“That was on our radar before the STEM labs were installed; knowing that we’d need to move these into new spaces,” said Julie McMorris, spokeswoman for Englewood Schools. “But all of the furniture and equipment and programs and systems will be moved into rooms that were specifically designed for our STEM labs instead of retrofitted classrooms.”

The new Clayton Elementary and Charles Hay World Schools are being built next to the present-day buildings because there was enough room on each campus to build without demolishing the old buildings first.

The new Bishop Elementary will be finished and ready for students in January 2020. 

“Knowing that, we still didn’t want to delay (Bishop’s students’) enjoyment of STEM until their new school gets built,” McMorris said. “And the middle school and high school teachers are thrilled that they no longer have to start from scratch in the STEM labs.”

That works for Luna, too.

“This is my favorite class ever,” he said. “It’s robot class.”

Originally Published: September 12, 2017 at 4:23 PM MDT