As the Georgia Department of Education’s Emergency and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grants fast approach their end in September, many school districts are evaluating what projects pandemic grants allowed them to accomplish.
In response to the economic outcome of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriation Act, and the American Rescue Plan provided funds to states and school systems throughout the country in an effort to support academic and non-academic areas in the face of COVID impacts.
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Choosing to focus on their education system’s long term plan, Lynn Cato, McDuffie County’s director of curriculum and instruction, was thrilled to share the multiple improvements and projects put in place in McDuffie’s schools thanks to ESSER funding.
“The ESSER dollars were a real God-send for our county, but we also knew there would be an expiration date on that funding, so we had to invest in things we could sustain,” she said. “Every county has things they need to maintain, but we really focused on being able to align these new expenditures with our strategic five-year plan.”
Racking up a total of almost $19 million in funding from the state’s Department of Education, Cato said she and Superintendent Mychelle Rhodes were determined to deliberately invest in long lasting improvements that not only helped the students, but the community’s needs as well.
“[Rhodes] is very visionary and we wanted these extra dollars to outlive our tenure as educators, and for it to continue to impact children for years to come,” Cato said. “What we hope we’ve done with these projects is inspire McDuffie kids to want to do the same.”
Adding a new classroom to a few of the elementary schools, Cato said Norris and Dearing Elementary were able to increase their educational spaces in order to meet growing county needs.
“It allowed us to build another special education classroom down at Dearing and one for STEM at Norris that hadn’t been part of the county’s original plan in the design of the building,” she said.
Norris and Dearing also received new greenhouses, active floors and drones to further the school system’s inventory in top-notch technology to provide a better and more engaging learning experience.
“New technology has immersed very quickly,” Cato said. “It’s constantly evolving, so you have to teach students to be able to think and problem solve no matter what’s put in front of them.”
With the help of active floors Cato said teachers now have the ability to wheel in a high-powered projector onto school tiles, which allow students to play active and educational games that keep them excited about testing their comprehension whilst experiencing some competitive or collaborative fun.
“To keep students engaged, because that is the world they are living in, you have to bring in some technology,” she said. “We don’t want our students to just consume technology by sitting in front of a computer … we want our students to be savvy in it. We want them to really evaluate what they are looking at.”
Prioritizing STEM opportunities for all ages, Cato said purchased drones at Dearing and Norris allow mathematical and scientific theories or lessons to be applied in a real-world manner that not only gets students outside, but creates an applicable situation for concepts that might otherwise be viewed by students as boring or unuseful.
“STEM engages students and it really is an application of the math and literacy that they’ve been learning, and what we’ve found is – when students can touch it and do it – it becomes real to them,” she said. “STEM teaches them creativity, collaboration with others and communication skills … it requires research skills and students being able to problem solve.”
However, STEM was not the only priority in the county’s usage of ESSER dollars; the county’s career, technology and agricultural education pathway program also received improvements that Cato said will last decades.
“CTAE the application of all those academic concepts they’ve been learning in a real-world setting,” she said.
Thomson High, the county’s only high school, received a healthcare science simulation, Anatomage virtual dissection tables, a new grand piano and a cannery boiler for the facility’s canning plant.
“The healthcare lab rivals those that you see in post-secondary schools, like for technical colleges, because we modeled it after that design,” Cato said. “There’s a mock-up of a hospital room and it is amazing.”
Featuring interactive mannequins that teachers can program to display various symptoms, such as coughing, high blood pressure or even heart attacks, Cato said students can now graduate from McDuffie County with an even deeper educational exposure to what further healthcare education will look like.
“The students have to respond to those conditions, and they’re really getting a feel for what it’s like to work with a real patient without experimenting on real people,” she said. “With this, there’s no harm, no foul and it’s real-time learning, because it has state-of-the-art equipment that you would see in real hospitals.”
While those in the healthcare pathway will get to embark on virtual dissections of animals and actual scanned cadavers to learn about pathology, forensic science and more, those in the agricultural classrooms will get to can community members’ vegetables and fruits to gain work experience while helping others in the county.
“We have one of the few full canneries in the state, which we’re very proud of, and to make it sustainable for our community long term we replaced the boiler,” Cato said. “Home gardeners actually bring their vegetables and soup stock to be canned by our students, as we run that each summer with our agricultural students.”
School-based enterprise work-based learning equipment also received a major boost with the purchase of a 3D print shop at Thomson-McDuffie Middle School and embroidery capabilities at Thomson High’s school store.
“By having a print shop, our students can learn and have the experience of running a business,” Cato said. “They can use those 3D printers for items they would sell to the community … which is sustainable over time.”
To increase student literacy, book vending machines were installed at Thomson and Maxwell Elementary, in addition to a new system-wide Bulldog Express STEM and literacy bus – the only one of its kind in the CSRA, according to Cato.
“We have made it into a mobile classroom, and it’s an extension of our STEM programming,” Cato said. “We have been taking it out into daycares, private preschool providers and schools for family engagement activities. So we’ve been taking that bus out and introducing it to children who are not yet even in school to give them STEM and literacy activities.”
Norris Elementary, Dearing Elementary, Thomson-McDuffie Middle and Thomson High School also received VR goggles, which Cato said gives students the opportunity to virtually travel and explore lessons more in depth.
“We want to be able to show our students things and places that are not tangible to them in the local area,” she said. “In McDuffie, we believe that just because our students attend a smaller county, does not mean their learning experiences should be any less.”
Further county projects included new digital interactive boards at Maxwell and Thomson Elementary, installing bipolar ionization units in all schools and buses, and acquiring more custodial equipment for all facilities.
“We want our graduates to be college and career ready, so we do everything we can to make that happen,” Cato said. “We offer a lot of opportunities to our students and this is about investing in our kids … I want our students to be invested in coming back here and continuing to contribute to the community, and it’s our job to get them prepared for that.”
