AURORA | A modest science classroom in east Aurora will be getting a major facelift in the coming months thanks to a hefty new grant from the Northrop Grumman Foundation.
Aurora Frontier P-8, an elementary and middle school in the Aurora Public Schools district, was selected last month as one of five winners in Northrop Grumman’s inaugural Fab School Labs Competition, an honor that earns Frontier a $100,000 grant to be used to completely revamp one of the school’s two science labs.
“I’m pretty sure that we all got teary-eyed and cried and thought, ‘Oh, my goodness,’” Cari Roberts, principal at Frontier, said of her and her colleagues’ reaction upon discovering that their school was chosen as a grant winner. “We were really excited for our kids.”
Frontier beat out hundreds of other schools from across the country to win the contest, and bested 15 other semi-finalists by garnering more votes in a Facebook voting campaign. The Aurora school was the only one in Colorado to be named a finalist or semi-finalist.
The application process for the contest began last spring when the aunt of a Frontier student, who is also a Northrop Grumman employee, alerted Roberts that the security firm was seeking entrants for the competition. A team of Frontier personnel then spent the next several months perfecting the school’s written and video application packages.
“I think we all thought that it was kind of long shot when we were trying for the grant,” said Megan Weaver, a middle school science teacher at Frontier who helped with the application process. “But it’s so awesome that we got it.”
Roberts, Weaver and other Frontier administrators will work with Chicago-based research firm Flinn Scientific in the coming months to finalize specific renovations for the classroom. Although specifics are still vague, new computers are a top priority, according to Weaver, who said that the laptops currently available to Frontier science students are so wonky, she rarely bothers tinkering with them because it takes away from valuable instructional time.
“We have almost 30 laptops, but we don’t really even use them because … I spend so much time trying to get them to work that it’s not even worth doing the activity on them,” she said.
The school’s laptops are about 10 years old, and aren’t compatible with much of the equipment the science program already has, such as probes and temperature sensors, according to Gwynn Moore, an instructional technology teacher at Frontier.
“They’re dated in the different types of programs they can run, battery life, as well as speed,” Moore said.
Outside of computers, plans for the grant money include purchasing software with three-dimensional capabilities and digital microscopes that can be connected to projectors so that instructors can visually explain concepts to an entire classroom, instead of having each student fiddle with individual devices. However, Roberts stressed that plans are tentative and that the vision for the final classroom may change over time.
“It doesn’t have to be just equipment — we can redesign the way that the lab looks, we can put hoods in — it just depends on what we want to do,” Roberts said. “The Flinn Scientific people know what’s the cutting edge out there and that’s what we want for our students —the cutting edge, the best.”
Roberts said that construction on the new classroom is slated to begin this summer and the facility should be ready for student use in the fall.