LONGMEADOW – The Longmeadow Educational Excellence Foundation (LEEF) presented 28 grants to teachers in the district at its annual grant recipient ceremony on Oct. 5. A total of $63,390 was donated to teachers this year for their projects.

LEEF President Jay Therrien said more than $1 million has been donated since the organization’s inception in 2001.

“You teachers meet this challenge year after year with all the amazing creative grants and all the wonderful initiatives we’ve had over the past 15 years,” he noted. “You do a terrific job, not only filling those young minds with knowledge, but also giving those children that environment to break out and find that new ground.”

Shelly Warren, substance abuse response coordinator for Longmeadow Public Schools, spoke about her grant for Longmeadow High School alongside co-author physical education and health department chair Rita Hawker. The grant is for an adventure challenge course at the school.

“Our grant was for a low ropes challenge course to be added on the wooded corner of Longmeadow High School (LHS),” Warren said. “We’ve been literally breaking new ground. We had student volunteers last year who worked on clearing the area of debris, creating paths, and setting up a couple activities based on equipment we already had, some of which was left over from a program that Rita used to run in the tenth grade [physical education class.]”

She continued, “The peer leaders really wanted to extend it and add more to that, so we wrote the grant with that idea in mind – so that peer leaders could be trained on using those activities to facilitate classes and workshops before the student body community.”

The equipment has been installed at the school and two days of training have been completed in regards to the challenge course, Warren said.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” she added. “It’s already being well utilized and embraced by the staff and the students.”

Hawker said the goal of the project is to get students to work cooperatively together and communicate to overcome the challenge course.

“It’s totally exceeded our expectations as to what we’re getting out of students in class,” she noted.  

Superintendent of Schools M. Martin O’Shea said he believes LEEF fuels creativity and passion for teachers and students.

“They’re almost like incubators for entrepreneurial spirit at the classroom level,” he added. “It’s something that we need more of, frankly, in education nowadays. I may be speaking to the choir, but in this day and age of standards and testing and accountability it’s great when we have opportunities to refresh what’s happening at the classroom level through grants such as these.”

Other grant recipients include LHS teacher Mariel Daniels for an iMac to utilize a 3D printer, Laura Amaral for math intervention supplies at Williams Middle School, Michael Carney for African drumming at Glenbrook Middle School, and Aaron Keller for arduino circuitry at LHS.

Keller told Reminder Publications after the ceremony his project is for an after school science and engineering club in which students build working circuit boards.

He noted circuit is powered by a battery and signals are sent to the arduino board in order to light up different letters or characters.

“You connect it to a laptop and there’s a program that you can modify and that program will send instructions to the circuit board and so you can program it to display any series of characters or letters in this display matrix,” he explained. “This one of 10 different circuits that they’ll build over the course of the year.”

During the ceremony, Therrien noted this year’s platinum sponsor for LEEF is Northstar Recycling. Gold sponsors include Bay Path University and Green Earth Energy Photovoltaic.

“Our ability to provide these grants would not exist without the support of our wonderful town and a lot of businesses in this town,” he added.  

LEEF’s annual gala, which raises funds to support the grants, is set to take place Nov. 5 at 6:30 p.m. at Twin Hills Country Club, Therrien said.