At their regular meeting last night, the Orcas Island School District (OISD) board voted to accept local and federal grants to assist the English Language Learning (ELL) program, and library technology. The board also voted to accept $460,000 from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to repair and replace the heating-ventilation-air conditioning (hvac) and plumbing systems in the elementary school.
An anonymous donor gave $4,000 for the English Language Learners Program for materials.Richard Fadem spearheaded a $15,089.00 donation from The Sir Francis Bacon Foundation for library technology.
In announcing the awards, OISD Superintendent Barbara Kline said, “Sometimes we are lucky enough to get grant money that we did not even have to request.” The ELL program supervisor Catherine Laflin has been busy putting in purchase orders to make use of the donation materials, Kline said.
Richard Fadam has worked with OISD Computer Technology teacher Paul Evans to purchase technology to use in the school library. With this grant, the school district will purchase:
- Six Mac iMac 21.5″ 3.2GHz 4BG 500GB drive @$1399. = $8394.
- Smart Technology Interactive Smartboard 600i = $2200.
- Safari Montage program $4495 — Price breakdown:
- Server hardware – $2000
- Creative station $495
- Subscription, $2000
“We are pretty lucky to live in a place and to know people who look out for our students and our schools,” Kline told the OISD board.
The Board also voted to approve a contract Washington State Dept. of General Administration to match the State Energy Grant for[intlink id=”10716″ type=”post”] elementary school repairs,[/intlink] which was awarded to the OISD last month.
Kline also said, “The grant requires a three-to-one match for a total expenditure of about 1.7 million in order to complete the required work. If we cannot find the matching dollars, we will need to return the funding to OSPI.”
The OISD Board also elected new officers for 2011: Janet Brownell was elected Board President, and Tony Ghazel was elected Board Vice-President.
