70 Summit Teacher Innovative Projects Receive Funding
Summit County teachers recently received $54,000 in Eileen Finkel Innovative Teacher Awards to help bring their creative ideas to life for their students. All schools and grade levels in Summit School District benefitted.
The awards aligned with Summit School District’s strategic plan and the IB Learner Profile and included projects involving hands-on science, career and technology education, and literacy, and mental health, for example:
Sarah Pomeroy, STEM instructor at Summit Cove Elementary, is helping students to design a bike pump track. The project will incorporate collaboration with high school students in the Bike Tech class. Tom Lutke, Summit High School (SHS) social studies and CTE teacher, also received an award for bike parts to support his Bike Tech students, who will repair community-donated bikes.
Tom Lutke and Joe Kassay, SHS social studies teacher, are providing outdoor education field experiences for career education and certifications. “As we build our programs and focus on giving students job-worthy skills for the local economy, we…[also want to] provide a backcountry experience for students who don’t have the socio-economic privilege to explore Summit County.” The class will be working with Breckenridge Ski Patrol.
SMS 8th graders will enjoy an Author Visit with Poet Jovan Mays this spring thanks to Brittany Wilson, 8th grade Language Arts teacher. Mays has worked with well over one million students through poetry outreach in his program, Your Writing Counts. This award is sponsored by Alpine Bank.
Greg Guevara, SMS Principal, will support 8th graders in the World Affairs Challenge, in which they think critically about global issues and work collaboratively on potential solutions. Students have opportunities to present at state, regional and national levels. Last year one of the SMS teams took 1st place in the “formal presentation” category.
Justin Holmes, Snowy Peaks High School humanities teacher, and students are hosting Hope Week with the goal of reducing youth suicide through education, training, and peer intervention.
Ron Besser and Nathan Schwalen, Snowy Peaks, received funding for student-led STEM projects including horticulture and sustainability projects, student designed (CAD/CAM) components for electric vehicles, wind turbines, water rockets, making clay flutes (ocarinas) for science sound unit, and more.
Jenna Sherman, 4th grade teacher at Dillon Valley Elementary (DVE) received an award for promoting literacy in Spanish. “Students are asked to read at home every night but they don’t always have the books they need,” she said.
Morgan Rowe, Silverthorne Elementary, will help students improve their writing skills, based on their individual abilities with Special Education Writing Intervention.
Ashley Girodo and Anita Overmyer, Upper Blue Elementary teachers, will guide 5th graders in projects using the Engineering Design Process.
Each fall, teachers request support for their ideas through the Eileen Finkel Innovative Teacher Award grant process. Principals and Parent-Teacher Organizations partner with the Education Foundation to review and fund the requests. The awards are also made possible through funding from The Summit Foundation, F Cubed Foundation, and Town Grants from Breckenridge, Silverthorne, Frisco, and Dillon.
For a full list of awards please click here.