CHCCS Receives $40,000 Grant from Duke Energy Foundation for STEM Program at Northside Elementary

Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools received a $40,000 check on Thursday to kick off a pilot STEM instruction program at Northside Elementary School.

The grant, from the Duke Energy Foundation, will go toward the training and development of teachers for an Inquiry and Nature-Based STEM program for students from third to fifth grade.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Sustainability Director Dan Schnitzer submitted the grant in collaboration with a team from CHCCS Instructional Services Department. Schnitzer said the program will give teachers the skill set and tools to follow a child’s natural curiosity and to allow them to help guide what they want to learn, even beyond STEM and into literacy, art, music or anything else they want to implement.

“In education, we often seem to think in smaller silos of subject matter, but the way kids experience the world, it’s all blended together,” Schnitzer said. “So, one of the beauties of inquiry-based learning is that, with them leading through the process, we will find crossovers that maybe we as adults and educators don’t normally see.”

Schnitzer said the program is aimed at third, fourth and fifth grade teachers because they want to instill the inquiry and nature-based mind set as early as possible.

“This isn’t a curriculum,” Schnitzer said. “This isn’t about teaching about plants, or animals, or ecosystems; this is about a way of thinking and engaging.

“It can be about anything.”

Superintendent Pam Baldwin said she thinks that for a long time, education has been structured in a way that has stifled creativity and that opportunities need to be made for students to see creativity and questioning as part of the learning process and not something that is a behavior issue.

“When you have a question, rather than trying to anticipate when you can raise your hand for a good kind-of stopping point, kids just need to talk and talk it out. Humans need to just talk and talk it out. And so we’ve got to create those flexible opportunities because that’s what’s happening in the workplace,” Baldwin said. “You don’t have to raise your hand at a meeting. You just have a thought, and you have than conversation around that dialogue that allows energy to flow and for people to come up with wonderful ideas.

“And so we need to support that process rather than to tell people somehow that’s not the way we do things.”

The goal of the program is to reduce non-proficiency on the fifth-grade science test by half over a period of five years to decrease the achievement gap in the district.

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